For Authors

Information for Authors

Authorship

microPublication Biology follows the authorship guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). All authors share responsibility for the content of the microPublication. Authorship should be limited to those persons that performed the experiment, any analysis, and or write-up. Submitting authors are required to assign authorship contributions using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) to provide transparency to the contributions of researchers to scholarly published work, to enable discoverability and to improve attribution, credit, and accountability.

Individuals who do not satisfy authorship guidelines but participated materially in the work, should be included in the acknowledgement section.

The Principal Investigator (PI) of the laboratory in which the work was performed may or may not be included at the discretion of the PI; however this PI must approve the submission of the article and provide the details of any funding source.

Authors are required to accept the following conditions when submitting an article:
“I/we declare to the best of my/our knowledge that the experiment is reproducible; that the submission has been approved by all authors; that the submission has been approved by the laboratory’s Principal Investigator, and that the results have not been published elsewhere.* The author(s) declare no conflict of interest.”

*Note: We do not consider publication as an academic thesis, electronic preprint, or abstract as a prior publication.

Author Fees

microPublication Biology does not currently charge any Submission or Article Processing Charges. As part of our long-term sustainability plan, we will institute article processing charges (APCs) starting April 2nd, 2022. We will charge $250 per article, which should cover costs but not new initiatives. No article will be refused because of an author’s inability to pay page charges.

Copyright and Licensing

Authors retain copyright for all submitted content published in articles by microPublication Biology under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

For all accepted submissions, authors agree to their data being delivered for integration into Model Organism Databases (or other authoritative repositories) by microPublication Biology. Each of these repositories contain their own copyright and licensing agreements. See each repository for more information.

Rejected articles and data there-in will not be stored by microPublication Biology, nor will they be deposited in collaborating repositories.

Following Acceptance and Publication

We will send submitted data to the relevant authoritative database and hyperlink known biological entities to that database. Published data will appear on the database website based on the database’s release cycle. If you do not see your data in the database after a couple releases, please contact that database.

Articles will be available on the microPublication Biology website as soon as possible, often within a week. We will send authors an announcement when the article has been published along with a final PDF version of their article. Authors should check the microPublication Biology online version, both the html and PDF, for possible errors in assembly. If errors are found, authors are instructed to contact us at contact@micropublication.org.

microPublication Biology is amenable to fixing unintentional mistakes (e.g., incorrect author list, incorrect strain name, etc.) as we do not consider such mistakes to be misconduct. In these cases, the small change will be fixed and published as a Corrigendum. In cases where the errors are due to editorial oversight, we will publish an Erratum.

As we are an online journal, there will be no final re-print hard copy of the article available through us.

Scientific misconduct

microPublication Biology takes allegations of scientific misconduct seriously and will investigate each on a case by case basis when brought to our attention, either by authors or concerned readers. We consult the guidelines provided by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).

microPublication Biology reserves the right to contact the authors’ institutions, funders, or regulatory bodies if needed. Should the allegations occur prior to publication of the article, we reserve the right to halt the peer review and publication process until the investigation is complete. In the case of published articles we will take the appropriate steps to correct the scientific record. These may include issuing an expression of concern or retraction of the published article.

Please address any concerns or questions to our editorial team.

Peer Review Process

microPublication Biology follows the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) guidelines in the ‘Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals’.

After submission, the manuscript will be sent to one or two reviewer experts in the field depending on the complexity of the article. The complexity and need for more than one reviewer will be at the discretion of the science editor. Authors are encouraged to suggest reviewers, which will be evaluated by the science editor for appropriateness. The science editor will ultimately select the reviewer(s).

microPublication Biology operates an elective open peer-review system, where the reviewers’ names are included on the final article html and PDF versions of the article upon acceptance of the manuscript, if the reviewer chooses open acknowledgement. During the review process itself the author is unaware of the identity of the reviewer; however the reviewer is aware of the authors’.

Reviewers are asked to declare any conflict of interest when they are asked to review an article and are encouraged to decline if they perceive a potential conflict, in which case they will be excluded from the review process for that article.

microPublication Biology relies on reviewer’s feedback, author’s compliance with any suggested editorial and reviewer’s revisions, and ultimately science editor’s discretion for acceptance of an article. We do not guarantee acceptance of submitted work. Further, while microPublication Biology aims to function on a quick turnaround for article feedback, we cannot guarantee a short review or processing time.

Appeals

Authors or Associated Principal Investigators, in the case they were not included in authorship, who wish to appeal a decision on an article or make a complaint, should contact a member of the editorial team at once. The contacted editorial staff member will provide information about the journal’s complaints procedure and relay the issue to other senior editorial staff members.