EMBO Press is the publishing arm of EMBO, the European Molecular Biology Organization - a non-profit organization of more than 2,000 elected life scientists, founded in 1964 and headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany. Unlike the large commercial houses, EMBO Press runs a deliberately small portfolio: five selective journals covering molecular and cell biology, systems biology, and molecular medicine. The EMBO Journal, launched in 1982, is the flagship and remains one of the most respected venues in molecular biology.

Two things changed significantly in January 2024, and both matter if you last submitted to an EMBO journal before then. First, the journals moved from Wiley to a publishing partnership with Springer Nature, so they are now hosted on the Springer Nature platform. Second, the whole portfolio converted to fully open access - there is no subscription route anymore, and every research paper is published under a CC BY 4.0 license.

• The EMBO Journal (1982) - molecular biology in the broadest sense: gene regulation, cell biology, structural biology, developmental biology, immunology, neuroscience.
• EMBO Reports (2000) - concise research articles across molecular biology, plus reviews, opinion, and science-and-society content.
• Molecular Systems Biology (2005) - systems and synthetic biology, quantitative and computational approaches; one of the earliest fully open-access journals in the field.
• EMBO Molecular Medicine (2009) - translational research linking molecular mechanism to human disease.
• Life Science Alliance (2018) - co-published with Rockefeller University Press and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; publishes methodologically sound work across the life sciences.

EMBO also runs Review Commons, a journal-independent preprint peer-review platform: your preprint is refereed once, and the reviews travel with the manuscript to any of 20+ affiliate journals, including all EMBO Press titles.

All EMBO Press journals are fully open access. Research content is published under CC BY 4.0, and source data are released under CC0.

Ways to reduce or avoid the fee: Springer Nature's institutional open-access (Read & Publish) agreements cover the APC for authors at participating institutions; discretionary waivers are available case-by-case for documented financial need (apply at submission); a country-tiered pricing pilot may lower the APC by author location; and authors funded through EMBO Young Investigator or Global Investigator schemes can access additional support. Prices are revised periodically - always check the journal's fees page before submitting.

EMBO Press is known for one of the most transparent editorial processes in life-sciences publishing:

• Transparent review: accepted papers are published with a Review Process File containing the referee reports, author responses, and editorial decision letters.
• Referee cross-commenting: reviewers see and can comment on each other's reports before a decision, reducing outlier verdicts.
• Consultative editing: professional scientific editors discuss reports with authors before decisions, and single-round revision is the stated aim.
• Scooping protection: competing work published after submission (or after preprint posting) does not undermine novelty.
• Portable review: reviews transfer between EMBO titles and via Review Commons, so a rejection rarely means starting from scratch.

Referees remain anonymous (single-anonymized) unless they choose to sign their reports.

1. Pick the journal using the scope notes above; presubmission inquiries are welcome at all titles.
2. Read the author guidelines on the journal's site - EMBO Press has detailed, title-specific guides and strict source-data and statistics requirements.
3. Prepare your manuscript. Format-neutral initial submission is accepted; use the journal's template on SciSpace for revision-stage formatting. References follow the EMBO house style.
4. Submit via the journal's eJournalPress-based online system (e.g., emboj.msubmit.net for The EMBO Journal) - not Snapp or Editorial Manager.
5. Or route through Review Commons to have the preprint refereed journal-independently first, then transfer the reviewed manuscript to an EMBO title.

EMBO Press is a member of COPE, OASPA, and STM, and applies COPE guidance to corrections and retractions. Its source-data policy requires the underlying data for figures to be published alongside the paper, and detailed methods reporting is enforced to support reproducibility. As a non-profit, EMBO reinvests publishing income into its fellowships, courses, and other programs for the life-sciences community.