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Reporting innovations in pharmacology and drug development, upholding excellence and improving author experience at the British Journal of Pharmacology in 2024

British Journal of Pharmacology2025Vol. 182(13), pp. 2825–2828

Andreas Papapetropoulos, Evan E. Santo, S P H Alexander, Miriam M. Cortese‐Krott, Zsuzsanna Helyes, Kirill A. Martemyanov, Claudio Mauro, Reynold A. Panettieri, Hemal H. Patel, Rainer Schulz, Barbara Stefañska, Gary J. Stephens, Nathalie Vergnolle, Xin Wang, Stephen G. Ward, Péter Ferdinandy

Abstract

As the British Journal of Pharmacology approaches 80 years of advancing pharmacology, we celebrate our achievements, embrace continuous improvement and look ahead to significantly shaping the future of this exciting field. Foremost, we thank all our authors, reviewers and editors. We also appreciate the British Pharmacological Society and the publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc., for their unique contributions that have made BJP one of the premier journals in pharmacology. In 2024, BJP was highlighted by the prestigious Shanghai Ranking in the ‘Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences’ category. Only three journals in this category were recognized by this index, of which BJP was the only original research journal (https://www.shanghairanking.com/_pub/com/gras/2024/Top%20Journal%20list.pdf). Furthermore, in the period from 2019 to 2023, BJP ranked in 18th place (within the top 5%) for the number of highly cited papers amongst 354 journals publishing in pharmacology. Reflecting our great success, we have also seen a marked increase in submission rates over the last year. However, we acknowledge our turnaround times for manuscripts are somewhat lacking compared to other leading journals in the pharmacology space. This is mainly due to the traditionally high-quality control system BJP maintains. We aim to improve turnaround times by partaking in a bold initiative as a member of the Horizon Europe consortium UNION (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101167421). The UNION consortium will seek to train young pharmacologists as BJP editorial board members, working closely with the EiC and Senior Editors to increase turnaround times, strengthen the pharmaceutical sciences community and remain relevant to young researchers. As for the Senior Editorial Board, we thank the outgoing editors David Kendall and Mauro Teixeira for their heroic service while warmly welcoming Zsuzsanna Helyes and Stephen Ward as their very able replacements. We would also like to congratulate our EiC Péter Ferdinandy and Senior Editor Stephen Alexander for being recognized again as highly cited researchers in 2024 (https://clarivate.com/highly-cited-researchers/). In 2023, BJP steadfastly committed to expanding its scope to keep up with the rapidly growing pharmacology field (Papapetropoulos et al., 2023). In 2024, we successfully recruited a bioinformatics consulting editor, Alexander Hauser, as well as editors in such burgeoning disciplines as targeted degraders and microbiota. As our EiC Péter Ferdinandy explains in a recent video message, BJP is ready and willing to tackle these and other hot new areas with renewed vigour (https://bpspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14765381). Our efforts to expand the scope of BJP have yielded tangible results. We recently published a themed issue on non-coding RNA therapeutic agents (Devaux et al., 2025). This issue explored in detail the 2023 and 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine winning theme of RNA therapeutics and their disease relevance. Other recent themed issues have dealt with the topics of the cancer microenvironment (Williams & Guzman, 2024), platelet activation via P2Y12 receptors within disease contexts (Pitchford & Pan, 2024), the complex relationships between vascular dementia and Alzheimer's disease (Semerano et al., 2024) and GPR84 pharmacology (Milligan, 2024). Additionally, our new article type of ‘Bioinformatic Tool’ is now live with the publications of EpigenPlot and GraphCPP (Imre et al., 2025; Muller & Gyorffy, 2025). EpigenPlot is an interactive web-based analysis platform for exploring DNA methylation data in both cancerous and normal colon tissue. With an intuitive user-friendly interface, it is potentially useful for the identification of therapeutic targets (https://epigenplot.com). GraphCPP uses graph neural networks to significantly improve the accuracy with which cell-penetrating peptides can be predicted, providing a helpful tool for drug delivery (https://github.com/attilaimre99/GraphCPP). The ‘Rapid Communication’ article type is also becoming increasingly popular for the speed with which important messages can be delivered to the pharmacological community. One such communication dealt with the cardiotoxicity of RNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines (Schreckenberg et al., 2024). Another demonstrated that cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) modulator therapy was relatively safe during pregnancy (Li et al., 2024). Always looking to improve, BJP has further streamlined its guidelines for experimental design and analysis (Curtis et al., 2025). Of note, BJP has made its randomization and blinding requirements more flexible for in vitro experiments. This modification has yielded more author-friendly guidelines that are consistent with current laboratory practices in both the academic and industry environments. We have also provided updated guidance on how best to publish research on natural products with BJP, a category of manuscripts with a generally lower acceptance rate (Wang et al., 2024). As this is a more challenging manuscript type, we urge authors to carefully read BJP's natural products guidelines and adhere closely to them to improve their chances of success. BJP has now also published a comprehensive review of a seldom-discussed topic: proper blood collection techniques and anaesthesia in mice (Li et al., 2025). These guidelines put forward state-of-the-art ethical practices as well as increasing the stringency and reproducibility of blood-borne measurements in mice. BJP strives to combat publication fraud and foster scientific rigour well beyond the experimental design and data presentation standards outlined in our recently updated author guidelines (https://bpspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/14765381/author-guidelines.html). In support of our efforts, BJP has engaged a consulting editor for scientific integrity, Marcel van der Heyden, in addition to the dedicated team at Wiley. This greatly helps to prevent potentially fraudulent data from making its way past editors and reviewers. Post-publication, BJP has also been fast to correct misconduct and was therefore found to have a retraction rate 10× higher than other journals in the 2000–2023 period (van der Heyden, 2024). To further discuss publication integrity issues as well as address the opportunities and challenges that AI poses to publication in the modern era, our EiC Péter Ferdinandy convened a symposium in November 2023 at Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary, of 14 other EiCs from top journals for a roundtable discussion (Benyo et al., 2024). The participants discussed the experiences of their journals with the issues of paper mills, image manipulation, the use of AI to both detect and commit fraud, submission and review process integrity and how best to vet author identities and conflicts of interest. A major conclusion drawn from these extensive discussions was that a strong community around a journal of authors, reviewers and editors was a good way to prevent fraud from occurring at all and to detect it early if it does. At the December 2024 meeting of the BPS in Harrogate, UK, this discussion was continued amongst the BJP Senior Editorial Board as well as EiCs of several leading pharmacology journals. Here, it was discussed how best to implement the lessons learned from the Budapest meeting. As previously mentioned, BJP in 2024 joined the Horizon Europe UNION consortium that seeks to train early-career pharmacologists as editors by pairing them with current Senior Editors. This arrangement will hopefully yield a new generation of editors who are ready to take on the challenges that publication in the modern era poses. Enhancing recognition of outstanding authors could go a long way to strengthening the BJP community. To achieve this, BJP now holds online symposia where authors of highly downloaded and cited BJP papers are invited to speak about their work and answer questions from an open audience. This environment enables people to connect around topics that interest them, which may foster new relationships that advance science and the impact of BJP in the pharmacology space. Furthermore, BJP plans to bolster its monthly Editor's Choice awards by issuing digital certificates to each author of chosen papers. This additional recognition that highlights exceptional publications may further encourage continued submissions by these valued authors and encourage others to submit to BJP. To amplify all the quality work BJP is publishing, authors should expect to see an enhanced social media presence going forward that will better promote our ‘superstar’ papers. BJP also recognized the work of its outstanding editors Emilio Russo [University of Catanzaro “Magna Græcia”, Catanzaro, Italy], Zoltán V. Varga [Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary] and David Adams [University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia] by awarding them the 2024 Editor Performance Prize at the 2024 BPS Harrogate, UK, meeting. Finally, BJP supports meetings of importance in the pharmacology field through direct funding. In 2024, these included the EPHAR2024 meeting, the BPS/AstraZeneca meeting ‘Emergence of Irreversible Modulation in Drug Discovery’, a meeting on cGMP entitled ‘cGMP: Generators, Effectors and Therapeutic Implications’ and a symposium at the ‘World Congress of Inflammation’. BJP is now also performing a major service for the field of pharmacology by publishing an annual review of all newly approved drugs for the previous year (Papapetropoulos et al., 2024; Topouzis et al., 2025). In the short time that this has been done, this annual review is proving to be very popular. It will undoubtedly increase the standing of BJP among pharmacologists and drug developers generally and attract more top authors to publish with us, broadening the BJP community. The pharmacology field is booming and becoming more multidisciplinary than ever. We see continued exciting developments in gene therapies and RNA therapeutics, such as using targeted lipid nanoparticles to achieve cell-type specificity. Cell therapy is rapidly moving beyond CAR T-cell therapies and cancer to target other pathologies, such as autoimmune diseases (i.e., arthritis). New modalities such as targeted degraders, molecular glues, biparatopic antibodies, nanobodies and the design of mutation-selective small molecules are expanding the possibilities in cancer therapy, making previously undruggable targets druggable. The targeting of GPCR receptors and SLC family carriers of metabolites will yield new possibilities for immune modulation. The modulation of protein acylation and lactylation, post-translational modifications now viewed as pervasive and consequential as protein phosphorylation, may represent a new panacea for drug development that rivals kinase inhibitors. Strikingly, vaccines themselves are being re-imagined not just to combat infectious diseases but to prevent pathologies such as cardiac arrhythmias and diabetes. Pain management is about to get a huge boost with the continued development of NaV1.8 ion channel inhibitors, with potential opioid-sparing utility. The mechanisms underlying the therapeutic benefits of natural products are being unravelled by the application of deep sequencing technologies, targeted mechanistic studies and computational modelling. Finally, AI will support the development of all these new modalities and approaches by aiding data analysis, predicting clinical efficacy and designing therapeutic agents that exhibit increased on-target and decreased off-target profiles. With our current and future efforts, BJP will be well-positioned to be at the forefront of the burgeoning pharmacology and drug development fields for years to come. All authors contributed to the design and writing of the manuscript. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Abstract

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