About

Aims and scope

Echo Research and Practice aims to be the premier international journal for physicians, sonographers, nurses and other allied health professionals practising echocardiography and other cardiac imaging modalities. This open-access journal publishes quality clinical and basic research, reviews, videos, education materials and selected high-interest case reports and videos across all echocardiography modalities and disciplines, including paediatrics, anaesthetics, general practice, acute medicine and intensive care. Multi-modality studies primarily featuring the use of cardiac ultrasound in clinical practice, in association with Cardiac Computed Tomography, Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance or Nuclear Cardiology are of interest.
Topics include, but are not limited to:

2D echocardiography
3D echocardiography
Comparative imaging techniques – CCT, CMR and Nuclear Cardiology
Congenital heart disease, including foetal echocardiography
Contrast echocardiography
Critical care echocardiography
Deformation imaging
Doppler echocardiography
Interventional echocardiography
Intracardiac echocardiography
Intraoperative echocardiography
Prosthetic valves
Stress echocardiography
Technical innovations
Transoesophageal echocardiography
Valve disease

Open access

All articles published by Echo Research & Practice are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Further information about open access can be found here.

As authors of articles published in Echo Research & Practice you are the copyright holders of your article and have granted to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate your article, according to the BMC license agreement.

For those of you who are US government employees or are prevented from being copyright holders for similar reasons, BMC can accommodate non-standard copyright lines. Please contact us if further information is needed.

Article-processing charges

Open access publishing is not without costs. Echo Research & Practice therefore levies an article-processing charge of £1590.00/$2290.00/€1890.00 for each article accepted for publication, plus VAT or local taxes where applicable.

If the corresponding author's institution participates in our open access membership program, some or all of the publication cost may be covered (more details available on the membership page). We routinely waive charges for authors from low-income countries. For other countries, article-processing charge waivers or discounts are granted on a case-by-case basis to authors with insufficient funds. Authors can request a waiver or discount during the submission process. For further details, see our article-processing charge page.

BMC provides a free open access funding support service to help authors discover and apply for article processing charge funding. Visit our OA funding and policy support page to view our list of research funders and institutions that provide funding for APCs, and to learn more about our email support service.

For more information on APCs please see our Journal Pricing FAQs

Authors from the British Society of Echocardiography are entitled to a discounted article-processing charge which is payable upon editorial acceptance of their manuscript for publication. To facilitate this, BSE members should indicate their membership (in payment option number 3) when submitting a manuscript.

British Society of Echocardiography members, and commissioned authors, are also entitled to apply for a grant to cover the cost of the APC’s. Grants will be awarded based on scientific merit and evaluated by the Editors in Chief and Associate Editors. Please note, case reports will not be eligible for an APC grant.

To request an application form, please contact erp@bsecho.org upon submission of your article. Authors who apply for a grant will be informed of the decision regarding an award at the same time as the manuscript is accepted for publication.

Indexing Services

All articles published in Echo Research & Practice are included in:

Academickeys
Biological Abstracts/BIOSIS
Cabell
CLOCKSS
CNKI
CNPIEC
Baidu
COPE
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Dimensions
EBSCO Discovery Service
Google Scholar
ProQuest-ExLibris Primo
ProQuest-ExLibris Summon
Naver
Portico
OCLC WorldCat Discovery Service
TD Net Discovery Service;
Edanz journal sector
EZB
EMBASE/Excerpta Medica
Emerging Sources Citation Index
Index Copernicus
Infobase
PubMed
PubMed Central
SCImago
Scopus
Sherpa/ROMEO
Web of Science's Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI)
WorldCat
Wanfang
Zetoc

The full text of all articles is deposited in digital archives around the world to guarantee long-term digital preservation. You can also access all articles published by BMC on SpringerLink.

Peer-review policy

Peer-review is the system used to assess the quality of a manuscript before it is published. Independent researchers in the relevant research area assess submitted manuscripts for originality, validity and significance to help editors determine whether the manuscript should be published in their journal. You can read more about the peer-review process here.

Echo Research & Practice operates a single-blind peer-review system, where the reviewers are aware of the names and affiliations of the authors, but the reviewer reports provided to authors are anonymous. Single-blind peer review is the traditional model of peer review that many reviewers are comfortable with, and it facilitates a dispassionate critique of a manuscript.

Submitted manuscripts will generally be reviewed by two or more experts who will be asked to evaluate whether the manuscript is scientifically sound and coherent, whether it duplicates already published work, and whether or not the manuscript is sufficiently clear for publication. The Editors will reach a decision based on these reports and, where necessary, they will consult with members of the Editorial Board.

Editorial policies

All manuscripts submitted to Echo Research & Practice should adhere to BMC's editorial policies.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Appeals and complaints

Authors who wish to appeal a rejection or make a complaint should follow the procedure outlined in the BMC Editorial Policies .

Citing articles in Echo Research & Practice

Articles in Echo Research & Practice should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. Because articles are not printed, they do not have page numbers; instead, they are given a unique article number.

Article citations follow this format:

Authors. Title. Journal Abbreviation [year];[volume number]:[article number].

e.g. Roberts LD, Hassall DG, Winegar DA, Haselden JN, Nicholls AW, Griffin JL. Increased hepatic oxidative metabolism distinguishes the action of Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor delta from Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor gamma in the Ob/Ob mouse. Diagn Pathol 2009;1:115.

1:115 refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Benefits of publishing with BMC

High visibility

Echo Research & Practice's open access policy allows maximum visibility of articles published in the journal as they are available to a wide, global audience.

Speed of publication

Echo Research & Practice offers a fast publication schedule whilst maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files). Articles will be published with their final citation after acceptance, in both fully browsable web form, and as a formatted PDF.

Flexibility

Online publication in Echo Research & Practice gives you the opportunity to publish large datasets, large numbers of color illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links (for example, to PubMed, to sequence and other databases, and to other articles).

Promotion and press coverage

Articles published in Echo Research & Practice are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be highlighted on Echo Research & Practice’s pages and on the BMC homepage.

In addition, articles published in Echo Research & Practice may be promoted by press releases to the general or scientific press. These activities increase the exposure and number of accesses for articles published in Echo Research & Practice. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BMC is available here.

Copyright

As an author of an article published in Echo Research & Practice you retain the copyright of your article and you are free to reproduce and disseminate your work (for further details, see the BMC license agreement).

For further information about the advantages of publishing in a journal from BMC, please click here.