Guide for authors
What to send, and what happens to it.
Submission is through the journal desk, which you reach from your member portal. There is no fee at any stage, and nothing you send is read by anybody outside the editorial process.
Before you submit
Who may submit
Anybody with an account. You do not have to be a member of Centre for Immunology, Genetics, and Systems Biology: from the desk you can take the Corresponding Author standing, which gives you a CISBM number to put on correspondence. It carries no progression level, no vote, and no right to name CISBM as an affiliation.
Co-authors need not have accounts at all. Nobody's standing at the Centre has any bearing on whether a paper is accepted: the reviewers do not know who wrote it.
The manuscript
One file, in PDF or Word. Any readable structure is accepted, because the journal imposes a house template only on a paper it has agreed to publish. Figures may be embedded for review; originals are asked for after acceptance.
The blinded copy
A second file with the authors, their affiliations, their acknowledgements and anything else that names them removed. This is what the reviewers read.
The desk will not accept a submission without one. It is the single requirement that makes double-blind review real rather than claimed: if the only copy in the system carries the authors' names, somebody will eventually see them.
Abstract and keywords
An abstract of up to 300 words, unstructured unless your field expects otherwise, and between three and eight keywords. Both are typed into the desk rather than taken from the file, because both are published as metadata and have to be exact.
Statements
Funding, competing interests and data availability. Say "none" where there are none; a blank is not an answer, and an article page prints what you wrote.
Authorship
Everyone listed has contributed to the work and can defend it; anyone who has contributed is listed. Adding a name as a courtesy, or leaving one off, is a matter the Centre treats under A11 of its terms rather than a formatting question.
The corresponding author is answerable for the submission and is the only person the journal writes to. Changes to the author list after submission are made by the editor, on the corresponding author's written request, with every author copied.
Language models
You may use one. Say so, in the statements, naming which and for what: drafting, translation, code, analysis. A model is not an author: it cannot take responsibility, and authorship is responsibility.
Text that a model produced and that nobody has checked is the thing this journal will not publish. The authors answer for every sentence, however it was first written.
After you submit
You will be told
Your manuscript gets a reference the moment it is submitted, and its state is on your desk page at every step: with the editor, under review, decided.
You will see the reviews
In full, as the reviewers wrote them for you. Their names stay with the editor, as do the comments written to the editor alone, which exist so that a reviewer can be candid.
You may withdraw
At any time before a decision, from your own desk, with a reason. A withdrawn manuscript keeps its reference and is never published.
An accepted paper is published in full on this site, placed in a section and an issue, and carries citation metadata from the day it appears. Where the Centre holds a Crossref membership a DOI is registered and printed; where it does not, the article's reference is its permanent identifier and the article page says so rather than leaving a blank.
What it costs you
Nothing to submit, and nothing to read. A member of the Centre publishes free. A corresponding author who is not a member pays £50 once, on acceptance; there is no page charge, no colour charge and no charge of any kind to your readers. Membership is itself free and open to apply for, which makes that fee avoidable rather than a toll.