About Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics

Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics

Overview

Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics, commonly abbreviated GPB, is a peer-reviewed international journal in English based in Beijing, China. It is sponsored by the Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Genetics Society of China, and it serves as the official journal of both organisations. Its ISSN is 1672-0229 and its Chinese publication number is CN 11-4926/Q. The journal publishes high-quality papers from all over the world in the fields of the various omics and bioinformatics, with a particular emphasis on large-scale data and analysis based on high-throughput sequencing technologies and on the integration and cross-over zones of omics and bioinformatics. It has been open access since 2013, and for more than two decades it has charted the rapid rise of large-scale biology and data-driven life-science research in China for international readers. Published bimonthly for much of its history, it was launched together with its sponsoring institute in 2003, in the year the Human Genome Project was completed.

Origins and the Beijing Institute of Genomics

The journal's history is inseparable from that of its sponsor. The Beijing Institute of Genomics was officially founded on 28 November 2003 as a new institution of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, after a three-year development period. Its predecessor was the Human Genome Research Center of the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, founded in August 1998, and its faculty and staff came mostly from that centre and from the Beijing Genomics Institute, the organisation founded in 1999 to take part in the International Human Genome Project on behalf of China. On the institute's own account, GPB was launched together with BIG: the journal, administrated by both BIG and the Genetics Society of China, started its voyage toward future genomics at the same time as the institute itself. In 2007, BIG moved to the Chaoyang District of Beijing, where its editorial address at Building 104, No. 1 Beichen West Road still places the journal inside the institute. BIG is now also known as the China National Center for Bioinformation (CNCB), and it hosts the National Genomics Data Center, so the journal sits within the institution that curates China's national genomics data resources as well as one that produces genomics research.

Sponsors, Publisher and Publication Details

GPB is sponsored by the Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Genetics Society of China. For most of its life it was jointly published by Elsevier and Science Press, with production and hosting by Elsevier and full text available through ScienceDirect and PubMed Central. ScienceDirect records that the title transferred to Oxford University Press as of 2025, and articles published in 2025 carry the imprint of Oxford University Press and Science Press on behalf of the Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences / China National Center for Bioinformation and the Genetics Society of China, distributed as open access articles under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. The journal is a gold open access title: it became open access in 2013, and its stated goals are to disseminate new frontiers of its focused research fields, to publish high-quality discoveries at a fast pace, and to promote open access and prompt online publication for efficient publishing. Those stable identifiers — the title, the ISSN 1672-0229, the sponsors and the Beijing editorial office — are the reference points libraries and indexing services use to distinguish GPB from other genomics titles.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal's featured areas are set out in its own aims and scope. In genomics, it covers large-scale data acquisition, integrated studies and technology developments concerning genome structures, variations, repeat contents and evolution, together with systematic studies and technology developments in genomics, genome evolution and epigenetics, and other DNA- and RNA-based omics. In proteomics, it covers protein structures, proteomics technology developments, protein expression profiling, and protein complexes in terms of structure, function, properties and interactions. In bioinformatics, it covers genome assembling, annotation and integrated analysis, large data curation and mining, sequence-based and other matrix-based phylogeny, database construction, web-based platforms and tools, and novel algorithms, tool boxes and software packages. Across all three areas it particularly welcomes work built on high-throughput sequencing and on the integration of omics with bioinformatics. Recent special-interest calls illustrate how that scope is applied in practice: a 2025 special issue on spatial multiomics, guest-edited by researchers from Yale University, Peking University and the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, invited methodological, computational and applied work in basic, translational and clinical research.

Article Types and Editorial Practice

GPB publishes a wide range of article types, reflecting its role as both a research journal and a record of its field. They include original research articles presenting novel data and ideas, reviews, and papers describing innovative protocols, methods, application notes, databases and resources. Its sponsoring institute's journal page also lists resource reviews, research highlights, news and views, perspectives and historical notes — the last being a comprehensive description of an important scientific event in the field with proper comment. Historical notes and anniversary editorials are a distinctive part of the journal's identity: GPB has carried retrospectives marking the anniversaries of the Genetics Society of China, of the Beijing Institute of Genomics itself, and of the Human Genome Project, written by figures involved in those events. The journal has described a fast-track editorial process in which a decision on direct rejection, direct acceptance or further review is made within 48 hours, and an article-in-press service by which accepted manuscripts are made available online ahead of their printed issue for fast dissemination. Authors are directed to the journal's current guide for authors and manuscript template for formatting and submission requirements.

Indexing and Discoverability

GPB has been abstracted and indexed in a long list of services attested by its sponsoring institute, including the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), PubMed/MEDLINE, PubMed Central, BIOSIS Previews, Scopus, Chemical Abstracts, EMBASE, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), ROAD, Index Copernicus and Chinese databases including the Chinese Science Citation Database. The institute announced that the journal had been selected for coverage in SCIE and the Journal Citation Reports / Science Edition, with information on articles published since 2015 available in the Web of Science core collection. Full-text articles are readable through the publisher's platform and through PubMed Central, which makes the open access content freely discoverable by clinicians and researchers who do not hold subscriptions. Indexing on this scale matters because omics research is found overwhelmingly through database searching rather than issue browsing, and inclusion in PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science is what places a Beijing-based journal in the working literature of laboratories worldwide.

The Journal and China's Genomics Community

GPB is best understood as the house journal of the community that built genomics in China. That community's founding generation — scientists such as Yang Huanming, Wang Jian and Yu Jun, named in accounts of BIG's founding — came out of China's contribution to the International Human Genome Project, and the institute they created went on to work that the journal has chronicled, from the first sequencing of the SARS virus genome in China in 2003 to the building of the National Genomics Data Center and the Genome Sequence Archive. When BIG marked its twentieth anniversary in 2023, the retrospective was published in GPB itself, setting out a future organised around digital genome, digital medicine and digital health. The journal had earlier been funded through phases of the Project for Enhancing International Impact of China STM Journals, a national programme to raise the international standing of Chinese science, technology and medical journals. That combination — academy sponsorship, national programme support, an international publishing partner and an editorial base inside a national data centre — explains why GPB is treated as China's flagship omics journal rather than as one specialist title among many.

Audience and Readership

The journal's readership is the international community working on genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and bioinformatics: laboratory researchers generating large-scale biological data, computational scientists building the tools to analyse it, and database specialists responsible for curating and sharing it. Because the journal is open access and indexed in the main biomedical databases, its articles are read well beyond its sponsoring institutes, and its authorship is drawn from all over the world rather than from China alone. For a directory reader, the practical summary is that GPB is an English-language, open access, Beijing-based journal of the Beijing Institute of Genomics and the Genetics Society of China, covering the omics sciences and bioinformatics, with a publication record running from 2003 and a publishing arrangement that moved from Elsevier to Oxford University Press in 2025 while Science Press remained a publishing partner.

Place in Chinese Scientific Publishing

Among Chinese scientific journals, GPB illustrates a distinctive route to international standing: founding alongside a new national institute in 2003, open access from 2013, indexing in SCIE, PubMed and Scopus, and successive partnerships with Elsevier and then Oxford University Press, all while retaining its editorial office at its sponsoring institute in Beijing's Chaoyang District. Its verified record — founded in 2003 with the Beijing Institute of Genomics, sponsored by that institute and the Genetics Society of China, ISSN 1672-0229, devoted to genomics, proteomics and bioinformatics — is sufficient on its own to establish its significance. Researchers considering a submission should read recent issues and special issues to judge fit, and should follow the current author guidelines on the journal's Oxford Academic pages. Readers meeting the journal for the first time can treat this profile's history, scope and publishing facts as a reliable starting point before going to the journal's own site for its latest articles and editorial information.