Publication Guide
The Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB) is a non-profit scholarly society devoted to the theory, principles, methodology and practice of systematics - phylogenetics, taxonomy, comparative methods and classification, across living and fossil organisms. It was organized in late December 1947 as the Society of Systematic Zoology and adopted its present name in the early 1990s, when its journal Systematic Zoology (1952-1991) was renamed Systematic Biology.
SSB is a society publisher rather than a large commercial house: it stands behind one flagship peer-reviewed journal, Systematic Biology, published on the society's behalf by Oxford University Press, plus a small society-run open-access outlet, the Bulletin of the Society of Systematic Biologists. This guide covers what each venue publishes, what it costs, how peer review and submission work, and what SSB membership changes about the bill.
Which SSB venue fits your paper?
| You're writing... | Choose this route |
|---|---|
| A methodological or theoretical advance in phylogenetics, comparative methods or classification | Systematic Biology - the society's flagship, bimonthly, highly selective, and the field's main venue for inference methods and phylogenetic theory. |
| A phylogenomic study whose contribution is a new analytical approach as much as a new tree | Systematic Biology - empirical work is welcome when it advances systematic principles or methods, not only the taxonomy of one group. |
| A software tool, package or pipeline for systematics | Systematic Biology Software for Systematics and Evolution articles - short, tool-focused papers with the code and documentation available. |
| A short opinion, critique or reply on a contested methodological question | Systematic Biology Points of View - the journal's long-running forum for concise argument and rebuttal. |
| A society-facing piece, dataset note, teaching resource or community report | Bulletin of the Society of Systematic Biologists (BSSB) - the society's open-access outlet, free of article charges for SSB members. |
| A descriptive species revision or single-taxon monograph | Usually elsewhere - journals such as Zootaxa, Systematic Entomology or Systematic Botany are a better fit; Systematic Biology prioritizes work with broad methodological reach. |
What Systematic Biology publishes
Systematic Biology is the official journal of SSB, published bimonthly by Oxford University Press. Its scope covers phylogenetic inference, evolutionary theory and comparative methods, morphology, biogeography, paleontology, population genetics and classification, for any group of organisms.
Article types go beyond standard research papers:
- Regular articles - full-length empirical or methodological research.
- Points of View - short, argued contributions on methodological or conceptual disputes.
- Software for Systematics and Evolution - descriptions of tools, packages and databases.
- Spotlight papers, invited reviews and book reviews - commissioned or editor-invited commentary.
The journal reports a 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 6.2 (2026 JCR release) and a 2025 CiteScore of 14.0, placing it in the top ranks of evolutionary biology titles. Impact metrics change annually - check the current JCR or Scopus entry rather than quoting these figures in a cover letter.
Open access, APCs and page charges
Systematic Biology is a hybrid journal: subscription by default, with an Oxford Open paid open-access option, and content becoming freely available on the OUP platform after a delay of about one year. The Bulletin is a different animal - a small diamond open-access journal launched in May 2021 in partnership with The Ohio State University Libraries.
| Cost item | What to expect |
|---|---|
| Systematic Biology open-access charge | Oxford Open hybrid APC - OUP publishes the current figure on the journal's charges page and revises it annually; check it before you budget. |
| SSB member discount on open access | 20% off the open-access charge for corresponding authors who are SSB members. |
| Page charges | $50 per page on accepted manuscripts - waived entirely for SSB member corresponding authors. |
| Colour figures | Charged at the journal's stated rate; no member discount. |
| Read & Publish coverage | Systematic Biology sits inside Oxford University Press's transformative-agreement portfolio; if your library has an OUP deal your open-access charge may be covered. Check ESAC or your library. |
| Bulletin of the SSB | No article processing charges for SSB members. |
| Licences | CC BY or CC BY-NC for open-access articles; a standard publication licence otherwise. |
Because the member discounts stack with the page-charge waiver, an SSB membership frequently costs less than the page charges on a single accepted paper.
Peer review
Peer review at Systematic Biology is single-anonymized: reviewers see the author names, authors do not see the reviewers. Manuscripts are handled by an Associate Editor drawn from a large board of practising systematists, who solicits external reviews and makes a recommendation to the Editor-in-Chief. The journal is selective, and methodological papers are commonly returned for substantive revision and re-review rather than accepted outright. Preprint posting before or during review is permitted, and the preprint record is updated with the final citation after publication.
How to submit
- Check scope. Ask whether the paper advances systematic theory, methods or broad-scale phylogeny; single-taxon descriptive work is usually better placed elsewhere.
- Pick the article type. Regular article, Points of View, or Software for Systematics and Evolution - the length and structure rules differ.
- Format the manuscript. Follow the journal's Manuscript Preparation Guidelines; references use an author-year style. LaTeX and Word templates are available on SciSpace.
- Archive data and code. Deposit alignments, trees, matrices and analysis scripts in a public repository (Dryad, Zenodo, GitHub) and cite the accession in the paper.
- Submit through ScholarOne. Manuscripts go to ScholarOne Manuscripts at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/systbiol.
- Flag your membership. Corresponding-author SSB membership is what triggers the page-charge waiver and the open-access discount, so make sure it is current at acceptance.
The Bulletin of the Society of Systematic Biologists
The Bulletin (BSSB, ISSN 2768-0819) launched on 1 May 2021 as a society-run, fully open-access journal produced with The Ohio State University Libraries. It is deliberately lighter-weight than Systematic Biology: it carries community-facing content, methods and resource notes, and society business, and publishes without article processing charges for SSB members. It is a young title, so if indexing coverage matters for your assessment or funder reporting, verify its current status before submitting.
Ethics, data and community
Systematic Biology is published by Oxford University Press, a COPE member, and follows COPE guidance on authorship disputes, corrections and retractions. Data and code underlying published analyses are expected to be publicly archived. Beyond publishing, SSB runs the Ernst Mayr Award for outstanding student presentations in systematics, Graduate Student Research Awards, Mini-ARTS awards and early-career travel funds, and co-hosts the annual Evolution meeting jointly with the Society for the Study of Evolution and the American Society of Naturalists.
