Instructions for Authors

Editorial policy

Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry publishes scholarly articles and reviews relating to biological and process-engineering sciences that underpin the translation of discoveries in life sciences to therapeutic and diagnostic products for the benefit of mankind. The journal also publishes commentary related to registration, clinical issues, cost and commercialization matters related to such products as they impact the biotechnology community. Minireviews provide the reader with timely updates in fast-moving areas.

The focus of the journal is directed towards the publication of original articles and reviews concerning the development of new technologies for recovery and extraction, purification and polishing, formulation, stability and characterization of either naturally occurring biological molecules, such as in blood plasma or other biological fluids, or synthetic molecules expressed in eukaryotic or prokaryotic biological systems. Papers that deal with novel expression systems and new cell-culture and fermentation methods that demonstrate step improvements in productivity without adversely affecting downstream purification and cost are particularly welcome. In the area of human healthcare, contributions are encouraged which directly address relevant issues related to the commercialization of novel medicines to fight the major diseases of the 21st century, including infectious diseases and cancers, heart attack and strokes, diabetes and obesity and their complications and neurological diseases. Papers that deal with life sciences and process-engineering aspects of new therapeutic proteins, antibodies and genes, tissue engineering, stem-cell and cell therapeutics, and nanotechnology as it impacts biotechnology are particularly encouraged.

Original papers, reviews and minireviews will be considered. Normally, however, review articles will be invited by the Reviews Editor; any person wishing to submit an unsolicited review article for consideration should, in the first instance, send a summary of the proposed article to the Reviews Editor, who will advise the author regarding its potential suitability. Original papers must contain sufficient detail to enable others to repeat the work.

Manuscripts are accepted for review with the understanding that the same work has not been published elsewhere in any language, including publication on the World Wide Web (WWW); that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere; that its submission for publication has been approved by all of the authors and by the institution where the work was carried out; that all persons entitled to authorship have been so named; and that any person cited as a source of personal communication has approved such citation. Written authorization may be required at the Editor's direction. Abstracts of oral or poster presentations are not considered to constitute previous publication. Preliminary communications in journals that regularly publish reports in this form will not preclude publication of a paper in Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry, provided the full paper contains additional information that justifies its publication and does not repeat the presentation of the same data. To facilitate evaluation of this matter by the Editors, submitted manuscripts should be accompanied by copies of all preliminary communications and of all relevant manuscripts that are in press or under editorial consideration elsewhere.

Submission of a paper implies that authors will make available samples of unique biological materials (including cell lines, DNA clones and antibodies) to academic workers who request them.

The description of experimental procedures must be rigorous. For example, the term 'room temperature' is to be avoided; actual temperature or temperature ranges must be reported. It is expected that authors will have validated the use of published experimental procedures for the specific use stated in the submitted manuscript. The description of experimental procedures must be of sufficient quality to comply with the principles of Good Laboratory Practice or the geographical equivalent.

Authors are encouraged to suggest a suitable member of the Editorial Board and up to five potential reviewers for their paper. Authors may also specify the names of those they wish to be excluded from the review process for a particular paper; in such cases their wishes will usually be respected, unless, of course, in the opinion of the journal such a request unreasonably excludes all the expertise available to it in that scientific area.

Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry follows a rigorous reviewing procedure, which, for each paper, requires written input from one member of the Editorial Board, one independent referee and, where appropriate, an Associate Editor. The Editorial Office, if required, receives advice before selecting the team of people involved in each paper and in each case the Editorial Office ensures that those involved in the process act independently and have no conflict of interest in the paper. In case of a complaint, the Editorial Office, if it is deemed necessary and appropriate, may ask for additional review(s) before making a recommendation. In all cases, the final decision rests with the Editor-in-Chief. The Editorial Board reserves the right to reject papers that are unsuitable for the journal or cannot adequately be assessed because of a poor standard of English.

Authorship

Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry endorses the Vancouver Guidelines on authorship as defined in the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors' (ICMJE) Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals, namely that entitlement to authorship should be based on all of the following criteria: (1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; (2) drafting the article or revising it for important intellectual content;(3) final approval of the version to be published. Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, alone, does not justify authorship. All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgements.

Copyright policy

Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry is published by Portland Press Ltd on behalf of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB), the sole owner of the journal; for purposes of convenience, the copyright is taken out in the name of the publisher, who reserves all rights and copyrights. Portland Press Ltd is the wholly owned subsidiary of the Biochemical Society. Portland Press Ltd, on behalf of the IUBMB, makes a high degree of investment in the scientific publication process. Therefore it is our practice, together with most other Learned Societies, to ask you to assign the copyright of your paper if it is accepted for publication. There are also a number of practical reasons for this: (i) our ownership of copyright will ensure maximum international protection against infringement, libel or plagiarism; (ii) it will enable us to deal efficiently with requests from third parties to reproduce or reprint the article, or part of it.

In assigning your copyright you will not be forfeiting your proprietary rights, including your patent rights. You may also do the following after obtaining our permission (which would not be withheld unreasonably) and provided that the Journal is acknowledged as the original source:

You need not seek permission from Portland Press Ltd to:

Please note: you are NOT permitted to post the Portland Press Ltd version of your article online.

Authors who are US Government employees, and whose works are therefore not subject to copyright protection, and employees whose works are subject to Crown copyright, will be asked to sign a non-exclusive licence. Full details will be provided on the Copyright Transfer Agreement that you will be asked to sign after your article is accepted for publication.

Opt2Pay
On acceptance authors may choose to pay a fee to make the final authoritative version (Stage 3) of their paper freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Licence. Portland Press will post all pre-paid articles on PubMed Central (PMC) on receipt of payment as a service to authors and permit their inclusion on PMC mirror sites. The Opt2Pay scheme allows authors to post the PDF version of the authoritative final version of record (Stage 3), for non-commercial purposes, on their own or institutional website or to free public servers in the relevant subject area, in whole or in part according to the terms of the licence, provided they include a link to the published article on the Journal's website and that the Journal and Portland Press are given the correct attributions. For more information, see Opt2Pay FAQs.

Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry Online (https://babonline.org)

Access to papers published in Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry Online in 2008 is restricted to institutions that have a subscription. To ensure that you have access, ask your subscribing librarian to contact . An electronic back archive is available to all users with an internet connection.

Immediate Publications

PDFs of manuscripts are mounted on the Journal's website as Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry Immediate Publications as soon as they are accepted, unless on submission the author has requested that this not be done. Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry Immediate Publications are listed in and accessible through Medline.

Medline links and inter-journal linking

Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry Online provides links to Medline citations, to related papers in Medline, to Medline citations for downloading to citation management software, and from references to the relevant abstracts in other online journals.

Multimedia adjuncts

Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry Online offers authors the opportunity to enhance their papers with multimedia adjuncts (e.g. time-lapse movies, three-dimensional structures). These will be submitted to peer review alongside the manuscript. To submit a paper with a multimedia adjunct, attach the file when you submit your manuscript online. Preferred formats are QuickTime for time-lapse movies and PDB for structures. There is no extra charge associated with the publication of a multimedia adjunct online.

Online submission of papers

Submission of a paper to Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry implies that it has been approved by all the named authors, that all persons entitled to authorship have been so named, that it reports unpublished work that is not under consideration for publication elsewhere in any language, that conflicts of interest are declared, that proper reference is made to the preceding literature and that if the paper is accepted for publication the authors will transfer to Portland Press the copyright of the paper, which will then not be published elsewhere in the same form, in any language, without the consent of Portland Press. Authors will be required to sign an undertaking to these effects.

Easy steps to submission as PDF

Step 1. Prepare the text in Microsoft Word 6.0 or a later version. Do not use Asian fonts as this will make your manuscript unreadable for reviewers. Use standard fonts such as Times or Times New Roman and symbol font for Greek and other special characters.

Step 2. Prepare graphics at publication quality resolution, using applications capable of generating high resolution TIFF or EPS files. Number each figure.

Step 3. Using Adobe Acrobat (see http://adobe.com/products/main.html for information), save your manuscript text and graphics in a single file in PDF format with one and a half line spacing. The PDF file should be printed and carefully reviewed before final submission. It is this version that is circulated on the Web for review. For detailed information on how to generate a PDF file go to https://babonline.org/bab/submitpdf.htm.

Step 4. After converting your manuscript text and figures to a single PDF file, carefully review a printed copy. Check file size (about 1 MB or less, but should not exceed 5 MB). If the file size exceeds 5 MB, please see https://babonline.org/bab/submitpdf.htm for suggestions.

Step 5. Submit the necessary information using the submission template at the web site https://babonline.org/submit/. You will need:

Submission not in PDF Format

If you cannot submit your manuscript as a PDF file, you may submit separate text and graphics files online. We will only accept the text of your manuscript as a Microsoft Word file created with MS Word 6.0 or a later version. Other word processing programs will not work for review. Do not use Asian fonts as this will make your manuscript unreadable for reviewers. Use standard fonts such as Times or Times New Roman and symbol font for Greek and other special characters.Do not embed figures in the text and be sure the number of the figure is visible in the figure. The MS Word and graphics files will be converted into a PDF file by the Editorial Office. However, you will be asked to approve the electronic version of the manuscript after the conversion to PDF. Carefully review a printed copy for changes in figures, formatting and symbols. A delay in review will occur if corrections are necessary because the manuscript must be resubmitted.

At this stage in the submission process we will accept graphics saved as TIFF, EPS, GIF, JPEG or BMP files. For graphics, we cannot accept certain application programs such as Microsoft Office (PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Access), Corel Perfect Office (WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, Presentations), Lotus SmartSuite (Freelance Graphics, 1-2-3, Approach, WordPro) and SigmaPlot. However, most of these applications will allow you to save graphics in one of the above formats.

Form of manuscript

Manuscripts should be written in clear, concise, and grammatically correct English; manuscripts that are inadequately prepared will be declined, since it is not feasible for the Editors to undertake extensive revision or rewriting of manuscripts. Editorial style should follow that recommended in the Instructions to Authors of the Biochemical Journal (see ). Nomenclature, abbreviations and symbols should wherever possible follow the recommendations of the Nomenclature Committee of IUBMB and the IUPAC-IUBMB Joint Commission on Biochemical Nomenclature (see http://www.chem.qmul.ac.uk/iubmb/). The International System of Units (SI; see Quantities, Units and Symbols in Physical Chemistry, 3rd edn, 2007, RSC Publishing, Cambridge) should be used; however, certain non-SI units (e.g. angstrom, minute) will continue to be accepted.

Page 1 should contain the article title, name(s) of author(s) (with first or second given name spelled out in full), affiliation(s), a short running title (abbreviated form of title) of less than 50 characters including spaces, and the name and complete mailing address (including telephone and fax numbers and e-mail address) of the person to whom correspondence should be sent.

Page 2 should contain a short synopsis of 50-250 words, and any footnotes to the text. On acceptance, authors will be offered the opportunity to provide a version of their synopsis in a language other than English, for publication alongside the English version. A list of up to six key words (in alphabetical order), of which at least three do not appear in the title of the paper, should form the first footnote, and a list of abbreviations used should form the second; neither of these two footnotes should bear a symbol. Other footnotes, identified by superscript arabic numerals, should be limited to dedications, an identification of the corresponding author and an author's present address.

The recommended organization of an article is: (i) synopsis, (ii) introduction, (iii) materials and methods (or experimental), (iv) results, (v) discussion, (vi) acknowledgements (e.g. of financial support) and (vii) references. Combination of certain of these sections (e.g. results and discussion) may make the presentation clearer.

Accepted papers

On acceptance authors will be requested to supply a Word file of the final version of their paper to the Editorial Office. Every effort will be made to use the Word file during typesetting, but this cannot be guaranteed. Authors must ensure that the file has been updated to incorporate all revisions, and hence that file matches the final version of the manuscript seen by the reviewers. Our preferred word-processing format is Word for Windows version 6. The Word file should be supplied in an e-mail specifying manuscript number, operating system and software program.

Text
Files should be formatted double-spaced with no hyphenation and automatic wordwrap (no hard returns within paragraphs). Please type your text consistently, e.g. take care to distinguish between '1' (one) and 'l' (lower-case L), and '0' (zero) and 'O' (capital O), etc.

Tables
Tables should be typed as text, using 'tabs'. The use of graphics programs and 'table editors' should be avoided.

Figures
No artwork should be incorporated into the text files. Figures should be supplied as electronic files. Full instructions will be provided on acceptance and guidance notes for the preparation of figures are available .

Mathematics
In-line equations should be typed as text. The use of graphics programs and 'equation editors' should be avoided. Displayed equations (unless prepared by the 'MathType Equation Editor') are re-keyed by our printer.


Addresses for correspondence

Experimental and publishing ethics

Experiments with animals should be performed in accordance with the legal requirements of the relevant local or national authority. Procedures should be such that experimental animals do not suffer unnecessarily. The text of papers should include details of the strain or stock of animal used, experimental procedures, and of anaesthetics used. Papers describing any experimental work with humans should include a statement that the research has been carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (2000) of the World Medical Association, that the Ethical Committee of the Institution in which the work was performed has approved it, and that the subjects have given informed consent to the work.

Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry is a member of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) and endorses its guidelines, which are available at http://www.publicationethics.org.uk. The journal also endorses the guidelines published by the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB; Code of Ethics). Complaints against the Journal must be submitted in writing to the Editor-in-Chief; if a complaint is not resolved to the satisfaction of the complainant they have the option of referring the matter to COPE. Notwithstanding, the Editorial Board will not accept papers where the ethical aspects are, in the Board’s opinion, open to doubt.

Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry will not tolerate plagiarism in submitted manuscripts. Passages quoted or closely paraphrased from other authors (or from the submitting author's own published work) must be identified as quotations or paraphrases, and the sources of the quoted or paraphrased material must be acknowledged. Use of unacknowledged sources will be construed as plagiarism. If any manuscript is found to contain plagiarized material the review process will be halted immediately.

Tables

Tables should be numbered with arabic numerals (Table 1, Table 2, etc.) and cited consecutively in the text. Each table should be titled. Units must be clearly indicated for each of the entries in the table. Footnotes to tables should be identified by superscript lower-case roman letters and placed at the bottom of the table.

Figures

Figures should be cited consecutively in the text by arabic numerals (Figure 1, Figure 2, etc.). The use of tints should be avoided. Lettering on the figures should be of a size that allows for eventual reduction of the figures. Authors will normally be required to pay for colour illustrations (at 2008 prices: £550 for the first figure and £300 for each subsequent figure; 17.5% VAT is payable by authors in the European Union).

Image acquisition and manipulation

Biotechnology and Applied Biochemistry endorses the guidelines given in the Instructions for Authors of the Journal of Cell Biology, from where the following is adapted by kind permission of Rockefeller University Press:

The following information must be provided about the acquisition and processing of images:

  1. Make and model of microscope
  2. Type, magnification, and numerical aperture of the objective lenses
  3. Temperature
  4. Imaging medium
  5. Fluorochromes
  6. Camera make and model
  7. Acquisition software
  8. Any subsequent software used for image processing, with details about types of operations involved (e.g. type of deconvolution, 3D reconstructions, surface or volume rendering, gamma adjustments, etc.).

No specific feature within an image may be enhanced, obscured, moved, removed or introduced. The grouping of images from different parts of the same gel, or from different gels, fields or exposures must be made explicit by the arrangement of the figure (i.e. using dividing lines) and in the text of the figure legend. Adjustments of brightness, contrast or colour balance are acceptable if they are applied to the whole image and as long as they do not obscure, eliminate or misrepresent any information present in the original, including backgrounds.The background of figures should be clearly distinct from the surrounding page. Non-linear adjustments (e.g. changes to gamma settings) must be disclosed in the figure legend.

Authors are encouraged to read the papers by and

References

References should be cited in the text by arabic numerals in square brackets (e.g. [1], [2,3], [4-7]) and listed at the end of the paper in numerical order. Names and initials of all authors and inclusive pagination should be provided. Abbreviations of journal titles should conform to those of Chemical Abstracts Service Source Index, 1999, and subsequent Quarterly Supplements. Please note the following examples for a journal article, a chapter in a multi-author book, and a single-author book, respectively:

1 Sarkar, S., Zhang, H., Levy, S. M., Hart, S. L., Hailes, H. C., Tabor, A. B. and Shamlou, P. A. (2003) Biotechnol. Appl. Biochem. 38, 95-102

2 Entwistle, N. (2003) in Excellence in Higher Education (De Corte, E., ed), pp. 83-96, Portland Press, London

3 Cornish-Bowden, A. (2004) Fundamentals of Enzyme Kinetics, 3rd edn, Portland Press Ltd, London

If an article has been accepted for publication but has not yet been published, the reference should appear as follows:

4 Kumar, S., Tuteja, U., Kumar, A. and Batra, H. V. (2008) Biotechnol. Appl, Biochem., in the press

A reference to 'unpublished work' should be accompanied by the names of all persons concerned; documentary evidence that any person cited as the source of a 'personal communication' has agreed to this citation must be provided; both of these types of citation are permitted in the text only, not in the list of references. The use of 'in preparation' or 'submitted for publication' is not permitted.

References are often the cause of many proof corrections, and inaccuracies hamper inter-journal linking and Medline links in the online journal. Please check the list carefully before submission.

WWW URLs are permitted in the text only, not in the reference list, and should be quoted only when a literature reference(s) will not suffice.

Proofs

Proofs will be sent to the authors by email as a PDF, together with an offprint order form. Authors will be charged for extensive alterations. To avoid delay in publication, corrected proofs should be faxed to the publisher within 48 hours of receipt.

Offprints

Offprints may be purchased at the prices given on the order form sent with the proofs.

Portland Press books

Authors, Editors and all contributors to Portland Press journals may order books published by Portland Press, for their personal use, at 25% discount. A complete list of books can be found at

© Portland Press, London 2008