Journal Information

ISME Communications is a new online, open access journal published by Springer Nature on behalf of the International Society for Microbial Ecology.

Why publish in ISME Communications?

  • Publishes discovery-based and methods-oriented content in microbial ecology.
  • An official journal of the International Society for Microbial Ecology.
  • Fully Open Access: ensuring that your work is easily discovered, accessed, and shared.

Aims & Scope
ISME Communications covers the diverse and integrated areas of microbial ecology spanning the breadth of microbial life. The journal encourages contributions that offer substantial advances in the study of microbial ecosystems, communities, and interactions of microorganisms in the environment. 

Focus will be on innovative studies that report on new methodologies in microbial ecology, microbiome analyses in a variety of habitats, holobiont interactions, climate change microbiology, biogeography & diversity surveys, time-series analyses and mechanistic studies on the functional importance of microorganisms in specific environments.

As a fully open access partner to The ISME Journal, publications in ISME Communications will emphasize research quality and diversity, encouraging both discovery-based and methods-oriented publications.
The broad scope of ISME Communications will help encompass the full breadth of microbial ecology research, exploring topics that include:

  • Climate change microbiology
  • Community assembly
  • Engineered and synthetic microbial communities
  • Host-microbiome interactions
  • Methodological and computational advances
  • Microbiomes of engineered environments
  • Modelling and ecological theory
  • Novel microorganisms and metabolic functions
  • Spatial and temporal dynamics

ISME Communications welcomes a range of content types including original research, review, brief communication and correspondence articles of high significance to the microbial ecology research community.

ISME Communications vs. The ISME Journal
The journals are similar with respect to subject matter but different with respect to impact. ISME Communications is an appropriate venue for high quality research that is of a narrower scope and impact on the field than would be appropriate for The ISME Journal.
In addition to discovery-based research, ISME Communications welcomes methodological and computational studies that represent major advances for the field of microbial ecology. 

The following studies will be considered out of scope:

  • Single organism studies, unless studied in an ecological context
  • Descriptive / exploratory studies without clear hypothesis and validation
  • Studies with insufficient biological and/or technical replication
  • Studies that lack novelty per se, but provide independent replication / expansion of earlier studies

Online Publication
ISME Communications is an exclusively online publication. This format enables us to publish articles as soon as they are ready, thus benefiting authors by allowing earlier publication dates and giving readers access to accepted papers several weeks before they would appear in a print issue. Papers published online are definitive and may be altered only through the publication of an addendum or correction, so authors should make every effort to ensure that the page proofs are correct.

Content Types
We publish a variety of content types, including Articles, Reviews, Perspectives, Brief Communications and Comments.

Abbreviation
The correct abbreviation for abstracting and indexing purposes is ISME Commun.

EISSN
The electronic international standard serial number (EISSN) for ISME Communications is 2730-6151.