About Microbiome and One Health

Microbiome and One Health

Microbiome and One Health is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published in Beijing by KeAi Communications, with publishing services by Elsevier, dedicated to publishing original research that elucidates the critical role of microbiomes colonising humans, animals, plants and the environment. It especially emphasises providing an interdisciplinary forum that integrates microbiology with veterinary science, medicine, agriculture and environmental science to advance the One Health paradigm — the principle that the health of people, animals and ecosystems is interconnected and must be studied together. The journal welcomes original research articles, reviews, short communications and perspectives, and also invites reproducible methods and protocols in microbiome research and interventional strategies in global public health.

The journal's founding logic is that microbes do not respect the boundaries between academic departments. The same microbial communities — and the same individual strains and resistance genes — move between the human gut, livestock, crops, soil and water. A journal that confined itself to human medicine would miss the animal and environmental reservoirs; one confined to veterinary or environmental microbiology would miss the clinical consequences. Microbiome and One Health is built to publish across those boundaries. It joins the portfolio of KeAi, the Beijing-based open-access publisher cofounded by China Science Publishing & Media and Elsevier and repurposed in 2013 as an open-access journal service provider, which now publishes more than 280 scholarly journals.

Eight Themes: From Zoonoses to Planetary Health

The journal's scope is organised into eight themes. Zoonotic Diseases and Pathogen Transmission covers the infections that pass between animals and humans and the routes by which they spread. Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) covers one of the defining public-health threats of the century: the emergence and movement of drug-resistant microbes across human, animal and environmental settings. Microbiome Interactions and Cross-Species Transmission addresses how microbial communities interact and how their members move between hosts. Environmental Microbiomes covers the microbial life of soils, waters and other habitats and its functions. Gut Microbiota and Human Health covers the best-known microbiome of all — the human intestinal community — and its links to disease and wellbeing. Interactions of Plant Growth-Promoting Rhizobacteria covers the root-zone microbes that support crop growth, connecting the journal to agriculture and food production. Food Safety and Security covers microbes in the food chain, from farm contamination to preservation. Finally, Climate Change and Planetary Health covers how a changing climate reshapes microbial ecology and health risk at the largest scale.

The One Health Paradigm

One Health, the framework in the journal's title, holds that human health, animal health and environmental health form a single system. It developed in response to events that no single discipline could explain alone: emerging infections spilling over from wildlife and livestock, antimicrobial resistance genes travelling from farms to clinics, and environmental change altering where vectors and pathogens thrive. The microbiome sciences give that framework a mechanism, because microbial communities are a literal biological connector between hosts and habitats — shared between people, animals and environments, and carrying both health-promoting functions and risks such as resistance. By naming itself for both the microbiome and One Health, the journal positions every submission — whether on a pig farm's resistome, a child's gut flora or a watershed's microbial ecology — within that connected picture.

Editors-in-Chief and Honorary Leadership

The journal's Editors-in-Chief are Chunling Xiao of Wenzhou Medical University in China and Cordia Chu of Griffith University in Australia — the latter a scholar long associated with One Health and ecohealth approaches, giving the journal leadership on both the microbiology and the One Health sides of its title. Three Honorary Editors-in-Chief lend senior standing: Bin Cong of Hebei Medical University; Daiming Fan of the China Anti-Cancer Association; and Ruifu Yang of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a microbiologist known for work on plague and other high-consequence pathogens. The Executive Editor-in-Chief is Jiahai Lu of Wenzhou Medical University, himself a prominent One Health researcher, and the Executive Associate Editor is Hongtao Liu of Hubei University of Chinese Medicine.

Associate Editors and Editorial Board

The associate editors are Ye Chen of Shenzhen Hospital of Southern Medical University; Baoli Zhu of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences; Mark Nicol of the University of Western Australia; and Hung Nguyen of the International Livestock Research Institute in Vietnam — the last appointment directly tying the journal to livestock research in Southeast Asia. The editorial board spans the journal's constituencies: members come from Dalian Medical University, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenyang Agricultural University, Shandong University, the Guangdong Academy of Sciences, Hunan University, the BGI Life Science Research Institute, Yunnan University, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing University, Nanjing Medical University, Sun Yat-sen University, the Chinese Academy of Environmental Sciences and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, represented by Zhihong Ren. International members include Gregor Reid of the Lawson Health Research Institute in Canada, known for probiotic research, and Miguel Gueimonde Fernández of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), alongside Hani El-Nezami of the University of Hong Kong.

Article Types and Requirements

The guide for authors defines five formats. Full Length Articles carry a word limit of 3,000–5,000 words, require highlights and up to six keywords, and require a clear structure including introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, ethics statement, conflict-of-interest and funding declarations and acknowledgments. Reviews, at 5,000–7,000 words, provide an in-depth and critical review of significant development or progress in recent years. Mini Reviews, at 3,000–4,000 words, give a succinct summary of focused aspects of a current area of investigation. Short Communications describe brief original research with no more than three figures. Correspondence, not exceeding 2,000 words, communicates findings equal in novelty and significance to a regular article but smaller in quantity. The requirement of highlights and structured declarations reflects the journal's expectation that cross-disciplinary readers — vets, clinicians, agronomists, environmental scientists — be able to grasp each paper's contribution quickly.

Peer Review: Double Anonymized

Peer review at Microbiome and One Health is double anonymized: authors' and reviewers' identities are both concealed, a model the journal shares with only some of its KeAi sister titles. Submissions are first screened by the editorial office, and papers failing basic standards can be desk-rejected for being out of scope, raising ethical conflicts, showing high similarity, lacking originality or having design or method flaws. Suitable manuscripts pass to the Editor-in-Chief, who invites reviewers directly or assigns a board member to do so; at least two reviewers report before the editor feeds comments back to authors, and the final decision on revisions is taken jointly by the assigned editor and Editor-in-Chief. Papers submitted by editors, board members or authors with conflicts are handled confidentially by another team member, and conflicted special-issue submissions are reassigned. Submissions are screened automatically with iThenticate's CrossCheck for plagiarism and overlap, and ORCiD identifiers are supported and encouraged.

Open Access and Publication Charges

The journal is fully open access: all articles are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download. To fund that model, an article processing charge of USD 1,000, plus VAT, applies, payable by authors or on their behalf by their funder or institution. As a launch incentive, the charge is waived for all papers submitted before 31 December 2027, so the journal's founding cohort of authors publishes free of charge. Reuse is governed by Creative Commons licences — CC BY, which permits distribution, adaptation and commercial reuse with credit, and CC BY-NC-ND, which permits non-commercial distribution without modification — and authors needing to meet a funder policy can apply for CC BY after acceptance. For each article, authors retain copyright alongside scholarly usage rights, and KeAi Communications is granted non-exclusive publishing and distribution rights, while the journal owner retains copyright of the compiled journal and issues.

Readership and Place in the Field

Microbiome and One Health addresses microbiologists, clinicians, veterinarians, agricultural scientists, environmental scientists and public-health practitioners — the full coalition the One Health idea requires. Its editorial centre of gravity at Wenzhou Medical University, its Australian co-editorship, and its board presence from bodies such as the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the International Livestock Research Institute give it both institutional weight and practical reach into the settings where zoonoses and resistance actually emerge. For WorldNM readers, it is catalogued as a scholarly magazine published in Beijing, China, with its official home on the KeAi Publishing website, where its aims and scope, eight themes, editorial board and guide for authors are maintained.