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Journal of Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology
Editor-in-Chief
Eric Triplett
University of Florida
United States of America
University of Florida
United States of America
Aims & Scope
Journal of Molecular Engineering & Systems Biology is an Open Access Publication which aims to publish potential papers on Engineering (manufacturing) of molecules like Proteins, Nucleic Acids, Carbohydrates etc. and Complex Interactions in Biological Systems.
Scope of the journal includes but not limited to insight into molecular and cellular mechanisms which underlie the functions of molecules, cells and organisms. Design and Fabrication of Unnatural Biological Components, Novel Design of Natural and Synthetic parts for a Designed Function, Experimental and Computational Tools and Techniques used in Synthetic Biology, Experimental and Computational Studies that associate pathway and network contacts with behavior of Organelles, Cells, Tissues, Physiological Systems and Organisms, Pathway Ontology, Systems and Synthetic Biology Tools, Molecular Interaction Databases, Model Databases, New Experimental and Mathematical Methods important for Systems Biology etc.
About Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology
| Aims and scope | Open access | Article processing charges | Publication Standards | Accelerate of publication | Consistency | Submission of Manuscript | Indexing & services | Editorial Policies | Why publish your article in Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology?
This page includes information about the aims and scope of Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology, editorial policies, the peer-review process and other information. For details of how to prepare and submit a manuscript through the online submission system, please see the instructions for authors.
Aims and Scope
Journal of Molecular Engineering & Systems Biology is an Open Access Publication which aims to publish potential papers on Engineering (manufacturing) of molecules like Proteins, Nucleic Acids, Carbohydrates etc. and Complex Interactions in Biological Systems.
Scope of the journal includes but not limited to insight into molecular and cellular mechanisms which underlie the functions of molecules, cells and organisms. Design and Fabrication of Unnatural Biological Components, Novel Design of Natural and Synthetic parts for a Designed Function, Experimental and Computational Tools and Techniques used in Synthetic Biology, Experimental and Computational Studies that associate pathway and network contacts with behavior of Organelles, Cells, Tissues, Physiological Systems and Organisms, Pathway Ontology, Systems and Synthetic Biology Tools, Molecular Interaction Databases, Model Databases, New Experimental and Mathematical Methods important for Systems Biology etc.
JMESB Subject area :
• Bioinformatics
• Computational biology
• Functional genomics
• Metabolomics
• Proteomics
• Structural genomics
• Synthetic biology
• Theoretical biology
• Transcriptomics
Open –Access License
The Herbert Open Access Journals (HOAJ) applies the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) to all works we publish (read the human-readable summary or the full license legal code). Under the CCAL, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their article, but authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in HOAJ, so long as the original authors and source are cited.
No permission is required from the authors or the publishers.
In most cases, appropriate attribution can be provided by simply citing the original article. If the item you plan to reuse is not part of a published article, then please indicate the originator of the work, and the volume, issue, and date of the journal in which the item appeared. For any reuse or redistribution of a work, you must also make clear the license terms under which the work was published.
This broad license was developed to facilitate open access to, and free use of, original works of all types. Applying this standard license to your own work will ensure your right to make your work freely and openly available. Learn more about open access. For queries about the license, please contact us.
Article-processing charges
To provide open access, Herbert Open Access Journals use a business model in which our expenses—including those of peer review, journal production, and online hosting and archiving—are recovered in part by charging a publication fee to the authors or research sponsors for each article they publish. For Molecular Engineering & Systems Biology the publication fee is £1079/US$1575/€1211.
We offer a complete or partial fee waiver for authors who do not have funds to cover publication fees. Editors and reviewers have no access to payment information, and hence inability to pay will not influence the decision to publish a paper.
For further information, Please contact us.
Publication Standards
To be appropriate for Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology, articles need to be of outstanding quality, broad interest and special importance. This will be determined by peer review and by the advice of a member of the editorial board or somebody of equivalent standing. There are no restrictions on the length of an article, but authors should bear in mind that excessive length deters potential readers.
Articles that are sound but only of importance to those with closely related interests will not be considered for publication, but should this only become apparent after peer review; the authors may be offered publication in the most appropriate subject-specific HOAJ series journals.
Accelerate of publication
Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology offers a very fast publication schedule while maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files). Articles will be published electronically in manuscript form immediately upon acceptance. A fully structured web version, and accompanying laid out PDF, will be published within a few weeks of acceptance.
Consistency
As an electronic-only journal, Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology offers authors the opportunity to publish large data sets, large numbers of illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links.
Submission of Manuscripts
Manuscripts must be submitted to Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology electronically using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.
Indexing and archiving
Following publication in Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology, the full-text of each article is deposited immediately and permanently archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine’s full text repository of life science literature.
Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology is indexed/tracked/covered by PubMed, MEDLINE, Scopus, Current Contents, Google Scholar and DOAJ.
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. 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 Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology retain copyright to their work.
Submission of a manuscript to Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology implies that all authors have read and agreed to its content, and that any experimental research that is reported in the manuscript has been performed with the approval of an appropriate ethics committee. Research carried out on humans must be in compliance with the Helsinki Declaration, and any experimental research on animals must follow internationally recognized guidelines. A statement to this effect must appear in the Methods section of the manuscript, including the name of the body which gave approval, with a reference number where appropriate. Informed consent must also be documented. Manuscripts may be rejected if the editorial office considers that the research has not been carried out within an ethical framework.
Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology publisher, HOAJ, has a legal responsibility to ensure that its journals do not publish material that infringes copyright, or that includes libelous or defamatory content. If, on review, your manuscript is perceived to contain potentially libelous content the journal Editors, with assistance from the publisher if required, will work with authors to ensure an appropriate outcome is reached.
Generic drug names should generally be used. When proprietary brands are used in research, include the brand names in parentheses in the Methods section.
Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology supports initiatives to improve the performance and reporting of clinical trials, part of which includes prospective registering and numbering of trials. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) defines a clinical trial as any research study that prospectively assigns human subjects to one or more health related interventions to evaluate the effects on health outcomes. Authors of protocols or reports of such clinical trials, where the primary purpose of the research is to understand the causes, development and effects of disease, or to improve preventative, diagnostic or therapeutic interventions, must register their trial prior to submission in a suitable publicly accessible registry. Registries which meet the requirements of the ICMJE include WHO Primary Registries.
Authors from pharmaceutical companies, or other commercial organizations that sponsor clinical trials, should adhere to the Good Publication Practice guidelines for pharmaceutical companies, which are designed to ensure that publications are produced in a responsible and ethical manner. The guidelines also apply to any companies or individuals that work on industry-sponsored publications, such as freelance writers, contract research organizations and communications companies.
The involvement of medical writers or anyone else who assisted with the preparation of the manuscript content should be acknowledged, along with their source of funding, as described in the European Medical Writers Association (EMWA) guidelines on the role of medical writers in developing peer-reviewed publications. If medical writers are not listed among the authors, it is important that their role be acknowledged explicitly.
Any 'in press' articles cited within the references and necessary for the reviewers' assessment of the manuscript should be made available if requested by the editorial office.
Submission of a manuscript to Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology implies that readily reproducible materials described in the manuscript, including all relevant raw data, will be freely available to any scientist wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes. Nucleic acid sequences, protein sequences, and atomic coordinates should be deposited in an appropriate database in time for the accession number to be included in the published article. In computational studies where the sequence information is unacceptable for inclusion in databases because of lack of experimental validation, the sequences must be published as an additional file with the article.
Nucleotide sequences
DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ)
European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL/EBI) Nucleotide Sequence Database
GenBank (National Center for Biotechnology Information)
Protein sequences
SwissProt
Protein Information Resource (PIR)
Structures
Worldwide Protein Data Bank
Nucleic Acid Database
Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre
Chemical structures and assays
PubChem Substance
PubChem BioAssay
Microarray data
Microarray Gene Expression Data Society
ArrayExpress
Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO)
Center for Information Biology Gene Expression Database (CIBEX)
Computational modeling
Systems Biology Markup Language
BioModels database
Plasmids
Why publish your article in Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology?
High visibility
Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology open access policy allows maximum visibility of articles published in the journal as they are available to a wide, global audience. Articles that have been especially highly accessed are highlighted with a 'Highly accessed' graphic, which appears on the journal's contents pages and search results.
Speed of publication
Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology offers a fast publication schedule whilst maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files). Articles are published with their final citation immediately upon acceptance in a provisional PDF form. The article will subsequently be published in both fully browsable web form, and as a formatted PDF; the article will then be available through Anesthesialogy and Clinical Research.
Consistency
Online publication in Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology gives authors the opportunity to publish large datasets, large numbers of color illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links.
Copyright
Authors of articles published in EMolecular Engineering and Systems Biology retain the copyright of their articles and are free to reproduce and disseminate their work.
For further information about the advantages of publishing in a journal from Herbert Publications, please contact us.
Contacting Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology
Queries about content, submissions, or the review process should be directed to editorial@hoajonline.com. All other enquiries should be directed to info@hoajonline.com.
Issue will be released soon
Instructions for authors - Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology
General information
Preparing main manuscript text
Preparing illustrations and figures
Preparing tables
Preparing additional files
Style and language
General information
Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology publishes articles on all aspects of potential papers on Engineering (manufacturing) of molecules like Proteins, Nucleic Acids, Carbohydrates etc. and Complex Intaractions in Biological Systems.
Each article type published by Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology follows a specific format, as detailed in the corresponding instructions for authors; please choose an article type from the below list to view the instructions for authors.
The instructions for authors include information about preparing a manuscript for submission to Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology, criteria for publication and the online submission process. Other relevant information about the journal's policies, the refereeing process and so on can be found in 'About this journal '.
Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology publishes the following article types:
Research
Book review
Case report
Hypothesis
Methodology
Review
Short report
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, Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology accepts only online submission.
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 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@hoajonline.com).
File formats :
The following word processor file formats are acceptable for the main manuscript document:
-
- Microsoft Word (97,2003)
- Rich text format (RTF)
- Portable document format (PDF)
- TeX/LaTeX
Preparing main manuscript text
Manuscripts for Research, Book review, Case report, Hypothesis, Methodology, Review, Short report articles submitted to Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology should be divided into the following sections:
-
- Title page
- Abstract
- Background
- Methods
- Results
- Discussion
- Conclusions
- List of abbreviations used (if any)
- Competing interests
- Authors' contributions
- Authors' information (if any)
- Acknowledgements and Funding
- References
- Figure legends (if any)
- Tables and captions (if any)
- Description of additional data files (if any)
You can download a template (compatible with Mac and Windows Word 97/98/2000/2003) for your article.
Title page
This should list the title of the article. The title should include the study design, for example:
A versus B in the treatment of C: a randomized controlled trial
X is a risk factor for Y: a case control study
The full names, institutional addresses, and e-mail addresses for all authors must be included on the title page. The corresponding author should also be indicated.
Abstract
The abstract of the manuscript should not exceed 350 words and must be structured into separate sections: Background, the context and purpose of the study; Methods, how the study was performed and statistical tests used; Results, the main findings; Conclusions, brief summary and potential implications. Please minimize the use of abbreviations and do not cite references in the abstract; Trial registration, if your research article reports the results of a controlled health care intervention, please list your trial registry, along with the unique identifying number, e.g. Trial registration: Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN61362816. Please note that there should be no space between the letters and numbers of your trial registration number.
Background
The background section should be written from the direction of researchers without specialist knowledge in that area and must clearly state - and, if helpful, illustrate - the background to the research and its aims. Reports of clinical research should, where appropriate, include a summary of a search of the literature to indicate why this study was necessary and what it aimed to contribute to the field. The section should end with a very brief statement of what is being reported in the article.
Methods
This should include the design of the study, the setting, the type of participants or materials involved, a clear description of all directions and comparisons, and the type of classifications used, including a power calculation if appropriate.
Results and Discussion
The Results and Discussion may be combined into a single section or presented separately. Results of statistical analysis should include, where appropriate, relative and absolute risks or risk decline, and confidence intervals. The results and discussion sections may also be broken into subsections with short, informative headings.
Conclusions
This should state clearly the main conclusions of the research and give a clear explanation of their importance and pertinence. Summary illustrations may be included.
List of abbreviations
If abbreviations are used in the text, either they should be defined in the text where first used, or a list of abbreviations can be provided, which should precede the competing interests and authors' contributions.
Competing interests
A competing interest exists when your understanding of data or presentation of information may be influenced by your personal or financial relationship with other people or organizations. Authors should reveal any financial competing interests but also any non-financial competing interests that may cause them embarrassment were they to become public after the publication of the manuscript.
Authors are required to complete knowledge of competing interests. All competing interests that are declared will be listed at the end of published articles. Where an author gives no competing interests, the listing will read 'The author(s) declare that they have no competing interests'.
When completing your declaration, please consider the following questions:
Financial competing interests
- In the past five years have you received reimbursements, fees, funding, or salary from an organization that may in any way gain or lose financially from the publication of this manuscript, either now or in the future? Is such an organization financing this manuscript (including the article-processing charge)? If so, please specify.
- Do you hold any stocks or shares in an organization that may in any way gain or lose financially from the publication of this manuscript, either now or in the future? If so, please specify.
- Do you hold or are you currently applying for any patents relating to the content of the manuscript? Have you received reimbursements, fees, funding, or salary from an organization that holds or has applied for patents relating to the content of the manuscript? If so, please specify.
- Do you have any other financial competing interests? If so, please specify.
Non-financial competing interests
Are there any non-financial competing interests (political, personal, religious, ideological, academic, intellectual, commercial or any other) to declare in relation to this manuscript? If so, please specify.
If you are unsure as to whether you or one of your co-authors has a competing interest, please discuss it with the editorial office.
Authors' contributions
In order to give appropriate credit to each author of a paper, the individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section.
An "author" is generally considered to be someone who has made substantive intellectual contributions to a published study. To qualify as an author one should 1) have made substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) have been involved in drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) have given final approval of the version to be published. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content. Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, alone, does not justify authorship.
We suggest the following kind of format (please use initials to refer to each author's contribution): AB carried out the molecular genetic studies, participated in the sequence alignment and drafted the manuscript. JY carried out the immunoassays. MT participated in the sequence alignment. ES participated in the design of the study and performed the statistical analysis. FG conceived of the study, and participated in its design and coordination and helped to draft the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an acknowledgements section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chair who provided only general support.
Authors' information
You may choose to use this section to include any relevant information about the author(s) that may aid the reader’s interpretation of the article, and understand the standpoint of the author(s). This may include details about the authors' qualifications, current positions they hold at institutions or societies, or any other relevant background information. Please refer to authors using their initials. Note this section should not be used to describe any competing interests.
Acknowledgements and Funding
Please acknowledge anyone who contributed towards the study by making substantial contributions to conception, design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data, or who was involved in drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content, but who does not meet the criteria for authorship. Please also include their source(s) of funding. Please also acknowledge anyone who contributed materials essential for the study.
The role of a medical writer must be included in the acknowledgements section, including their source(s) of funding.
Authors should obtain permission to acknowledge from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgements.
Please list the source(s) of funding for the study, for each author, and for the manuscript preparation in the acknowledgements section. Authors must describe the role of the funding body, if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; and in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.
References
All references must be numbered consecutively, in square brackets, in the order in which they are cited in the text, followed by any in tables or legends. Reference citations should not appear in titles or headings. Each reference must have an individual reference number. Please avoid excessive referencing. If automatic numbering systems are used, the reference numbers must be finalized and the bibliography must be fully formatted before submission.
Only articles and abstracts that have been published or are in press, or are available through public e-print/preprint servers, may be cited; unpublished abstracts, unpublished data and personal communications should not be included in the reference list, but may be included in the text and referred to as "unpublished data", "unpublished observations", or "personal communications" giving the names of the involved researchers. Notes/footnotes are not allowed. Obtaining permission to quote personal communications and unpublished data from the cited author(s) is the responsibility of the author. Journal abbreviations follow Index Medicus/MEDLINE. Citations in the reference list should contain all named authors, regardless of how many there are.
Links
Web links and URLs should be included in the reference list. They should be provided in full, including both the title of the site and the URL, in the following format: The Mouse Tumor Biology Database [http://tumor.informatics.jax.org/mtbwi/index.do]. If an author or group of authors can clearly be associated with a web link, such as for weblogs, then they should be included in the reference.
Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology reference style
References
Only published or accepted manuscripts should be included in the reference list. Meetings abstracts, conference talks, or papers that have been submitted but not yet accepted should not be cited. All personal communications should be supported by a letter from the relevant authors.
Herbert Open Access Journals uses the numbered citation (citation-sequence) method. References are listed and numbered in the order that they appear in the text. In the text, citations should be indicated by the reference number in brackets. Multiple citations within a single set of brackets should be separated by commas. Where there are three or more sequential citations, they should be given as a range. Example: "... now enable biologists to simultaneously monitor the expression of thousands of genes in a single experiment [1, 5-7, 28]." Make sure the parts of the manuscript are in the correct order for the relevant journal before ordering the citations. Figure captions and tables should be at the end of the manuscript.
Authors are requested to provide at least one online link for each reference as following (preferably PubMed).
Because all references will be linked electronically as much as possible to the papers they cite, proper formatting of the references is crucial. Please use the following style for the reference list:Examples:
Published Papers
- Laemmli UK (1970) Cleavage of structural proteins during the assembly of the head of bacteriophage T4. Nature 227: 680-685.
- Brusic V, Rudy G, Honeyman G, Hammer J, Harrison L (1998) Prediction of MHC class II- binding peptides using an evolutionary algorithm and artifi cial neural network. Bioinformatics 14: 121-130.
- Doroshenko V, Airich L, Vitushkina M, Kolokolova A, Livshits V, et al. (2007) YddG from Escherichia coli promotes export of aromatic amino acids. FEMS Microbiol Lett 275: 312-318.
Note: Please list the first five authors and then add "et al." if there are additional authors.
Electronic Journal Articles Entrees Programming Utilities
http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query/static/eutils_help.html
Microsoft Word template
Although we can accept manuscripts prepared as Microsoft Word, RTF or PDF files, we have designed a Microsoft Word template that can be used to generate a standard style and format for your article. It can be used if you have not yet started to write your paper, or if it is already written and needs to be put into Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology style.
Download the template (Mac and Windows compatible Word 1998/2000) from our site, and save it to your hard drive. Double click the template to open it.
Preparing illustrations and figures
Figures should be provided as separate files. Each figure should comprise only a single file. There is no charge for the use of color.
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 legends
The legends should be included in the main manuscript text file rather than being a part of the figure file. For each figure, the following information should be provided: 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.
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 document text file. 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 Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology 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, at the end of the document text file:
-
- 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'.
Additional file formats
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).
Style and language
General
Currently, Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology can only accept manuscripts written in English. Spelling should be US English or British English, but not a mixture.
Gene names should be in italic, but protein products should be in plain type.
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 and tables should be sequentially referenced. Authors should include all relevant supporting data with each article.
Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology 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.
Abbreviations
Abbreviations should be used as sparingly as possible. They can be defined when first used or a list of abbreviations can be provided preceding the acknowledgements and references.
For any quiries please contact us.
Publication and Peer-review Process
Criteria for Publication
Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology considers the following types of articles:
- Research - reports of data from original research.
- Theory - short articles presenting an untested original theory backed solely by previously published results rather than any new evidence.
- Methodology articles - present a new experimental method, test or procedure. The method described may either be completely new, or may offer a better version of an existing method. The article must describe a demonstrable advance on what is currently available.
- Reviews - comprehensive, authoritative descriptions of any subject within the journal's scope. These are usually written by opinion leaders invited by the Editorial Board.
- Short reports - brief reports of data from original research.
Peer-review Policy
All manuscripts submitted to Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology will be peer reviewed. Each manuscript will be sent to the appropriate Section Editor who in turn will assign 3 reviewers (other members of the Editorial Board or outside experts) with the stipulation that the review must be submitted within 2 weeks. Once two concordant reviews are received, the Section Editor will make a decision, even if the third review has not been received. In the case of conflicting reviews, the Section Editor will have the prerogative on making a decision. In general, if two of three reviews are favorable, the manuscript will be accepted. However, if two are not favorable it will be declined. Any properly challenged decision will be given due consideration by the Section Editor and the Editor-in-Chief.
Portability of Peer-review
In order to support efficient and thorough peer review, we aim to reduce the number of times a manuscript is re-reviewed after rejection from Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology, thereby speeding up the publication process and reducing the burden on peer reviewers. Therefore, please note that, if a manuscript is not accepted for publication in Molecular Engineering and Systems Biology and the authors choose to submit a revised version to another Herbert Open Access Journals, we will pass the reviews on to the other journal's editors at the authors' request. We will reveal the reviewers' names to the handling editor for editorial purposes unless reviewers let us know when they return their report that they do not wish us to share their report with another Herbert Open Access Journals.