Guidelines for Authors
Aims and scope
The HFSP Journal aims to promote understanding across a broad readership from diverse scientific backgrounds and to facilitate communication and exchange of ideas and discoveries within the interdisciplinary science community by publishing high quality, innovative interdisciplinary basic research at the frontier of biology over a wide range of organizational levels (from the molecular level to population biology) using strategies or technologies from the more quantitative disciplines (e.g. physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, or informatics). Examples of such studies include but are not restricted to the following:
- computational approaches to gene, protein or signal transduction networks
- physical studies of the structure and dynamics of the molecular machinery of the cell
- mathematical, chemical and physical approaches to biological processes (e.g. morphogenesis, growth, genotype/phenotype relationship)
- novel chemical and physical approaches to studying biological phenomena (such as from synthetic chemistry and materials science)
- single molecule approaches to biological systems
- new ways of studying intracellular processes (e.g. novel methods from non-linear optics)
- novel physical and computational approaches to understanding brain and cognitive functions
- new methods in experimental and theoretical sciences that open up new approaches to understanding biological systems
- mathematical and computational approaches to evolutionary studies
The HFSP Journal is published both online and in print. Articles are published online rapidly and ahead of their assignment to an issue and publication in print.
The HFSP Journal is operated by HFSP Publishing, a non-for-profit organization. One of the goals of the HFSP Journal is to enhance the scientific impact of the Human Frontier Science Program which is run by the International Human Frontier Science Program Organization (HFSPO). This international funding agency has been supporting innovative research at the frontier of biology since its establishment in 1989.
Benefits of publishing in the HFSP Journal
- Guaranteed quality and interdisciplinary peer review process
- Fast submission and review process
- Research reaches the different scientific communities interested in your research in a timely manner
- Qubits: fast-track free open access publication of short reports on arising matters
- Commentaries and Perspective articles highlighting up and coming developments in interdisciplinary research in a language and format accessible across scientific disciplines
- Authors retain the copyright on their work
- Open-access publication is possible for research articles
- Compliant with NHS and Wellcome Trust open access policies
Peer Review of interdisciplinary articles
Peer review of interdisciplinary articles presents considerable challenges to ensure that all aspects of a paper receive fair and rigorous review. HFSP Journal' review procedures are designed to optimize review of such articles through interaction between Editorial Board members and external reviewers from different disciplines, while not compromising the speed of publication.
The suitability of submitted manuscripts for review is first evaluated by the Managing Editor and the Editor-in-Chief, after consultation with Editorial Board members whose expertise is relevant to a given manuscript. For each manuscript, referees are assigned and post-review decisions are made by a member of the editorial board member, after consultation with other editorial board members with expertise in disciplines other than their own where appropriate. Referees might also be asked to comment on the criticisms of other referees in cases where conflicting reports are received and to ensure that all aspects of the research are appreciated by the reviewers from the different relevant disciplines.
In some circumstances, at the author’s request and provided the referees have given their consent, information about a manuscript considered by the HFSP Journal and subsequently submitted to another journal may be provided to the editor of that journal. Such information might include the comments and identities of referees. Conversely, if provided with the comments and identity of the reviewers by another journal that a manuscript was considered by, the HFSP Journal will in some circumstances make a decision based on those reviews. This is to speed up the reviewing process and avoid reviewer fatigue.
Open access, subscription-restricted access, and not-for-profit policy
Immediate open access of Qubits is free. The HFSP Journal’s aims to make primary research as widely accessible as possible while maintaining financial sustainability. Primary research published in the HFSP Journal will be freely available to all researchers worldwide 6 months after publication, ensuring maximum dissemination of content. The HFSP Journal is thus compliant with the open access policies of e.g. the NIH and the Wellcome Trust.
The HFSP Journal has opted for a 'hybrid' financial model to cover for its editorial and production costs. Access to primary research articles is free immediately on publication if the authors of this article have opted for the open access option and paid the open access fee (USD2,100). For other articles, access is restricted to subscribers; non open access research articles become freely accessible 6 months after publication.
No page charges or colour figure charges apply for articles that do not exceed 10 pages and contain no more than 3 colour figures. The number of pages can be estimated by 1/3 of the number of manuscript pages + 1/4 of the number of figures. Charges apply for articles in excess of 10 pages and/or 3 colour figures (see Charges).
Authors are requested to fill in and sign a Production Form 
and a License to Publish upon acceptance of their manuscript stating which
publication model they chose for their article and which charges will apply.
All income will be used to cover the costs of running the HFSP Journal, first to reimburse the loan that HFSP Publishing received to launch the journal; subscription and open access fees, and excess page charges will subsequently be revisited on a regular basis depending on the journal's revenue and expenses.
The HFSP Journal enables developing countries to access its content free or at discount prices through its partnership with the HINARI (Health InterNet Access to Research Initiative), OARE (Online Access to Research on the Environment) and AGORA (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture).
Copyright and Archiving Policy
Authors of research articles accepted for publication in the HFSP Journal retain the copyright of the contents of the article.
All authors are entitled to self-archive their primary research article and may post a copy of the accepted version of their manuscript on their own website or institutional repository or the authors' funding body archive 6 months after the date of publication of the article, or immediately if the authors have opted for open access publication.
Authors that have opted for immediate open access and have paid an open access fee may use the final version of articles produced by the HFSP Journal for self-archiving; if the authors have not opted for open access, they should refrain from using the version produced by the journal for self-archiving for the first six months after its original print publication in the HFSP Journal.
Provided that the HFSP Journal is acknowledged and referenced, the authors and third parties may reproduce parts of any article (also review articles) for non-commercial purposes.
However if an article published in the HFSP Journal is republished by another publisher for commercial purposes, permission has to be obtained from HFSP Publishing (please email kthompson@hfsp-publishing.org for permission requests), the authors of the original article should be acknowledged, the HFSP Journal should be referenced and a reproduction fee will apply to the publisher.
Upon acceptance of their manuscript for publication in the HFSP Journal, authors are required to sign a License to Publish which grants HFSP Publishing the license to publish
, reproduce, distribute, display and store the article (as well as summaries, extracts or other derivative works based on the article) in all forms, formats and media whether currently known or hereafter developed throughout the world, to license others to do so, and to include links from the article to third-party material.
HFSP Publishing's Guidelines Regarding Ethical Scientific Behaviour
HFSP Publishing endorses the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines on good publication practice (available at http://www.publicationethics.org.uk/guidelines ) and we expect our editors, author, reviewers and subscribers to comply with it.
Types of article
The HFSP Journal publishes Primary Research Articles, Perspectives and Commentaries. Perspectives are review articles discussing up and coming topics of interest to the interdisciplinary community, and Commentaries are mini-reviews discussing recent interdisciplinary research articles and explaining the context and the importance of this research.
General considerations for all types of articles
- General policy:
Submission of a paper implies that it reports original unpublished work and that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that all authors have approved the submission and that the authors are authorized by their employers and/or funding agencies to publish the work. Authors of research articles may however post the submitted manuscript on pre-print servers such as arXiv (http://www.arxiv.org/) or Nature Proceedings (http://precedings.nature.com/ ) and should then indicate the arXiv or Nature Proceedings reference number in the cover letter accompanying their submission to the HFSP Journal. Authors should declare any commercial interests in relation to the submitted work. - Additional material for the editors and the referees:
Any manuscripts under review or accepted for publication elsewhere from the same authors and that are related to the work submitted to the HFSP Journal should be made available to the editors and the reviewers of the HFSP Journal. - Permissions:
If excerpts from other copyrighted works are included in the manuscript, please provide evidence of permission to reproduce these excerpts from the copyright owners and credit the sources in the article. If a figure of the manuscript has been adapted from a published figure, please check with the copyright owners to see if permission is required and include a complete citation/reference for the original article. Please note that obtaining permissions can take up to several weeks. In order to avoid delays, we recommend that you request permission at the time of submission. - Style:
Care should be taken to write the articles for a broad audience. The abstract, introduction and discussion sections in particular should be intelligible to a wide audience of life scientists and scientists from other relevant disciplines and should clearly emphasize the novelty and significance of the data reported. - Title:
The title should not exceed 100 characters (including space). - Title page:
The full name of each author should be given. Numbers in superscript should be used to indicate the department, institution, city with postal code and country, for each author. Any changes of address may also be given in numbered footnotes. It is possible to name more than one author as the correspondent of a published article; at the time of submission, however, upon submission of a manuscript, please indicate only a single author to whom all correspondence is to be addressed, together with an e-mail address, telephone and fax numbers.
The title page must also state the precise character and word count of the manuscript. - Abstract:
The abstract should not exceed 200 words. - Acknowledgements:
The contribution of each author, the source of funding and key disciplines relevant to the article should be specified. - Reference style:
In the text of the manuscript, a reference should be cited by first author name and initial, and year of publication; 'et al' should be used if there are more than two authors (e.g. Ferrier V & Falaschi A, 2003; Magnasco M et al, 2000).
Personal communications (M Reddington, personal communication, 2005), unpublished data (P Vincent and T Wiesel, unpublished data, 2004), manuscripts in preparation or submitted, but not yet accepted (I Coquard and A Jones, in preparation) , should be cited in the text as indicated, but not included in the list of references. Evidence of consent should be provided for personal communications.
In the reference list, citations should be listed in alphabetical order and then chronologically, with the authors' last name and initials, followed by the year of publication (publications by the same author(s) in the same year should be labeled with a, b, c after the year of publication). If there are more than 10 authors, only the first author's surname and initial should be shown, followed by 'et al'. The title of the article should be provided, followed by the journal name (abbreviated according to Index Medicus) in italicized characters, the volume (in bold characters) and page numbers.
Examples:
For an article:
Marcy Y, Prost J, Carlier, MF, and Sykes C (2004) Forces generated during actin-based propulsion: a direct measurement by micromanipulation. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 101, 5992-5997
for a book chapter:
Glaser R (1996) Intramolecular bonds. In Biophysics, Fischer Verlag G (ed) pp 6-17. Springer, Heidelberg, Germany
for a book:
Glaser R (1996) Biophysics. Springer, Heidelberg, Germany
For an article in press:
Marcy Y, Prost J, Carlier, MF, and Sykes C (2004) Forces generated during actin-based propulsion: a direct measurement by micromanipulation. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, (in press)
For an article that has been published online only:
Marcy Y, Prost J, Carlier, MF, and Sykes C (2004) Forces generated during actin-based propulsion: a direct measurement by micromanipulation. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, online publication 20 April 2004, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0601257103 - Conventions and abbreviations:
Authors are invited to follow the conventions given in "Scientific Style and Format: The CBE Manual for Authors, Editors and Publishers" (1994) Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 6th edn, in Chemical Abstracts and its indexes for chemical names, and in the IUPAC-IUBMB Joint Commission on Biochemical Nomenclature for biochemical terminology; genotypes should be indicated in italics; phenotypes should not be italicized.
Abbreviations should be limited to SI symbols and symbols recommended by the IUPAC. Abbreviations should be defined in brackets after their first mention in the text, not in a list of abbreviations. - Format of the text:
Text files should be provided in LaTeX2e, RTF, TXT, AMSTex, MS Word, or Word Perfect. The final character count must be clearly indicated on the title page of the manuscript. - Illustrations:
Graphics files must be submitted in one of the following formats: TIFF, EPS, or Postscript. Please provide one file per figure and label each file according to the figure number (e.g. Fig_1.eps, Fig_2.tif, etc). For black and white photographs or micrographs and for any type of graph or drawing in grayscale, the resolution should be a minimum of 500 dpi (at the approximate print size). For figures that contain color, the resolution should be a minimum of 300 dpi. - Reviewers:
Authors are invited to provide the names and contact details of 4 potential referees for their manuscript with expertise in the different areas of research which are relevant to their article. - Revision:
Please use the URL provided in the decision letter to submit the revised version of the manuscript. The deadline for resubmission is indicated in the original decision letter. Please include a detailed letter of response to the reviewers' and the editors' criticisms.
Research articles and Qubits
- Electronic images:
Digital images submitted for publication should be representative of the original data. The Editors reserve the right to request original versions of figures from the authors of a manuscript under consideration. - Availability of published material:
Materials and reagents that were used in the research reported in the HFSP Journal and that are not available from commercial supplier should be made available to colleagues in academic research e.g. organisms, viruses, cells, nucleic acids, antibodies, and other reagents. - Organization of research articles:
Research articles should be subdivided into the following sections: abstract, introduction, results, discussion, materials and methods, acknowledgements, references, figure legends, figures, tables, supplementary information. The results and discussion sections can be combined if the authors feel this is more appropriate, e.g in theoretical papers.
No page charges or colour figure charges apply for articles that do not exceed 10 pages and do not contain more than 3 colour figures. The number of pages can be estimated by 1/3 of the number of text pages + ¼ of the number of figures. A USD600 fee will be charged for each page in excess of the 10 page limit and a USD500 fee for each additional colour figure (see Charges). - Organization of Qubits
Qubits are short communications reporting on exciting, preliminary observations. Publication of qubits is fast-tracked and immediate open access is free. Qubits should be subdivided into the following sections: abstract, results and discussion, materials and methods, acknowledgements, references, figure legends, figures, tables, supplementary information. No page charges or colour figure charges apply for Qubits. Qubits should be no longer than 25, 000 characters long (including spaces) and contain no more than 3 figures. - Abstract:
Authors are encouraged to organize their abstracts as follows: a few sentences to set the background and significance of the work, a few sentences about the methods used, about the results that were obtained, and finally about the conclusions that were reached (but no subheadings should be used). - Supplementary material:
The supplementary material should be limited to displaying data or additional details about the methods which are not essential to the central conclusions of the article.
Authors should display data in a format that is accepted by their community:- microarray data should be provided in MIAME-compliant format, see http://www.mged.org/Workgroups/MIAME/miame_checklist.html, www.ebi.ac.uk/arrayexpress/ or www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/)
- crystal structure data should be presented according to the recommendations of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) in Acta Crystallographica (2000), D56, 2, all publications must be accompanied by deposition of both the atomic coordinates and the structure-factor amplitudes in the appropriate database (PDB or NDB)
- NMR data should include resonance assignments, and all restraints used in structure determination (NOEs, spin-spin coupling constants, amide exchange rates) and the derived atomic coordinates for both an individual structure and for a family of acceptable structures
- electron microscopy of the structures of biological macromolecules should be deposited in the EMDB database at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/msd/Deposition.html and Tagari et al. (2002) Trends Biochem Sci 27:589
- for chemistry data, reproductions of spectra to support compound identification and demonstrate compound purity should be provided.
- data sets in systems biology should use the Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML)
- nucleotide sequence data should be deposited in public databases (see the DDBJ at http://www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp/, the EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Submissions at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/, GenBank at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/), and accession numbers should be provided in article.
Commentaries and Perspectives
-
The HFSP Journal also publishes commentaries discussing
recent interdisciplinary research articles and explaining the context and the
importance of this research, and perspectives discussing up and coming topics
of interest to the interdisciplinary community.
- Commentaries:
* Format:
The text should be 15- 20, 000 characters long (including spaces) and include 1-2 figures. - Perspectives:
* Format:
Perspectives should not exceed 10 pages which corresponds to 60, 000 characters (including spaces) and 5 figures.
These articles should contain an abstract, an introduction, and a conclusion section; the main body of the text can be organized at the authors' discretion.
These articles are usually commissioned but suggestions can be considered: please contact the Managing Editor, Valerie Ferrier: vferrier@hfsp-publishing.org
Submission
Manuscripts should be submitted at the following URL: http://www.editorialmanager.com/hfspj/. An author tutorial regarding online submission is available from this site. Authors may contact the editorial office (kthompson@hfsp-publishing.org tel + 33 (0) 3 88 21 52 83 for assistance. If you are unable to submit your manuscript online, you may send your manuscript to Managing Editor, HFSP Journal, 12 Quai St Jean, 67000 Strasbourg, France. Please include a CD with electronic files of text and figures in the acceptable formats (see above).
You will be prompted to upload the individual components of your manuscript (cover letter, text, figures, supplemental data, etc.) as separate files. Upon completion of this step, the website will build a composite PDF file of your entire manuscript that will contain links for the editors and reviewers to download the individual high-resolution files of each component. Editors and reviewers will also be able to download supplementary information files. Please note that the cover letter will not be made available to the reviewers; any information therein will remain confidential to the editor. Hence, for revised manuscripts, a letter of response to the referees should be provided in addition to the cover letter to the editor.
Please be aware that all communications about the paper (including the request for final approval and the confirmation of submission) will be sent to the person who was indicated to be the corresponding author during the submission process, or if no name is designated, to the person whose account is used to submit the manuscript. If you wish to specify a different author for editorial correspondence after submission please contact the editorial assistant at kthompson@hfsp-publishing.org
Proofs
We use an online proofing system. The corresponding author of a manuscript is notified by email and provided with a URL and a PIN when the manuscript is ready for proofing. Please follow the instructions and return the proofs within 48 hours.
Speed of publication
Research articles are usually published online 3 weeks after acceptance and in print in the next available issue.
Subscriptions and Charges
The open access fee is USD 2,100.
No page charges or colour figure charges apply for articles that do not exceed 10 pages and do not contain more than 3 colour figures. Pages in excess of 10 will be charged.
USD630/page and colour figures in excess of 3 will be charged USD525/figure.
Subscription prices are valid till December 31st 2010 and for a period of 12 months.
ISSN Numbers
Print: 1955-2068
Online: 1955-205X
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