INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS
Submit new articles through our Submission Portal. You will need to create an account if you do not already have one. Visit ‘Submit a New microPublication’ for additional details.
Information about what is accepted can be found below.
microPublication Results
Articles in microPublication Biology are meant to be short and limited to reporting data from a single experiment. All data used to support a concluding remark should either be reported within the article or from the cited literature. We discourage any reference to “data not shown” or “unpublished data”.
microPublication Journal Sections
Articles in microPublication Biology are categorized by field, species and Data Type (e.g., Expression Data, Phenotype Data, New Methods, Software, etc.). In addition, articles are labeled by the nature of the findings (New Finding, Negative Result, etc). These categories and labels will be used to inform editorial staff of the type of data being reported and guide assignment of the article to the appropriate curators at collaborating databases. These labels will continue to expand as needed.
Nature of microPublication Findings
New finding – including new reagents
Finding not previously shown (an unpublished result in prior publication)
Negative result
Replication – successful
Replication – unsuccessful
Commodity validation
Author Contributions
We support the use of the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) to state the contributions of each author on your manuscript. CRediT was defined by the CASRAI (Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information) organization with partnering entities PLoS and NISO (National Information Standards Organization). Please use CRediT terms to note each author’s contribution to the submitted work, visit the site to see the terms and definitions.
Nomenclature Standards
microPublication Biology works directly with curators at authoritative community knowledgebases (e.g. WormBase, FlyBase, Saccharomyces Genome Database, etc.) to validate biological entities reported in submitted articles. Authors must adhere to community standards in reporting these reagents, and bioentity names such as gene, strain, variation names etc. Reported reagents and names of bioentities will be quality controlled for accuracy by a curator at a collaborating knowledgebase or by automated methods set up by microPublication in conjunction with the knowledgebase to ensure that these objects adhere to these standards.
Accepted nomenclature sources for human and major biomedical model organisms can be found here.
Methods
Sufficient information must be provided to allow another group to repeat the experimental analysis.
Reagents
Include all pertinent reagents used and generated in your study. Biological reagents such as strains, animals, antibodies, and molecular tools (e.g. transgenes, plasmids) should be listed in a table. For each reagent include enough information for unambiguous identification, see examples below.
For strains and plasmids, minimally provide the name, full genotype, and source where it is available. Provide the full genotypes for any transgene or engineered allele within the strain genotype or in a separate column. You are welcome to include any other relevant information in subsequent columns as you wish.
| Strain | Genotype | Available from |
| N2 | Caenorhabditis elegans | CGC |
| PHX2811 | ceh-84(syb2811[crh-84::GFP]) | Sunybiotech |
| EG4788 | Caenorhabditis portoensis | CGC |
| OH12747 | otEx5854[inx-6p(2TAAT-deletion)::tagRFP; pRF4] | CGC |
| Plasmid | Genotype | Description |
| pAB1 | inx-6p(2TAAT-deletion)::tagRFP::unc-54 3’ UTR; | 1654 bp region upstream of inx-6 coding region, where two TAAT sites were deleted. Available at Addgene. |
| Antibody | Animal and clonality | Description |
| anti-FLD-1 | Rabbit polyclonal | Rabbit antiserum was generated by immunizing a rabbit against the peptide TQVGDVESGPLRTQ corresponding to C terminal amino acids. |
Software
Software written, or adapted, and used by the authors in the manuscript is considered data that must be archived along with the article itself. If the software code is not included within the article, authors should include a link to a released and tagged version of the code. For examples of how to release and tag software in a github repository go here.
Authors should provide a license for the software. A list of software licenses can be found at https://opensource.org/licenses. The selection guide at https://choosealicense.com may also be helpful in determining which license to use. The software release should be compliant with institutional sharing policies.
Statistical Analysis
Any statistical analysis that was performed must be indicated, including multiple comparison corrections. Standardized nomenclature for reporting statistical analyses, e.g., SI units, must be followed.
Figures
We accept images in .jpg and .png formats with a minimum 500 DPI. The image should have approximately a 4:3 ratio.
Within your image please ensure:
- Solid lines are not broken up.
- Image areas are not pixilated.
- Text is legible and of high quality.
To avoid inappropriate image manipulation, see Rossner and Yamada 2004, Journal of Cell Biology, 166:11.
Video and Movie files
microPublication Biology supports video and movie files. The acceptable format is MP4/MPEG up to 1GB in size.
References
References need to be entered one reference at a time. Authors should provide the PubMed ID (PMID) in the submission form when available. If no PMID is available, a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) should be entered. Exceptions will be made when needed. The PMID and DOI will be added and hyperlinked to the reference citation during publication processing.
References should be arranged alphabetically and formatted following the Council of Scientific Editors (CSE) guidelines.
For printed and online journal articles
Author(s). Date. Article title. Journal title. Volume(issue):location. PMID
Author(s) of article. Date of publication. Title of article. Title of journal (edition). [date updated; date accessed];Volume(issue):location. Notes. DOI
For online journals without Volume information
Author(s) of article. Date of publication. Title of article. Title of journal. DOI
Examples:
Kaneuchi T, Sartain C.V., Takeo S, Horner V.L., Buehner N.A., Aigaki T, Wolfner M.F. (2015). Calcium waves occur as Drosophila oocytes activate. Proc Natl Acad Sci 112(3), 791–796. PMID
Hu, Q; Vélez-Avilés, AN; Wolfner, MF (2020). Drosophila Plc21C is involved in calcium wave propagation during egg activation. microPublication Biology. 10.17912/micropub.biology.000235
If there are more than 8 authors
Display the first 6 authors, then an ellipsis or the words “et al.”, followed by the last author, as shown in the following citation:
Vrailas-Mortimer AD, Aggarwal N, Ahmed NN, Alberts IM, Alhawasli M, Aljerdi IA, et al., Kagey JD. 2021. B.2.16 is a non-lethal modifier of the Dark82 mosaic eye phenotype in Drosophila melanogaster. microPublication Biology. 10.17912/micropub.biology.000359.
OR
Vrailas-Mortimer AD, Aggarwal N, Ahmed NN, Alberts IM, Alhawasli M, Aljerdi IA, …, Kagey JD. 2021. B.2.16 is a non-lethal modifier of the Dark82 mosaic eye phenotype in Drosophila melanogaster. microPublication Biology. 10.17912/micropub.biology.000359.
See more examples here.
In-Text Citations
- For citations with two authors, include both authors’ names.
- Example: (Ricardo and Lehmann 1999)
- For citations with three or more authors, list only the first author’s name followed by et al.
- Example: (Kim et al. 1999)
- Cite references chronologically.
- Example: (Chen et al. 1997; Scott and Rogers 1998; Isaacson 1999)
- For multiple citations with the same first author, list single-author entries by year using 1996a, 1996b, etc.
- Example: (Chen et al. 1996a)
Extended Data
microPublication discourages the inclusion of supplemental data. However, we allow authors to include ‘Extended data’ files which are necessary to support experimental results presented in the study. Examples of acceptable Extended Data are software, movies, mass spectrometry hits for proteomic analysis, GFF, FASTA, Variant Call Format (VCF) files, among others.
Extended data files should be accompanied by a descriptive title and a brief description. Files will be deposited as is on the Caltech Data server for long term preservation and will be hyperlinked to the final version of the article. If extended data are images or tables of experimental results and are exceeding the scope of a single microPublication, we encourage the authors to submit a separate microPublication. Extended Data files will be peer-reviewed along with the article and may be declined at the editor’s discretion to be included if not deemed necessary for the article.
Material Sharing
Authors are expected to make biological materials described in their article available upon reasonable request from researchers. Authors are encouraged to deposit biological materials to public repositories such as Addgene, Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center, Caenorhabditis Genetics Center, European Xenopus Resource Centre and other appropriate repositories.
Article Submission Agreement
By submitting an article to microPublication Biology, all authors agree to the following:
- All curatable data in the article will be shared with relevant and appropriate databases collaborating with microPublication journals.
- All experiments discussed in the article are reproducible.
- The results have not been published elsewhere.*
Further, the following must be true:
- The submission has been approved by all authors.
- The submission has been approved by the laboratory’s Principal Investigator.
- There is no conflict of interest for any author.
*We do not consider publication as an academic thesis, electronic preprint, or abstract as a prior publication.
After Submission
Once an article has been submitted, a managing editor and Science Officer will do a quick evaluation of the article for moving on to peer-review. If the article passes this initial evaluation, the article will be sent to a reviewer. During any of these reviews, the authors may be asked to address comments and revise the article. To speed this process, authors should address all comments and questions and list/explain all changes made to the manuscript to simplify evaluation by the editors and reviewers.
