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.
Publication Standards
Reported results must be original work that has not been published elsewhere. Experiments and or analyses must be well-described and appropriately interpreted. Each submission must include a complete description of the result with accompanying reagents, resources, tools, and methodologies that were used in the experiment and any analysis. Results need to be validated using appropriate controls and replicates, which themselves need to be reported in the article. All biological entities must adhere to standards and nomenclature set and maintained by the relevant community knowledgebase, as determined bymicroPublication Biology. All articles and accompanying data will be peer-reviewed.
All articles are peer-reviewed. See our guidelines on peer-review for more information.
Signing Up and Signing On
To submit an article, go to https://portal.micropublication.org
First time users should click on ‘Sign up’ and provide a username, personal information and a password. Please store this information as all further communication, portal activity, including invitations to review and account resetting will require these details.
Before proceeding, look in your email inbox for a verification message from our system, if you do not receive one within a few minutes, there could be something wrong with your entered email address or your institution could be blocking emails from our mail server.
Please let us know if you need help to set up or log into your account: contact@micropublication.org.
Starting a microPublication (the Metadata)
Name - Please add names in the order of authorship. You are required to appoint both a Submitting Author, who will be the main contact during the submission process and a Corresponding Author who will be the main contact for the article after publication. The Submitting and Corresponding Authors can be the same person.
Affiliation - Please include the institute name, city, state/region and country for all authors. Do not include street addresses or mail-codes.
ORCID - include ORCID iDs for all authors.
CRediT - Contributor Roles Taxonomy. You are required to describe each authors’ contribution to the work that is being submitted, using the CRediT taxonomy. See the NISO website for more information.
For long author's lists, authors can fill out a spreadsheet. You can contact editors@micropublication.org for more information.
Articles in microPublication Biology are categorized by 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, Replication -Successful, etc). These categories and labels will be used to
- inform editorial staff of the type of data being reported guide
- assignment of the article to the appropriate curators at
- collaborating databases ease searching and indexing on our journal site
These categories and labels will continue to expand as needed.
- Species
Choose a species from the dropdown, if your species is not listed there, please select ‘Other’.
- Data Type
One of the goals of microPublication is to integrate research findings into Knowledgebases for bioinformatic indexing and curation. To facilitate such integration, when possible, we guide authors by providing data type specific curation forms. If the form for a specific data type is not available, we will alert a Curator at the relevant knowledgebase. Data types currently covered are:
Biochemistry: Biochemistry data refer to any type of in-vitro data that is generated through the study of chemical processes.Database Updates: Database updates describe a new knowledge or database, novel features or tools in an existing database, or updates to a database such as any new coverage of data.Electrophysiology Data: Electrophysiologyl data refer to data generated by measuring the electrical activity of living cells, tissues, or organs.Expression Data: Expression data report spatial or temporal expressions of a gene under normal conditions, studied on a gene by gene basis.Genetic Screens: Genetic screens report the outcome of studies focused on identifying and selecting animals with a phenotype of interest among a mutagenized population.Genome: Genome data report whole genome sequence(s).Genomic: Genomic data report structural or functional analyses of sequence-based data.Genotype Data: Genotype data report sequence information for a specific allele, locus, strain, or line.Integrations: Integrations are extended narratives for data published as microPublications. These articles can include a final experiment that ties published microPublication data into a cohesive report.Interaction Data: Interaction data analyze how genes, gene products, or chemicals may influence the function of other genes, or on physical interactions between genes and gene products (protein-protein, DNA protein, RNA protein).Methods: Methods articles describe new experimental or analysis techniques used for research.Models of Human Disease: Models of human disease articles describe an experimental model for a specific human disease (e.g., Parkinson’s disease), for example, through the study of a gene/allele or strain that recapitulates disease phenotype(s).Phenotype Data: Phenotype data describe organisms containing genetic or genomic alterations from control organisms.Phylogenetic Data: Phylogenetic data describe evidence for the evolutionary standing of a species or group of species with respect to lines of descent.Science and Society: Science and society articles describe topics that are of interest to the wider science community and do not focus on specific types of data that are curated in science knowledgebases.Software: Software articles report computer programs or algorithms developed for the analysis or generation of data.Structural Biology Data: Structural biology data include three-dimensional structures of biological molecules, such as proteins, nucleic acids, and carbohydrates. - Nature of microPublication Findings. These speak to the kind of result you are reporting and are as follows:
New finding -a first-time published discovery or result, including first-time published new reagents
Finding not previously shown -an unpublished result mentioned in a prior publication, but never included, these include data not shown.
Example article: Michael, 2017Negative result -a result from a solid experiment that did not produce a result you expected and so does not support your hypothesis. Such results are often useful, but left out of scholarly communication.
Replication – successful -a report that supports a previous outcome of a similar experiment.
Replication – unsuccessful -a report that does not support a previous outcome of a similar experiment.
Commodity validation -results reported for a commercial reagent that replicate results achieved using commonly available reagents and so do not require the purchase of the commercial product.
Writing a microPublication
microPublications are meant to be reports of single experiments. We expect these data to fit within one figure. Multiple panels are allowed.
We accept images in .jpg and .png formats with a minimum 500 DPI. The image should have approximately a 4:3 aspect ratio.
Within your image please ensure:
- It has not been published before (exceptions will be made for Integration Articles)
- Solid lines are not broken up
- Image areas are not pixilated
- Text is legible and of high quality
The text in the figure needs to be well readable at 100% magnification of the PDF view. Your article cannot be published if your figure does not meet these requirements.
To avoid inappropriate image manipulation, see Rossner and Yamada 2004, Journal of Cell Biology, 166:11.
Sufficient information must be provided to allow another group to repeat the experimental analysis.
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 | Caenorhabditis portoensis | 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. |
References can be entered one at a time or uploaded in bulk from a file. Supported file formats are NBIB or RIS.
- Bulk import
microPublication is working on streamlining reference imports from commonly used reference management software, such as EndNote, Zenodo, Mendeley.
You can create the list of references in Pubmed (export the file in NBIB) or use your citation manager (export the file in RIS format). In the citation manager you can select any journal style before exporting the file in RIS. You can then drag and drop the file in the Reference section in the microPublication submission form.
- Manual input
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 references that do not have a PMID or DOI
Use the following format and enter one reference per box. Click on 'Add reference' to insert additional references: Author(s). Date. Article title. Journal title. Volume(issue):location.
For Dissertations and Theses we follow the recommendations of the CSE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers.
Example: Lutz M. 1989. 1903: American nervousness and the economy of cultural change [dissertation]. [Stanford (CA)]: Stanford University. (Lutz 1989) - 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.
- In-Text Citations
Please use the APA citation style, i.e. (Author's last name, Year of publication) and list your references alphabetically in the Bibliography. We do not accept numbered citations and references. 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.
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)
- 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.
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 CaltechData 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.
Adhering to Nomenclature Standards
microPublication Biology editors work 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.
Structural Biology Data
microPublication Biology is now partnering with Proteopedia, a 3D web resource with pages that describe protein and nucleic acid structures and their structure/function relationships through descriptive text linked to rotatable, zoomable 3D structures. You can access an article with the embedded Proteopedia Molecular Tour here.
Authors that report new macromolecular structures have now the opportunity to opt in and create 3D structures with models built from PDB data. This page is linked from the published article and accessible both through the journal and through the Proteopedia website. microPublication authors will be able to opt in during the submission of the manuscript. Authors will be contacted by Proteopedia personnel and will be asked to provide additional data files to build the Interactive 3D Complement (I3DC). More information here.
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.
Integration Articles
If the amount of your data does not fit within one microPublication, we encourage you to prepare multiple microPublications, each focused on an independent result, and to tie the articles together with an Integrations article, which serves as a summary narrative article. Each Integrations article furthers the discussion of data reported in multiple microPublications. Integrations can include a final experiment that ties published microPublication data into a cohesive report. Example articles: Abay, Wong, and Neumann, 2017; Minor and Sternberg, 2019; Ashley and Holgado, 2019
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. Instructions are given at the time of revision requests. Editorial staff and Science Officers reserve the right to decline or reject an article, as well as request corrections to the article at any point during the submission and proofing process.
Peer Review Process
Each manuscript sent to microPublication Biology undergoes two rounds of peer review, first Academic Peer Review and then Curatorial Peer Review. An article needs to pass both academic and curatorial peer review in order to be accepted for publication.
Academic Peer Review
microPublication Biology follows the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) guidlines in the ‘Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals’.
After submission, the manuscript is 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 are 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 final article html and PDF versions of the article upon publication 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 author’s name.
Reviewers are asked to declare any conflict of interest if they accept the invitation 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 editors rely on the reviewer’s feedback, author’s compliance with suggested editorial and reviewer revisions, and ultimately on the science editor’s decision for acceptance or rejection of an article. We do not guarantee acceptance of submitted work. Further, while microPublication Biology aims at a quick turnaround for article peer review, we cannot guarantee a short review or processing time.
Curatorial Peer Review
microPublication journals collaborate with community knowledgebases to validate and vet reported data and regents so that nomenclature and data reporting meet community standards. A Curator at a relevant database, chosen by the Editors, will be enlisted to vet the data being reported. Authors are expected to address any feedback provided by the Curator as they would for Reviewer feedback.
Peer Review Panel for Multiple Submission Projects
Multiple Submission Projects output regular reports that are amenable to a formulaic article template, such as consortia generated data or undergraduate CURE authored reports. For such formulaic submissions, we instantiate review panels composed of researchers and database curators. Invited researchers evaluate the reported results for being complete and technically sound. Database curators ensure the reported data meet community standards. These panels ensure consistency in peer-evaluation across all articles. Review panels are assembled based on the needs of the project, e.g. the number of submissions and the complexity of the articles. If you think your project will result in multiple output of similar articles, please contact us at editors@micropublication.org.
Following Acceptance - the Proof Stage
Articles go through an author-editable proof stage. While microPublication does not employ a copy-editor, microPublication Editors may request authors to address stylistic, grammatical, and or nonscientific issues of the article. Ultimately, authors are responsible for carefully proofreading their article with the goal of identifying grammatical or stylistic errors. Authors can make changes in the portal. Changes to the proof will be checked by an editor and any corrections that alter data, results, or experiment conclusions will be subject to further review.
Following Publication
Articles will be available on the microPublication Biology website as soon as possible after final proof approval. We will send authors an announcement when their article has been published and available on our live site. Two weeks after going live, the article will be uploaded to PubMedCentral. Authors should check the microPublication Biology online version, both the html and PDF, for possible errors in assembly or content, see "Corrections After Publication" below.
Corrections After Publication
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. If these mistakes are caught within two weeks of publication, no corrigendum is necessary. However, after two weeks from publication, the article will be considered the final version for indexing and any further correction will require a Corrigendum (or Erratum if the error was an editorial oversight). If errors are found, authors are instructed to contact us at editors@micropublication.org. We will convey all corrections to our indexing services (e.g. PubMed Central).
Data handling
Once the final version of the article for indexing has been established, we will send curated 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 expected database after a couple releases, please contact that database.
As we are an online journal, we do not provide hard-copy versions of articles.
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 bymicroPublication Biology, nor will they be deposited in collaborating repositories.
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 (editors@micropublication.org).
Author Fees
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. To request a waiver, please fill out this form. Contact billing@micropublication.org for any further questions.
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 senior editorial staff members.
microPublication Biology is published by
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The microPublication project is supported by
The National Institute of Health -- Grant #: 1U01LM012672-01