General information for jHASE authors

Prospective authors are advised to also read About this journal, which includes other relevant information.

Submission process

To facilitate rapid publication and to minimize administrative costs, jHASE  currently accepts submissions through the online journal system (OJS) with attachments of article text and figures/illustrations formatted according to additional instructions for authors provided in this document for each article type. 

Publication and peer review processes

Unless they are outside the scope for the journal or are of an unacceptably low standard of presentation, submitted articles will be sent to peer reviewers. They will generally be reviewed by 2-3 subject experts with the aim of reaching a first decision as soon as possible. Section Editors are assisted by peer-review fellows with consolidation of reviewer reports or with any additional literature reference work that may be needed. Statistical reviewers are also used where required, as determined by the Section Editor. Reviewers are asked to declare any competing interests and have to agree to open peer review, which works on two levels: the authors receive the signed report and, if the manuscript is published, the same report is available to the readers. The pre-publication history (initial submission, reviews and revisions - see, for example, pre-publication history) may be posted on the web with the published article or made available on request.

To expedite publication and reduce costs of developing a large pool of relevant peer reviewers, jHASE requires that all authors provide the contact details (including e-mail addresses) of at least four to five (4-5) potential peer reviewers for their manuscript. These should be knowledgeable on the topic of the manuscript submitted as they need to be able to provide an objective assessment of the manuscript. Any suggested peer reviewers should not have published with any of the authors of the manuscript within the past five years and should not be members of the same research institution. Members of the Advisory Editorial Board can be nominated, except Editor(s)-in-Chief, Associate/Senior Editors, Section Editors, and Managing Editors of the journal. Suggested reviewers will be considered alongside potential reviewers identified by their publication record or recommended by Editorial Board members. To leave this page and read more information on requirements for qualifications and experience of peer reviewers for jHASE publications, click here.

Reviewers are asked whether the manuscript is scientifically sound and coherent, how interesting it is and whether the quality of the writing is acceptable. Where possible, the final decision is made on the basis that the peer reviewers are in accordance with one another, or that at least there is no strong dissenting view. In cases where there is strong disagreement either among peer reviewers or between the authors and peer reviewers, advice is sought from a panel of senior members of the journal's Editorial Board. The journal allows a maximum of two revisions of any manuscripts. The ultimate responsibility for any peer review decision lies with the Editors-in-Chief.

Reviewers are also asked to indicate which articles they consider to be especially interesting or significant. These articles may be given greater prominence and greater external publicity.

Once an article is accepted, it is published in jHASE immediately as a provisional PDF file. The paper will be subsequently  published in both fully browseable web form, and as a formatted PDF; the article will then be available through jHASE (published by IEPH, Inc.) and indexed and archived in the World Health Organization(WHO)-sponsored African Index Medicus(AIM) and searchable through Google Scholar Search for AIM . jHASE expects to have it's AIM-indexed publications to be retroactively cross-indexed in Pubmed Medline after about 12 months of publication track-record, which is what's typically required to qualify for Medline indexing. Following publication in jHASE, the full text of each article is immediately and permanently archived in IEPH's literature repository (pending archiving in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature and indexing in MEDLINE).

At this time, authors may track the progress of their paper at any time by logging in to the jHASE online journal system (OJS).

Article-processing charges

To ensure that all worthy and accepted manuscripts can be published in jHASE regardless of the authors' ability to pay, jHASE routinely waives article-processing charges for qualifying authors . For further details, please see more information about article-processing charges.

Supplemental editorial policies

Any manuscript submitted to the journal must not already have been published in another journal or be under consideration by any other journal, although it may have been deposited on a preprint server. Manuscripts that are derived from papers presented at conferences can be submitted unless they have been published as part of the conference proceedings in a peer reviewed journal. 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 jHASE retain copyright to their work (more information on license). Correspondence concerning articles published in jHASE is encouraged.

Submission of a manuscript to jHASE implies that all authors have read and agreed to its content, and that any experimental research on humans or animals that is reported in the manuscript has been performed with the approval of an appropriate ethics committee, and is in compliance with the Helsinki Declaration. A statement to this effect must be included in the Methods section of the manuscript. Generic drug names should generally be used. When proprietary brands are used in research, include the brand names in parentheses in the Methods section.

We ask authors of jHASE papers to complete a declaration of competing interests, which should be provided as a separate section of the manuscript, to follow the Acknowledgements. Where an author gives no competing interests, the listing will read 'The author(s) declare that they have no competing interests'. Much has been written about competing interests (or conflict of interest, as other journals call it) within scientific research, but the following articles provide some background:

R Smith: Beyond conflict of interest. BMJ 1998, 317:291-292

R Smith: Making progress with competing interests. BMJ 2002, 325:1375-1376

CD DeAngelis, PB Fontanarosa, A Flanagin: Reporting financial conflicts of interest and relationships between investigators and research sponsors. JAMA 2001, 286:89-9

K Morin, H Rakatansky, FA Riddick Jr, LJ Morse, JM O'Bannon 3rd, MS Goldrich, P Ray, M Weiss, RM Sade, MA Spillman: Managing conflicts of interest in the conduct of clinical trials. JAMA 2002, 287:78-84

For all articles that include information or clinical photographs relating to individual patients, written and signed consent from each patient to publish must also be mailed or faxed to the editorial staff. The manuscript should also include a statement to this effect in the Acknowledgements section, as follows: "Written consent was obtained from the patient or their relative for publication of study".

jHASE and its publisher, IEPH, Inc., support initiatives to improve the performance and reporting of clinical trials, part of which includes prospective registering and numbering of trials. While there are initiatives to ensure that all clinical trials are registered (most notably the recent statement from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors - see http://www.icmje.org/clin_trial.pdf), we are focussing on randomised controlled trials, for now. Authors of protocols or reports of randomised controlled trials must register their trial prior to submission in a publicly accessible registry. The trial registration number must be included in the title of the manuscript. One such number is the International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number (ISRCTN), which can be obtained by completing an online application form http://www.controlled-trials.com/isrctn/submission/.

jHASE and its publisher, IEPH, Inc., also support initiatives aimed at improving the reporting of biomedical research. Checklists have been developed for randomized controlled trials (CONSORT), systematic reviews (QUORUM), and meta-analyses of observational studies (MOOSE). Authors are requested to make use of these when drafting their manuscript and peer reviewers will also be asked to refer to these checklists when evaluating these studies. For authors of systematic reviews, a supplementary file, linked from the Methods section, should reproduce all details concerning the search strategy. For an example of how a search strategy should be presented, see the Cochrane Reviewers' Handbook.

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.

Submission of a manuscript to jHASE implies that readily reproducible materials described in the manuscript 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. Where appropriate, authors should adhere to the standards proposed by the Microarray Gene Expression Data Society (http://www.mged.org) and must deposit microarray data in one of the public repositories, such as ArrayExpress (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/arrayexpress), Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/geo/) or the Center for Information Biology Gene Expression Database (CIBEX; http://cibex.nig.ac.jp).

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.

The publisher of jHASE, IEPH, Inc., subscribes to the guidelines and code of conduct of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE); for more information, visit www.publicationethics.org.uk

Preparing main manuscript text for jHASE article submissions

File formats

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

• Microsoft Word (version 2 and above, compatible with Word 2000 - 2003)
• WordPerfect (version 5 and higher versions compatible with Word 2000 - 2003)
• Rich text format (RTF)

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.

PLEASE NOTE: Figures must be submitted as separate image files, not as part of the submitted DOC/RTF/PDF file.

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 a Research article, the structure for which is described below.

Preparing illustrations and figures

In addition to inserting/embedding illustrations in the text file of the Word template of the submission manuscript at the appropriate locations indicated in the template, illustrations should ALSO be provided and uploaded as separate files using formats described below. This means that each figure should include a single composite illustration, which should be a separate graphics file inserted into the text and also provided as a separate file in formats described below. There is no charge for the use of color figures. Each figure should be closely cropped to minimize the amount of white space surrounding the illustration.

PLEASE NOTE: As described above, if a figure consists of separate parts, it is important that a single composite illustration file be submitted which contains all parts of the figure.

Photographs should be provided with a scale bar if appropriate, as well as high-resolution component files. If photographs of patients' body parts, X-rays or scans are given as part of the manuscript, written and signed consent of the patient should also be scanned and e-mailed or faxed to the editors.

Scaling/resolution

Illustrations should be designed such that all information is legible when scaled to a horizontal width of 600 pixels, since this is the default size for a jHASE illustration on the web. High-quality versions of figures will also be generated and stored by jHASE, however, so image files should be submitted at a resolution of 300 dpi or greater if possible.

Text within figures should use either Arial or Helvetica fonts, although Courier may also be used if a monospaced font is required. Text too should be designed to be legible when the illustration is scaled to a width of 600 pixels.

Formats

The following file formats can be accepted for the separate files of figures/illustrations submitted:

• Insert figures into Microsoft Word files (version 5 and above up to 2003; figures must be A4 portrait, and not exceed a single page ); figures may be inserted within the Word template of the submission article or in a separate Word document;
• Insert figures into PowerPoint files, compatible with versions 2000 - 2003) (figures must be a single page);
• PDF (especially suitable for diagrams);
• Other formats which may be considered (depending on quality of figures submitted, poor quality figures may be returned for resubmission in better formats):
  • JPEG (only if saved at High or Maximum quality);
  • TIFF
  • BMP
  • GIF (least preferred)

If the large size of TIFF or BMP figures is an obstacle to e-mail/online submission, authors may find that conversion to JPEG format before submission results in significantly reduced file size (and e-mail/online upload time), while retaining acceptable quality. JPEG is a 'lossy' format, however. In order to maintain acceptable image quality, it is recommended that JPEG files are saved at High or Maximum quality.

There is not likely to be much gain in reducing file size from use of file compression tools such as Zipit or Stuffit prior to submission. These tools will in any case produce negligible file-size savings for JPEGs and TIFFs, which are already compressed.

Image conversion tools

There are many software packages, many of them freeware or shareware, capable of converting to and from different graphics formats, including PNG.

Good general tools for image conversion include GraphicConverter on the Macintosh, PaintShop Pro, for Windows, and ImageMagick, which is available on Macintosh, Windows and UNIX platforms.

About EPS format: Note that bitmap images (e.g. screenshots) should not be converted to EPS since this will result in a much larger file size than the equivalent JPEG, TIFF, PNG or BMP, with no increase in quality. EPS should only be used for images produced by vector drawing applications such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw. In all instances, vector drawing application images and EPS formats must be converted and submitted in PDF format and not EPS format.

About images originally prepared in an Office application, such as Word or PowerPoint, then the Office files should be submitted in this Office application, rather than converted to JPEG or another format that may be of reduced quality.

Figure legends

The figure legends should be included in the main manuscript text, immediately following the references, rather than being a part of the figure file. The following information should be provided, for each figure: 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: 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

As described above under the section on illustrations, in addition to inserting tables in the text file of the Word template of the submission manuscript at the appropriate locations indicated in the template, tables should ALSO be provided and uploaded as separate files as described herein. 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.

As is applicable to all tables, smaller tables considered to be integral to the manuscript must also be pasted into the document text file in portrait format in the text file of the Word template of the submission manuscript at the appropriate locations for tables and figures indicated in the template. If the manuscript is accepted, jHASE will also typeset and display such tables 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, and therefore, tabbed tables will not be accepted. Columns and rows of data should be made visibly distinct by ensuring the borders of each cell display as black lines. Commas should not be used to indicate numerical values. Color and shading should not be used in tables.

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 datasets provided as additional files can be uploaded as an Excel spreadsheet compatible with Excel 2000 - 2003 (.xls) or comma separated values (.csv). As with all files, please use the standard file extensions.

Preparing additional files

Although jHASE 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 10 MB, and files will be virus-scanned on submission. If additional files exceed 5 MB, authors are kindly requested to Zip the additional files (without password protection) and send the Zip file containing the additional files as an attachment to e-mail.

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).

Style and language

General

Currently, jHASE 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 also no restriction on the number of figures, tables or additional files that can be included with each article online. Figure and tables should be sequentially referenced. Authors should include all relevant supporting data with each article.

jHASE 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 such as that provided by Biology Editors, Manuscript Presentation Service, International Science Editing and English Manager Science Editing. jHASE has no first-hand experience of these companies and takes no responsibility for the quality of their service.

Help and advice on scientific writing

MedBioWorld also provides a list of resources for science writing. Tim Albert has produced for BioMed Central a list of tips for writing a scientific manuscript. 

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.

• 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.
• All pages should be numbered and page numbering must be centered and located in the footer of the document.
• Use the jHASE 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.

Units

SI Units should be used throughout (litre and molar are permitted, however).

Last revised: 4 April 2009