JALA is a multi-disciplinary international forum devoted to the advancement of technology in the laboratory. It is an official, peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening, and provides a unique forum for the presentation of method-focused scientific papers and related news and product announcements. Six issues are published each year in partnership with Elsevier.

JALA authors, readers and reviewers are academic, commercial and government researchers, scientists and engineers who conduct research and develop new technologies to increase productivity, elevate data quality, reduce lab process cycle times or enable experimentation that otherwise would be impossible.

JALA manuscript abstracts are indexed by Analytical Abstracts, Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS Previews, Chemical Abstracts (CAS+), CINAHL, Compendex, EMBASE / Excerpta Medica, Google Scholar, Inspec, Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition, Proquest CSA Technology Research Database, Science Citation Index Expanded (also known as SciSearch), SciFinder, Scirus, and Scopus. JALA Online and Elsevier ScienceDirect publish abstracts and full text articles.