Mission Statement
Melba (The Journal of Machine Learning for Biomedical Imaging) is a web-based journal devoted to the free and unrestricted access of high quality articles in the broad field that bridges machine learning and biomedical imaging. Melba’s aims include:
- to be a top tier publication venue for journal-length articles in its scope;
- to provide recognition of meritorious scholarship;
- to provide curated content that will help researchers keep abreast of rapid developments;
- to incentivize and to support the sharing of resources, including code and data;
- to empower authors with copyrights to their own work (all articles are published under the CC BY 4.0 license);
- to encourage a constructive, rigorous, and streamlined review process that enables authors to improve their articles;
- to offer unrestricted and free access to readers;
- to recognize the efforts of reviewers; and
- to minimize the financial burden on authors by leveraging web-based technologies.
Scope
Melba (The Journal of Machine Learning for Biomedical Imaging) invites the submission of previously unpublished journal-length papers that report research developments at the interface of machine learning and biomedical imaging. Papers focusing on innovative methods and/or novel biomedical applications are strongly encouraged to be submitted.
Topics of interest include:- new machine learning techniques that are motivated by or applicable to known problems in biomedical imaging, with strong theoretical justification and appropriate empirical evaluation;
- empirical accounts that evaluate, and/or compare existing machine learning algorithms for biomedical imaging applications of interest;
- presentation of a novel biomedical application involving imaging, where existing machine algorithms offer a key solution;
- description of a new problem formulation for machine learning and/or a new publicly available dataset that is relevant to a biomedical imaging application, and a baseline attempt at solving the problem; and
- well-written surveys of existing work relevant to the scope of the journal.
Overall, Melba aims to publish high-quality research contributions that add value and move science forward through new insights and perspectives, including negative results that can be generalized from. Melba encourages authors to share and support their code and data, with an emphasis on replicability.
Manuscripts must communicate their ideas and findings in the English language, in a concise and complete manner. Therefore papers should be carefully proofread and polished by authors. If these criteria are not met, this can be grounds for rejecting the paper without a review.
Melba adheres to standard practices in modern scientific publication. This means that all claims need to be articulated precisely and justified through theoretical arguments and/or empirical evidence. Prior literature should be properly acknowledged. Submitted papers need to be original and not published. Significantly extended versions of conference proceedings are allowed to be submitted, however the overlap of content should be less than 50%.
Peer review process
MELBA is a web-based journal and submission to arXiv prior to submission to MELBA is encouraged. MELBA uses a single-blind review process, where the reviewers are anonymous, but the authors are known to the reviewers. The detailed review process can be found here.
Ethical standards
MELBA requires the declaration of conflicts of interest related to the review process and to the work itself. See the Conflict of Interest section for a detailed description of MELBA’s conflict of interest policy. MELBA also requires that the work presented must follow appropriate ethical standards in conducting research and writing the manuscript, following all applicable laws and regulations regarding the treatment of animals or human subjects. See the Human and Animal Rights, Informed Consent, and Ethical Standards section for a detailed description of MELBA’s policy on Human and Animal Rights, Informed Consent, and Ethical Standards. The data sharing policy requires authors to provide a data availability statement in their manuscripts.
MELBA process for handling corrections, retractions, and editorial expressions of concern
Scientific integrity is of utmost importance to MELBA. MELBA aims to ensure the highest possible publication standards via a thorough, rigorous review process. Concerns arising after publication should be brought to the attention of the Editor in Chief (by emailing EiC@melba-journal.org) who will then, in consultation with MELBA’s executive editorial board, decide on an appropriate action. These concerns may be raised by the authors themselves or by MELBA readers. Possible actions include author and publisher corrections, retractions, and editorial expressions of concern as detailed below.
Author Corrections: MELBA author corrections are intended to reflect changes in articles that are due to inadvertent inaccuracies or for other reasons (as deemed appropriate by the editorial board), discovered after publication. For such corrections, the authors will submit a revised article which will be made available online as well as a detailed list of changes which will be appended to the corrected article. In addition, a separate notice of correction will be published describing these changes. This notice of correction will receive its own DOI and will therefore be citable. A link to this notice of correction will be provided at the top of the corrected article, including a statement that the article was corrected by the authors.
Publisher Corrections: MELBA publisher corrections address errors introduced during the publication process. A revised article will be made available online and will include a detailed list of changes which will be appended to the corrected article. As for author corrections, a separate notice of correction will be published describing these changes. This notice of correction will receive its own DOI and will therefore be citable. A link to this notice of correction will be provided at the top of the corrected article, including a statement that the article was corrected by the publisher.
Editorial expression of concern: MELBA implements decisions due to concerns of scientific misconduct (including concerns related to scientific integrity and ethical concerns) only after a thorough investigation based on sufficient initial evidence. Such investigations take time and may involve consulting external experts. Upon the decision of the editorial board to open an investigation an editorial expression of concern will be published on the MELBA website. This editorial expression of concern will receive its own DOI and will be linked to the article under investigation. Upon conclusion of the investigation, an editorial note will be published, again with its own DOI, detailing the decision taken. Such a decision will typically result in either an author correction (following the author correction process above) or a retraction of the article.
Retractions: Confirmed violations of scientific integrity, for example, due to discovered plagiarism, or fabrication of results or data, will result in manuscript retractions. A retraction is a possible outcome following an investigation by MELBA (see editorial expression of concern above). A retracted article will remain available online but will be marked as retracted. The retracted article may include a statement of agreement or disagreement with the reasons for retraction by the authors. A separate notice of retraction will be published. This notice of retraction will receive its own DOI and will therefore be citable. A link to this notice of retraction will be provided at the top of the retracted article, including a statement that the article was retracted. This notice of retraction will clearly state that the article was retracted and will include references to the initial editorial expression of concern as well as to the editorial note detailing the decision taken (both of which have their own DOI as described in the policy on editorial expression of concern above).
The Melba Executive Board Terms of Reference are available here.