Instructions for Journal of Systems Chemistry authors

General information

• experimental and theoretical studies of complex molecular networks
• catalytic and autocatalytic systems
• self-replicating and self-reproducing chemical systems
• dynamic combinatorial chemistry
• emergent phenomena in molecular networks
• information-processing by chemical reactions
• bifurcation and chiral symmetry breaking
• bottom up approaches to synthetic biology and chemical evolution
• research on chemical self-organization inspired by the problems of the origin and synthesis of life
• research from the conjunction of supramolecular, prebiotic and biomimetic chemistry, theoretical biology, complex systems physics, and earth, planetary and space sciences with a center in chemistry

Submission process

Manuscripts must be submitted by one of the authors of the manuscript, and should not be submitted by anyone on their behalf. The submitting author takes responsibility for the article during submission and peer review.

To facilitate rapid publication and to minimize administrative costs, Journal of Systems Chemistry accepts only online submission. The submission process is compatible with version 3.0 or later of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, and with most other modern web browsers. It can be used from PC, Mac, or Unix platforms.

Files can be submitted as a batch, or one by one. The submission process can be interrupted at any time - when users return to the site, they can carry on where they left off.

See below for examples of acceptable word processor and graphics file formats. Additional files of any type, such as movies, animations, or original data files, can also be submitted as part of the publication.

During submission you will be asked to provide a cover letter. Please use this to explain why your manuscript should be published in the journal and to elaborate on any issues relating to our editorial policies detailed in the instructions for authors.

Assistance with the process of manuscript preparation and submission is available from the customer support team (info@biomedcentral.com).

Publication and peer review processes

Journal of Systems Chemistry uses online peer review to speed up the publication process. The time taken to reach a final decision depends on whether reviewers request revisions, and how quickly authors are able to respond.

Once an article is accepted, it is published in Journal of Systems Chemistry immediately as a provisional PDF file. The paper will subsequently be published in both fully browseable web form, and as a formatted PDF.

The ultimate responsibility for any decision lies with the Editor-in-Chief, to whom any appeals against rejection should be addressed.

No article processing charge needs to be paid by the author

The publication costs for Journal of Systems Chemistry are covered by the journal, so authors do not need to pay an article processing charge.

Editorial policies

Any manuscripts, or substantial parts of it, submitted to the journal must not be under consideration by any other journal. In general, the manuscript should not have already been published in any journal or other citable form, although it may have been deposited on a preprint server. The journal is willing to consider peer-reviewing manuscripts that are translations of articles originally published in another language. In this case, the consent of the journal in which the article was originally published must be obtained and the fact that the article has already been published must be made clear on submission and stated in the abstract. Further information on duplicate/overlapping publications can be found here. Authors are required to ensure that no material submitted as part of a manuscript infringes existing copyrights, or the rights of a third party. Authors who publish in Journal of Systems Chemistry retain copyright to their work (more information). Correspondence concerning articles published in Journal of Systems Chemistry is encouraged.

Submission of a manuscript to Journal of Systems Chemistry implies that all authors have read and agreed to its content.

Characterization of compounds

For known compounds used in syntheses the methods of preparation and the literature data used to confirm the material's identity should be cited. For all new compounds sufficient evidence to establish the identity and the degree of purity of the compound must be provided. Experimental data should generally be included within the Additional Material rather than within the main text of the paper and should include relevant spectral and other data. Copies of spectra used in the characterisation of compounds may be reproduced as figures in the Additional Material. X-ray crystallographic data, atomic co-ordinates, nucleic acid sequences and protein sequences should be deposited in an appropriate database in time for any relevant accession numbers to be included in the published data.

Preparing main manuscript text

Nomenclature

Authors should adhere to IUPAC conventions on nomenclature of chemical compounds, which may be found at http://www.chem.qmw.ac.uk/iupac

File formats

The following word processor file formats are acceptable for the main manuscript document:

• Microsoft Word (version 2 and above)
• Rich text format (RTF)
• Portable document format (PDF)
• TeX/LaTeX (use BioMed Central's TeX template)
• DeVice Independent format (DVI)
• Publicon Document (NB)

Users of other word processing packages should save or convert their files to RTF before uploading. Many free tools are available which ease this process.

TeX/LaTeX users: We recommend using BioMed Central's TeX template and BibTeX stylefile. If you use this standard format, you can submit your manuscript in TeX format (after you submit your TEX file, you will be prompted to submit your BBL file). If you have used another template for your manuscript, or if you do not wish to use BibTeX, then please submit your manuscript as a DVI file. We do not recommend converting to RTF.

Note that figures must be submitted as separate image files, although they may also be included as part of the submitted DOC/ PDF/TEX/DVI file.

Article types

When submitting your manuscript, you will be asked to assign one of the following types to your article:

Please read the descriptions of each of the article types, choose which is appropriate for your article and structure it accordingly. If in doubt, your manuscript should be classified as Research article, the structure for which is described below.

Preparing figures and schemes

Figures and schemes should be provided as separate files and should not be included in the main text of the submitted manuscript, although they may also be embedded in appropriate locations in the text file. Schemes must only be embedded in the text file. Each figure or scheme should comprise only a single file. There is no charge for the use of color.

Please read our figure preparation guidelines for detailed instructions on maximising the quality of your figures, and schemes

Formats

The following file formats can be accepted:

• EPS (preferred format for diagrams)
• PDF (also especially suitable for diagrams)
• PNG (preferred format for photos or images)
• Microsoft Word (figures must be a single page)
• PowerPoint (figures must be a single page)
• TIFF
• JPEG
• BMP
• CDX (ChemDraw)
• TGF (ISIS/Draw)

Figure and scheme legends

The legends should be included in the main manuscript text file rather than being a part of the figure or scheme file. For each figure, the following information should be providedat the end of the manuscript text, following the references: Figure number (in sequence, using Arabic numerals - i.e. Figure 1, 2, 3 etc); short title of figure (maximum 15 words); detailed legend, up to 300 words. For each reaction scheme, immediately after the scheme appears in the text, please include a legend comprising: scheme number (in sequence, using Arabic numerals - i.e. Scheme 1, 2, 3 etc); short title of scheme (maximum 15 words); detailed legend, up to 300 words (for example, a list of reagents).

Please note that it is the responsibility of the author(s) to obtain permission from the copyright holder to reproduce figures or tables that have previously been published elsewhere.

Preparing tables

Each table should be numbered in sequence using Arabic numerals (i.e. Table 1, 2, 3 etc.). Tables should also have a title that summarizes the whole table, maximum 15 words. Detailed legends may then follow, but should be concise.

Smaller tables considered to be integral to the manuscript can be pasted into the end of the document text file, in portrait format (note that tables on a landscape page must be reformatted onto a portrait page or submitted as additional files). These will be typeset and displayed in the final published form of the article. Such tables should be formatted using the 'Table object' in a word processing program to ensure that columns of data are kept aligned when the file is sent electronically for review; this will not always be the case if columns are generated by simply using tabs to separate text. Commas should not be used to indicate numerical values. Color and shading should not be used.

Larger datasets can be uploaded separately as additional files. Additional files will not be displayed in the final, published form of the article, but a link will be provided to the files as supplied by the author.

Tabular data provided as additional files can be uploaded as an Excel spreadsheet (.xls) or comma separated values (.csv). As with all files, please use the standard file extensions.

Preparing additional files

Although Journal of Systems Chemistry does not restrict the length and quantity of data in a paper, there may still be occasions where an author wishes to provide data sets, tables, movie files, or other information as additional information. These files can be uploaded using the 'Additional Material files' button in the manuscript submission process.

The maximum file size for additional files is 20 MB each, and files will be virus-scanned on submission.

Any additional files will be linked into the final published article in the form supplied by the author, but will not be displayed within the paper. They will be made available in exactly the same form as originally provided.

If additional material is provided, please list the following information in a separate section of the manuscript text, immediately following the tables (if any):

• File name
• File format (including name and a URL of an appropriate viewer if format is unusual)
• Title of data
• Description of data

Additional datafiles should be referenced explicitly by file name within the body of the article, e.g. 'See additional file 1: Movie1 for the original data used to perform this analysis'.

Formats and uploading

Ideally, file formats for additional files should not be platform-specific, and should be viewable using free or widely available tools. The following are examples of suitable formats.

• Additional documentation
• PDF (Adobe Acrobat)
• Animations
• SWF (Shockwave Flash)
• Movies
• MOV (QuickTime)
• MPG (MPEG)
• Tabular data
• XLS (Excel spreadsheet)
• CSV (Comma separated values)

As with figure files, files should be given the standard file extensions. This is especially important for Macintosh users, since the Mac OS does not enforce the use of standard extensions. Please also make sure that each additional file is a single table, figure or movie (please do not upload linked worksheets or PDF files larger than one sheet).

Mini-websites

Small self-contained websites can be submitted as additional files, in such a way that they will be browsable from within the full text HTML version of the article. In order to do this, please follow these instructions:

1. Create a folder containing a starting file called index.html (or index.htm) in the root
2. Put all files necessary for viewing the mini-website within the folder, or sub-folders
3. Ensure that all links are relative (ie "images/picture.jpg" rather than "/images/picture.jpg" or "http://yourdomain.net/images/picture.jpg" or "C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\mini-website\images\picture.jpg") and no link is longer than 255 characters
4. Access the index.html file and browse around the mini-website, to ensure that the most commonly used browsers (Internet Explorer and Firefox) are able to view all parts of the mini-website without problems, it is ideal to check this on a different machine
5. Compress the folder into a ZIP, check the file size is under 20 MB, ensure that index.html is in the root of the ZIP, and that the file has .zip extension, then submit as an additional file with your article

Style and language

General

Journal of Systems Chemistry can only accept manuscripts written in English. Spelling should be US English or British English, but not a mixture.

The publisher recommends that authors adhere to the ACS Style Guide on matters of nomenclature, physical quantity symbols and units, abbreviations, references, use of italics and punctuation.

There is no explicit limit on the length of articles submitted, but authors are encouraged to be concise. There is no restriction on the number of figures, tables or additional files that can be included with each article online. Figures , schemes and tables should be sequentially referenced. Authors should include all relevant supporting data with each article.

Journal of Systems Chemistry will not edit submitted manuscripts for style or language; reviewers may advise rejection of a manuscript if it is compromised by grammatical errors. Authors are advised to write clearly and simply, and to have their article checked by colleagues before submission. In-house copyediting will be minimal. Non-native speakers of English may choose to make use of a copyediting service.

Help and advice on scientific writing

The abstract is one of the most important parts of a manuscript. For guidance, please visit our page on "Writing titles and abstracts for scientific articles".

• Please use double line spacing.
• Type the text unjustified, without hyphenating words at line breaks.
• Use hard returns only to end headings and paragraphs, not to rearrange lines.
• Capitalize only the first word, and proper nouns, in the title.
• All pages should be numbered.
• Use the Journal of Systems Chemistry reference format.
• Footnotes to text should not be used.
• Greek and other special characters may be included. If you are unable to reproduce a particular special character, please type out the name of the symbol in full.
  
  Please ensure that all special characters used are embedded in the text, otherwise they will be lost during conversion to PDF.

Last revised: 1 September 2009