Publication review process
We encourage members of the HCA community to submit relevant papers for inclusion within the Human Cell Atlas publications. This can help your paper gain more visibility among the HCA community and recognizes the contribution of your research to HCA.
What is an HCA publication?
There are two main types:
- Papers containing datasets that have been integrated into one or more HCA Biological Network Atlases - these automatically qualify as HCA publications
- Papers that have been reviewed by the HCA Publication Committee and confirmed to be within the technical or community scope of the HCA
Please note that this review process:
- Does not constitute a peer review
- Does not constitute an ethics review
Examples of papers in scope for HCA include, but are not limited to, those that include a significant proportion of genomics reference data from healthy human cells and tissues, created using single cell sequencing and/or spatial genomics atlas technologies, or advances in these methods.
Authors remain responsible for ensuring they adhere to all applicable local laws and regulations with respect to the collection, processing and sharing of samples and data.
Submitting your paper
When submitting your paper for review, please include:
- a link to a preprint or a complete draft manuscript
- a data availability statement, this can be either a reference to actual data or an explicit data release plan
We encourage you to submit your work to a preprint server.
The review process
Review
Three committee members will be assigned to each paper and each will vote if the publication should become part of the HCA. If there is no consensus among 3 assigned committee members, the paper will be brought to the entire committee for additional review, to be decided by majority vote.
Approval
Following notification of approval, the following statement should be included in the acknowledgement section of the paper:
This publication is part of the Human Cell Atlas - www.humancellatlas.org/publications/
Once the paper has been added to bioRXiv, please advise publications@humancellatlas.org of the bioRXiv DOI to ensure the paper is listed under the bioRXiv HCA channel.
Contact us
General publication enquiries should be directed to publications@humancellatlas.org.