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Submission checklist

Authors of commissioned articles, please use the commissioned submission system.


Welcome, Stanford University authors!

Thank you for deciding to submit your manuscript to BMC Biology.

To be appropriate for BMC Biology, articles need to be of outstanding quality, broad interest and special importance. Articles which are of importance to those with closely-related research interests should be submitted to one of the subject-specific journals in the BMC series.

Please make sure you have satisfied the points on the following checklist before submitting your manuscript. If you have any questions about the submission process, please contact info@biomedcentral.com. If you are submitting a manuscript to a particular Special Issue, please refer to its specific name in your covering letter.

1. Email addresses
Do you have a list of the email addresses for all the co-authors of the manuscript? You will need to provide these so that we can inform the co-authors when the manuscript has been received and when it is published.

2. Instructions for Authors and peer review policy
Have you read the detailed Instructions for Authors for BMC Biology? You may also like to read BMC Biology's peer review policy.

3. Covering letter, peer reviewers and editorial board selection
Have you prepared a covering letter for your submission, explaining why it is of special importance and broad interest and elaborating on any issues relating to our editorial policies detailed in the instructions for authors? This should be provided using the 'cover letter' section of the submission process.

4. Manuscript files
Do you have all the files for the manuscript in an acceptable format?

  • Main manuscript
    Formats: DOC, DOCX , PDF , RTF (rich text format) , DVI , TEX
    Tables less than 2 pages (about 90 rows) should be included at the end of the manuscript. Longer tables should be submitted, and referred to in the text, as additional files. TeX files must use the BioMed Central TeX template.
  • Figure files
    Formats: EPS , PDF (for line drawings) , PNG , TIFF (for photographs and screen dumps) , JPEG (for photographs and screen dumps) , BMP , DOC, DOCX , PPT, PPTX
    Must be separate files, not embedded in the main manuscript.
  • Additional files
    May be any standard type of file, eg. movies, datasets, large tables etc.
    Files must be named with the three letter file extension appropriate to the file type (eg .pdf, .xls, .txt)
    Additional material files should include necessary material that cannot be included in the PDF version of the published article, such as large datasets or movies . Tables should ordinarily be included in the manuscript file, unless they are exceptionally large (more than 2 manuscript pages or 90 rows). The manuscript file should include a short description of any additional files and software necessary to view them.

    • Please refer to the Instructions for Authors for further information about suitable file types.

    5. Article-processing charges
    BMC Biology levies an article-processing charge of £1515/US$2410/€1900 per article accepted for publication. However, you have been recognised as being at an institution that is a BioMed Central member and has arranged to partly cover the processing charge. Please continue with the submission process below. You should be aware that the institution will check whether you are entitled to the Membership payment, and may inform us that you are not covered. If this happens, you will need to arrange to pay the full article-processing charge.

    6. Are you one of the authors of this article?
    If not, you cannot submit the article on behalf of the authors.

    As part of the submission process you will assign a contact author for the article, and this can be yourself or a co-author where they are registered. Once the manuscript is submitted the contact author takes responsibility so only they will be able to access the manuscript online in the 'My manuscripts' section of the website and receive correspondence sent throughout the peer review and production process.

    7. Conditions of submission and BioMed Central Copyright and License Agreement
    Do you confirm that all the authors of the manuscript have read and agreed to its content , that readily reproducible materials described in the manuscript will be freely available to any scientist wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes , and that you have ethical approval for any human or animal experimentation (for more information see our Instructions for Authors)? Do you confirm that the manuscript is original, has not already been published in a journal and is not currently under consideration by another journal? By clicking the button below, you are confirming these points and agreeing to these and all other terms of the BioMed Central Copyright and License Agreement, which we suggest you read.

    Yes, I am the submitting author of this article and I accept the conditions of submission and the BioMed Central Copyright and License Agreement - take me to the next step.

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