About PRX Life
PRX Life is a highly selective, multidisciplinary open access journal that publishes impactful research at the intersection of biology with physics, computer science, mathematics, and engineering. Featuring a collaborative peer-review process and ensuring high visibility, it aims to shape the future of life science.
Why Publish in PRX Life?
- Highly selective, to showcase high-quality, innovative research with lasting and profound impact
- Open access, under a CC-BY license, to maximize the visibility and impact of articles
- Promotion of all published articles via social media, and newsworthy research to the media resulting in coverage in outlets such as Physics Magazine, The New York Times, Scientific American, Nature News, and Le Monde
- First Physical Review Journal with a Collaborative Review Process on all papers, allowing referees to see and comment on each other’s reports — helping authors receive coherent feedback during review
- The Physical Review experience researchers value and trust
Bridging the Gap Between Physical and Life Sciences
Across scales, collections of living matter give rise to dynamical systems with remarkable features. Understanding how these systems work across temporal and dynamical scales is central to understanding life itself. Recent technical breakthroughs have enabled researchers to study biological systems with remarkable spatiotemporal resolution. Biological physics transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries as scientists from different fields work together to advance our understanding of living systems at all length and time scales.
As the first interdisciplinary journal focused exclusively on quantitative biological research, PRX Life will catalyze the biological physics community by:
- Providing a high-impact forum for—and seamless connections across—all members of the interdisciplinary communities at the interface of physics and biology and more broadly on quantitative life science, and
- Broadly disseminating the most significant and timely results to make the physics of life accessible to a broader community of scientists
PRX Life is distinguished by its personalized and responsive editorial process that brings together authors, editors, and referees in a reasoned dialog to direct each article through the rigorous selection process, thus leading to the best possible outcome. PRX Life offers flexible article lengths and formats that allow authors to engage and inform a broad audience within the field while also providing the scientific depth sought by topical specialists.
By Scientists, For Scientists
Like all of the journals in the Physical Review family, PRX Life is shaped by researchers to serve the research community. This ensures that its mission, standards, and policies prioritize the needs of researchers and the broader scientific community; this commitment is reinforced by APS’s promise as a founding member of the Purpose-Led Publishing coalition.
PRX Life welcomes manuscripts on all topics relevant to the diverse multidisciplinary biological physics research communities. The journal’s scope spans fundamental and applied research across physics, biology, bioengineering, biochemistry, materials science, medicine, computer science, and mathematics. Experimental, theoretical, computational, and data-intensive approaches; including significant advances in methods and instrumentation; and interdisciplinary and emerging areas are encouraged. PRX Life coverage will include, but not be limited to, the following broad areas:
- Molecular and subcellular processes
- Nucleic acids replication and information processes
- Protein dynamics, structure, and function
- Structural and molecular biology
- Membranes
- Genome organization
- Energy conversion and non-equilibrium phenomena
- Virology and self-assembly
- Synthetic biology
- Single-molecule manipulation
- Cellular organization, physiology, and dynamics
- Cells, tissue, and organoids
- Mechanobiology
- Molecular networks, genomics, proteomics, omics
- Biomaterials
- Phase condensates
- Fluid flows and vascular flows
- Organismal, Population, Evolutionary, and Ecological processes
- Virus-host interaction and immune responses
- Development, signaling and pattern formation
- Collective animal behavior, social interactions and emergent phenomena
- Epidemiology and human behavior
- Living matter, active matter and related forms of matter
- Evolutionary and population dynamics
- Molecular evolution
- Sensing, adapting and learning without the brain
- Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence
- Sensory Systems: vision, olfaction, auditory systems, and touch
- Neural networks, and artificial intelligence
- Neural basis of learning and memory
- Mechanics, movement, decision making, and the physics of behavior
- Embodiment (the constraint imposed on the brain by having a body)
Submitted manuscripts should demonstrate exceptional achievements according to at least one of the following criteria:
- Exceptional advance: pushing the field of biological physics in a new and consequential direction.
- Exceptional connection: linking different area(s) within the biological physics communities, or between the field and other scientific disciplines.
- Exceptional capabilities: presenting experimental tools that address challenges in computational approaches, theoretical frameworks, and/or methodologies allowing to solve major challenges in the topical area(s) of the journal.
- Exceptional insight: addressing a timely topic of high impact and interest across the communities at the intersection of biology with physics, computer science, mathematics, and engineering.
- This journal is funded through article publication charges (APCs), which are due once an article is accepted for publication.
- All articles are published with an open CC-BY (4.0 International) license with authors retaining copyright. This license permits anyone to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the work with proper attribution. APS reviews APCs regularly to ensure that it offers a reasonable and cost-effective publishing option for authors in line with APS’s status as a not-for-profit society publisher.
- APS authors are free to post the final version of their articles on their laboratory, institutional or departmental web sites.
- APS offers authors from lower-income countries the opportunity to publish open access at no cost by automatically offering APC waivers for articles accepted into all hybrid and gold open access titles. Learn more here.
Editorial Team
PRX Life is managed by a professional editorial team of Ph.D. scientists with extensive research experience at major academic institutions and research laboratories around the world. All editorial decisions are based on PRX Life acceptance criteria.
High Quality, Visibility, Broad Dissemination
PRX Life articles are selected for their high quality. Their authors gain high visibility and achieve broad dissemination of their work by publishing in a high-impact, online-only publication that offers global free access. The editors bring attention to outstanding research and elucidate its importance through a number of features:
- Editors’ Suggestions: Selected papers are chosen as Editors’ Suggestions to direct readers to interesting, important, and well-written articles in areas of research beyond their usual interests. They garner, on average, more downloads and citations than other papers published in the journal and are more frequently covered by news outlets.
- Highly selective, to showcase high-quality, innovative research with lasting and profound impact.
- Featured in Physics: Editors regularly notify Physics, APS’s daily online news and commentary publication, about important papers, resulting in coverage in the forms of Synopsis, Focus, or Viewpoint.
- Publicity: APS promotes press-worthy papers from its journals to journalists through a weekly Tip Sheet, resulting in frequent coverage in industry publications and the popular press, such as Physics World and Business Insider.
- The Physical Review experience researchers value and trust.
- Indexing: Scopus, Inspec, Google Scholar, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
- Follow APS on Social Media:
- X: @PRX_Life
- LinkedIn: @APSPhysics
- Facebook: @APSPhysics
- Instagram: @APSPhysics
- WeChat: @APSPhysics
Editorial and Publishing Policies
All journals published by APS follow a common set of Editorial Policies and Practices, which cover Editorial Oversight and Decision Making, Authorship, Submissions, Resubmissions, and Transfers, Peer Review, Ethics and Research Integrity, Post Publication, and Open Access and Publications Rights.
PRX Life is published electronically one article at a time. Articles are identified by volume number and a six-digit article number, for example, Journal 1, XXXXXX (2020).
PRX Life editors can decide to accelerate the review process for a small number of manuscripts that report particularly important or groundbreaking research.