The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) is one of the oldest scientific societies in the United States, founded on December 26, 1906 (as the American Society of Biological Chemists; renamed in 1987) and headquartered in Rockville, Maryland. It publishes three research journals that anchor the molecular life sciences: the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC, publishing since 1905), Molecular & Cellular Proteomics (MCP, launched 2002), and the Journal of Lipid Research (JLR). JBC in particular is one of the most-cited journals in all of science by total citations, thanks to more than a century of foundational biochemistry papers.

In January 2021 ASBMB made a decisive move: all three journals flipped to fully gold open access in a single step, and the society entered a publishing partnership with Elsevier, which now provides peer-review systems, production, and hosting on ScienceDirect while ASBMB retains full editorial control. This guide covers which journal fits your paper, what publishing costs, how peer review works, and how to submit.

All three publish regular research articles plus reviews, methods papers ('Methods and Resources' at JBC and MCP), and editorial commentary.

3 peer-reviewed journals, all fully open access:

• Journal of Biological Chemistry - the society's flagship and one of the highest-total-citation journals in science. Broad scope across biochemistry and molecular biology: protein structure and function, metabolism, signal transduction, RNA biology, cell biology, and more.
• Molecular & Cellular Proteomics - launched in 2002; the standard-setting journal for proteomics, notable for pioneering strict guidelines on depositing raw mass-spectrometry data.
• Journal of Lipid Research - the definitive lipid-science journal, covering lipid biochemistry, metabolism, and lipids in health and disease.

ASBMB also publishes ASBMB Today, a monthly member magazine (not a research venue).

ASBMB was one of the first established society publishers to flip an entire portfolio to gold open access, effective January 2021. There is no subscription or hybrid content: every accepted article is immediately and permanently free to read. Authors choose a CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND license and retain copyright.

Three ways to pay less:

• ASBMB membership - the society has historically offered discounted APCs to members; check the journal's fee page for the current member rate.
• Institutional agreements - because the journals are published on Elsevier's platform, APCs are covered for corresponding authors at many institutions with Elsevier open-access agreements. Ask your library.
• Waivers - authors in eligible low- and middle-income countries can request full or partial waivers through the Elsevier open-access waiver program.

Prices are revised periodically - always confirm on the journal's own fees page before submission.

• Model: single-anonymized peer review across all three journals - reviewers know author identities, authors do not know reviewers.
• Editorial control: academic editors-in-chief and associate editors appointed by ASBMB make all decisions; Elsevier provides the infrastructure only.
• Data standards: MCP enforces some of the strictest data-deposition requirements in the life sciences - raw mass-spectrometry files must be deposited in a public repository (e.g., PRIDE via ProteomeXchange) before review.
• Turnaround: JBC has long emphasized rapid editorial handling; exact times vary by journal and paper type, so check each journal's author page for current statistics.

1. Pick the journal using the scope notes above and recent tables of contents.
2. Read the author guidelines - each journal publishes detailed instructions (jbc.org/pages/authors and the equivalents at MCP and JLR).
3. Prepare your manuscript. ASBMB journals use the JBC reference style (a Vancouver-type numbered style); templates are available on SciSpace.
4. Submit via Editorial Manager - all three journals run on Editorial Manager following the Elsevier partnership.
5. After acceptance, your paper appears online quickly as an accepted 'in press' version, then in a numbered issue, open access from day one.

ASBMB journals are members of COPE and follow its guidelines on authorship disputes, corrections, and retractions, and ASBMB participates in OASPA as a fully open-access publisher. Image-integrity screening is well established - JBC was an early adopter of systematic figure checks. Data-availability statements are required, and MCP's repository-deposition mandate is a model for the field.