About Cell Discovery

Cell Discovery

Overview

Cell Discovery is an English-language, peer-reviewed, fully open access scientific journal covering all areas of molecular and cell biology. It was established in 2015 in Shanghai as a sister journal to Cell Research, and it is published by Springer Nature in partnership with Chinese Academy of Sciences institutions in Shanghai. Its electronic ISSN is 2056-5968, its standard abbreviation is Cell Discov., and it publishes continuously online rather than waiting to assemble conventional print issues. Nature's journal information page describes it as an open access international journal that publishes results of high significance and broad interest in all areas of molecular and cell biology, and states that it aims to provide an open access platform for scientists to publish their outstanding original works.

In this directory Cell Discovery is listed as a magazine-category outlet for Shanghai, Shanghai, China, which reflects its editorial and sponsoring base in Shanghai rather than the location of its readers or authors. Both are international. The journal was created at a moment when Chinese life-science research was expanding rapidly and when its older sister journal, Cell Research, had already shown that a Shanghai-based, English-language journal, published with an international publisher, could attract strong papers from around the world. Cell Discovery extended that model into fully open access publishing.

Launch in 2015 and the sister journal relationship

Cell Discovery was announced in an editorial by Dangsheng Li, published online on 28 April 2015 as Cell Discovery (2015) 1, 15009. Li announced the birth of a newly launched, fully open access international journal covering all areas of molecular and cell biology, co-sponsored by the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences — more specifically by its Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology and the Shanghai Information Center for Life Sciences — and by the Chinese Society for Cell Biology, and jointly published with Nature Publishing Group, the predecessor imprint within what is now Springer Nature.

The sister relationship to Cell Research was central from the first day. Li's editorial explained that the journal was launched and operated as a sister journal of Cell Research, described then as a highly prominent international journal with a current impact factor of 11.981, and that the editorial team of Cell Discovery was led by Professors Gang Pei and Dangsheng Li — the editor and executive editor of the new journal — who also headed Cell Research. The new journal, the editorial argued, was positioned to inherit the key factors that had contributed to its elder sister's success. Nature's current journal information still presents the relationship first among the journal's defining features: established in 2015 as a sister journal of the high-profile international journal Cell Research.

Sponsors, publisher and the Shanghai base

Cell Discovery is published by Springer Nature in partnership with the Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, according to Nature's journal information. The same page says the journal is co-sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science, CAS, and the Chinese Society for Cell Biology, and that it is affiliated to the Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science. That centre is the successor institutional home, in Shanghai, of the SIBS institutes that co-sponsored the journal at launch, so there is institutional continuity behind the change of name: the journal remains a Shanghai CAS journal, published internationally by Springer Nature.

The editorial policies of the journal, Nature states, are determined jointly by its editorial board and Springer Nature in accordance with the legal and regulatory requirements of China. That joint governance is characteristic of Springer Nature's partnership journals in China, of which Cell Research is the best-known example in the life sciences. For authors, the practical consequence is a recognisable Nature Portfolio-style submission, review and production system, combined with an editorial office rooted in a major Chinese cell-biology institute and able to draw on its scientific networks in China and internationally.

Aims and scope

The journal's scope, as set out at launch and maintained in its current descriptions, covers all areas of molecular and cell biology. The 2015 launch editorial listed, by way of example, cell growth and differentiation, signal transduction, apoptosis, chromatin modulation, epigenetics, transcriptional regulation, stem cell research, development, immunology, neurosciences and plant cell biology. Nature's current summary and independent journal listings give essentially the same map of the field, adding cell signalling, stem cells and disease mechanisms to the headline topics, exactly as this directory's seed description summarises them.

Two qualifications in the journal's own wording matter for prospective authors. First, it seeks results of significance and originality — in Nature's current phrasing, results of high significance and broad interest. This is not a journal that promises to publish any technically sound cell-biology paper; breadth of interest beyond a narrow subfield is part of the test. Second, the scope spans basic mechanisms and their relevance to disease. Papers on gene expression, signalling pathways, development and disease mechanisms sit within a single title, so a mechanistic study is strengthened when its wider biological or medical implications are made explicit, and a disease-focused study is strengthened when it reveals mechanism rather than only association.

What it publishes

Cell Discovery publishes original research articles, reviews and reports, covering topics such as gene expression, cell signalling, development and disease mechanisms. Its continuous, online-only publication model means accepted articles appear as they are ready, identified by volume and article number and a DOI in the Nature style — the launch editorial itself, cited as volume 1, article 15009, with the DOI prefix used for the journal, illustrates the system from the journal's first year.

Within that structure, research articles carry the journal. Bibliometric overviews of its contents show cell biology as the largest share of its work, with computational biology, cancer research and virology among the other prominent areas, and with topics such as embryonic stem cells, RNA, genetics and CRISPR-based methods recurring across papers. Reviews and shorter reports play a supporting role, synthesising fast-moving areas and highlighting significant developments. For a general reader browsing the journal, the mix reads as a broad molecular life-science journal rather than a specialist title for one technique or one organism: human, animal, plant and microbial cell biology can all appear, provided the central claim is about molecular or cellular mechanism.

The open access model

Cell Discovery was fully open access from its launch, before open access became the default expectation for many new life-science journals. The 2015 editorial presented that as a distinguishing feature, setting the journal apart from other journals including other open access journals, and the current Nature description repeats the commitment: the journal aims to provide an open access platform for scientists to publish their outstanding original works. All articles are freely available to read on publication, and the journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), confirming its open access status in the main directory for such titles.

Open access publishing of this kind is normally funded by an article processing charge paid by the author, their institution or their funder, rather than by reader subscriptions. Journal listings record a publication fee for Cell Discovery; the exact charge in force at any given time should be checked on the journal's own site, since charges change and waivers or institutional agreements may apply. The benefit the journal offers in return is immediate, unrestricted readership: a clinician, a researcher at an institution without a subscription, or a scientist in a neighbouring field can read, download and cite a paper without an access barrier, which is particularly valuable for the interdisciplinary audience the journal seeks.

Editorial leadership

At launch, as noted above, the editorial team was led by Gang Pei as editor and Dangsheng Li as executive editor, the same leadership that headed Cell Research, supported by an international editorial board. Li's byline on the launch editorial identifies his roles at that time as deputy editor-in-chief of Cell Research and executive editor of Cell Discovery, from the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences. Nature's current journal information states that the editorial team of Cell Discovery is led by Dr Lin Li, and directs readers to its about-the-editors page for current details. Directory readers should therefore distinguish the founding leadership, which is a matter of historical record, from the current leadership, which the journal's own site states at any given time.

The editorial model inherited from Cell Research combines in-house professional editing with academic editors and an international board. That structure matters for a broad-scope journal: manuscripts ranging from chromatin biology to plant cell biology to immunology cannot all be judged by a small generalist team, so breadth on the board is a functional necessity, not a decorative feature. It also explains the journal's consistent emphasis, from 2015 onward, on significance and broad interest as selection criteria — those are judgements an experienced editorial team and board are being asked to make quickly and explicitly, before and alongside formal peer review.

Indexing and discoverability

Nature's journal information lists Cell Discovery as abstracted and indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded (also known as SciSearch), PubMed Central, Journal Citation Reports / Science Edition, Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS Previews and the Directory of Open Access Journals. Independent listings add Scopus, with coverage from the journal's first year, 2015, and PubMed and Embase among the services through which its articles can be found. This directory's seed record likewise records indexing in SCI-Expanded, PubMed Central and Scopus.

For a life-science journal, PubMed Central inclusion is especially consequential. It means full texts are archived in, and searchable through, the main open repository used by biomedical researchers and clinicians, alongside the article's presence on the Nature platform. A researcher searching PubMed for a signalling pathway, a stem-cell method or a disease mechanism can therefore encounter a Cell Discovery paper without ever visiting the journal's homepage. Indexing in SCI-Expanded and listing in Journal Citation Reports also mean the journal receives an official impact factor and is tracked in the citation databases universities use for evaluation.

Impact and notable research

Journal Citation Reports figures cited for Cell Discovery show a journal that quickly entered the high-impact tier for its field. Wikipedia's summary of the journal, citing Journal Citation Reports, gives a 2024 impact factor of 12.5. Other aggregators report different values for different reporting years, as impact factors are recalculated annually and revised, so any single figure should be read with its year attached. The consistent picture across sources is that Cell Discovery performs at a level well above most broad cell-biology titles and is ranked in the first quartile (Q1) in Scopus categories including biochemistry, cell biology, genetics and molecular biology.

The journal's visibility rose sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it published early, heavily used virology and drug-repurposing work. Bibliometric listings of its most cited papers place at the top a study reporting that hydroxychloroquine, a less toxic derivative of chloroquine, was effective in inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 infection in vitro, followed by a network-based drug repurposing study for the novel coronavirus and a comparative genetic analysis of the ACE2 receptor in different populations. Those papers show the journal's broad scope operating in an emergency: cell-biological methods applied to an urgent clinical question, published open access, and therefore immediately available to researchers worldwide. They are also a reminder that citation records reflect the circumstances of a field at a moment in time as well as the underlying quality of a journal.

Readership and role in Chinese life-science publishing

Cell Discovery's readers are molecular and cell biologists, biochemists, geneticists, stem-cell and developmental biologists, immunologists, neuroscientists and researchers working on the cellular mechanisms of disease, together with clinicians and translational researchers who follow basic findings for their medical implications. Because every article is open access and indexed in PubMed Central, that readership is not limited to subscribing institutions. Authors, correspondingly, are international: the journal was designed from launch as a platform for scientists all around the world, in the launch editorial's words, to publish high-quality work, and not as a house journal for its sponsoring institutes.

Its wider role is best understood alongside Cell Research. Together, the subscription-based elder sister and the fully open access younger journal gave Shanghai's CAS cell-science community two complementary routes to international publication from a Chinese editorial base — a significant development in a system where leading Chinese biologists had historically sent their best work almost exclusively to American and European journals. A decade after its 2015 launch, Cell Discovery's Q1 standing, its double-digit impact factor in recent Journal Citation Reports and its presence in the main international indexes indicate that the experiment succeeded on its own stated terms: an open access platform, run in partnership between a Chinese Academy of Sciences centre in Shanghai and Springer Nature, publishing molecular and cell biology of high significance and broad interest.