Bar of a microPublication

microPublication Biology publishes these Article types:

• New finding - novel discoveries, new reagents and/or methods
• Null/negative result
• Replication - successful (including being scooped)
• Replication - unsuccessful
• Materials and Reagents
• Methodology
• Data updates

Acceptance of a manuscript is independent of the perceived impact.
Submissions to microPublication Biology must have the equivalent scientific rigor and clear, scholarly written text as that of articles in other well-respected, peer-reviewed journals (Current Biology, Development, Evolution, Genetics, MBoC, Molecular Ecology, PLoS Biology, and others) but within the context of our publishing model - a single figure and short format text.
Submissions that do not meet this standard will be returned to the authors without peer review or rejected following review.

During the submission process, authors will be asked to indicate one or more of the seven Article types above. The submission text must be consistent with the Article type.

Articles with undergraduate authors must meet the same peer review standards as any other article in microPublication Biology. The faculty mentor has an essential role in the process, including design and execution of the study, adherence to scientific rigor, appropriate statistical analysis (if relevant), presentation of the data, and clear scholarly written text. The faculty mentor must either be the senior author on the manuscript or provide a written letter attesting that the manuscript meets the standard described here.

Authorship

microPublication Biology follows the authorship guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). All authors share responsibility for the content of the microPublication. Authorship should be limited to those persons that performed the experiment, any analysis, and or write-up. Submitting authors are required to assign authorship contributions using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) to provide transparency to the contributions of researchers to scholarly published work, to enable discoverability and to improve attribution, credit, and accountability.

Individuals who do not satisfy authorship guidelines but participated materially in the work, should be included in the acknowledgement section.

The Principal Investigator (PI) of the laboratory in which the work was performed may or may not be included at the discretion of the PI; however this PI must approve the submission of the article and provide the details of any funding source.

Authors are required to accept the following conditions when submitting an article: “I/we declare to the best of my/our knowledge that the experiment is reproducible; that the submission has been approved by all authors; that the submission has been approved by the laboratory’s Principal Investigator, and that the results have not been published elsewhere.* The author(s) declare no conflict of interest.”

*Note: We do not consider publication as an academic thesis, electronic preprint, or abstract as a prior publication.

Publication Standards

Reported results must be original work that has not been published elsewhere. Experiments and or analyses must be well-described and appropriately interpreted. Each submission must include a complete description of the result with accompanying reagents, resources, tools, and methodologies that were used in the experiment and any analysis. Results need to be validated using appropriate controls and replicates, which themselves need to be reported in the article. All biological entities must adhere to standards and nomenclature set and maintained by the relevant community knowledgebase, as determined bymicroPublication Biology. All articles and accompanying data will be peer-reviewed.

See our guidelines on peer-review for more information.

Signing Up and Signing On

To submit an article, go to https://portal.micropublication.org

First time users should click on ‘Sign up’ and provide a username, personal information and a password. Please store this information as all further communication, portal activity, including invitations to review and account resetting will require these details.

Before proceeding, look in your email inbox for a verification message from our system, if you do not receive one within a few minutes, there could be something wrong with your entered email address or your institution could be blocking emails from our mail server.

Please let us know if you need help to set up or log into your account: contact@micropublication.org.

Starting a microPublication (the Metadata)

Writing a microPublication

Adhering to Nomenclature Standards

microPublication Biology editors work directly with curators at authoritative community knowledgebases (e.g. WormBase, FlyBase, Saccharomyces Genome Database, etc.) to validate biological entities reported in submitted articles. Authors must adhere to community standards in reporting these reagents, and bioentity names such as gene, strain, variation names etc. Reported reagents and names of bioentities will be quality controlled for accuracy by a Curator at a collaborating knowledgebase or by automated methods set up by microPublication in conjunction with the knowledgebase to ensure that these objects adhere to these standards.

Accepted nomenclature sources for human and major biomedical model organisms can be found here.

Plagiarism Detection

As part of microPublication Biology's commitment to protecting the integrity of the scholarly record, we employ iThenticate to detect plagiarism upon submission. iThenticate Similarity Reports provide an overall similarity index for each submission and inform editors on text copied from other sources without attribution. Plagiarized content will not be considered for publication. If plagiarism is identified, we will follow COPEguidelines.

If using text part of a thesis work, please add in text reference, and include the thesis citation in the 'Reference' section. Example: Lutz M. 1989. 1903: American nervousness and the economy of cultural change [dissertation]. [Stanford (CA)]: Stanford University. (Lutz 1989)

For arXived work, please acknowledge that part of the work can be found on arXiv in the acknowledgements section.

Structural Biology Data

microPublication Biology is now partnering with Proteopedia, a 3D web resource with pages that describe protein and nucleic acid structures and their structure/function relationships through descriptive text linked to rotatable, zoomable 3D structures. You can access an article with the embedded Proteopedia Molecular Tour here.

Authors that report new macromolecular structures have now the opportunity to opt in and create 3D structures with models built from PDB data. This page is linked from the published article and accessible both through the journal and through the Proteopedia website. microPublication authors will be able to opt in during the submission of the manuscript. Authors will be contacted by Proteopedia personnel and will be asked to provide additional data files to build the Interactive 3D Complement (I3DC). More information here.

Material Sharing

Authors are expected to make biological materials described in their article available upon reasonable request from researchers. Authors are encouraged to deposit biological materials to public repositories such as Addgene, Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center, Caenorhabditis Genetics Center, European Xenopus Resource Centre and other appropriate repositories.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence: microPublication follows the CSE guidelines on the use of Artificial Intelligence, such as ChatGPT, Chatbots, Large Language Models (LLM) in the preparation and or revision of work to our journal. Authors should disclose, upon submission of the original and any revised version of the article, if they used AI or other machine learning tools in generating any text or images in the manuscript, and where it was used. Contributions by artificial intelligence (AI) tools and technologies to a study or to an article's contents must be clearly reported in a dedicated section of the Methods. We require the disclosure of the technical specifications (name, version, model) of the AI tool or model and how its application was used (query structure, syntax). We ultimately hold human authors accountable for all aspects of their manuscript, these aspects include the accuracy of content created with AI assistance, the absence of plagiarism, appropriate attributions of such sources.

Article Submission Agreement

By submitting an article to microPublication Biology, all authors agree to the following:

• All curatable data in the article will be shared with relevant and appropriate databases collaborating with microPublication journals.
• All experiments discussed in the article are reproducible.
• The results have not been published elsewhere.*

Further, the following must be true:

• The submission has been approved by all authors.
• The submission has been approved by the laboratory’s Principal Investigator.
• There is no conflict of interest for any author.
• Contributions by artificial intelligence (AI) tools and technologies to this study have been described in the Methods

*We do not consider publication as an academic thesis, electronic preprint, or abstract as a prior publication.

Integration Articles

If the amount of your data does not fit within one microPublication, we encourage you to prepare multiple microPublications, each focused on an independent result, and to tie the articles together with an Integrations article, which serves as a summary narrative article. Each Integrations article furthers the discussion of data reported in multiple microPublications. Integrations can include a final experiment that ties published microPublication data into a cohesive report. Example articles: Abay, Wong, and Neumann, 2017; Minor and Sternberg, 2019; Ashley and Holgado, 2019

After Submission

Once an article has been submitted, a managing editor and Science Officer will do a quick evaluation of the article for moving on to peer-review. If the article passes this initial evaluation, the article will be sent to a reviewer. During any of these reviews, the authors may be asked to address comments and revise the article. To speed this process, authors should ​address all comments and questions and list/explain all changes made to the manuscript to simplify evaluation by the editors and reviewers. Instructions are given at the time of revision requests. Editorial staff and Science Officers reserve the right to decline or reject an article, as well as request corrections to the article at any point during the submission and proofing process.

Peer Review Process

Each manuscript sent to microPublication Biology undergoes two rounds of peer review, first Academic Peer Review and then Curatorial Peer Review. An article needs to pass both academic and curatorial peer review in order to be accepted for publication.

Academic Peer Review

microPublication Biology follows the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) guidlines in the ‘Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals’.

After submission, the manuscript is sent to one or two reviewer experts in the field depending on the complexity of the article. The complexity and need for more than one reviewer will be at the discretion of the science editor. Authors are encouraged to suggest reviewers, which are evaluated by the science editor for appropriateness. The science editor will ultimately select the reviewer(s).

microPublication Biology operates an elective open peer review system, where the reviewers’ names are included on final article html and PDF versions of the article upon publication of the manuscript, if the reviewer chooses open acknowledgement. During the review process itself the author is unaware of the identity of the reviewer; however, the reviewer is aware of the author’s name.

Reviewers are asked to declare any conflict of interest if they accept the invitation to review an article and are encouraged to decline if they perceive a potential conflict, in which case they will be excluded from the review process for that article.

microPublication Biology editors rely on the reviewer’s feedback, author’s compliance with suggested editorial and reviewer revisions, and ultimately on the science editor’s decision for acceptance or rejection of an article. We do not guarantee acceptance of submitted work. Further, while microPublication Biology aims at a quick turnaround for article peer review, we cannot guarantee a short review or processing time.

Curatorial Peer Review

microPublication journals collaborate with community knowledgebases to validate and vet reported data and regents so that nomenclature and data reporting meet community standards. A Curator at a relevant database, chosen by the Editors, will be enlisted to vet the data being reported. Authors are expected to address any feedback provided by the Curator as they would for Reviewer feedback.

Peer Review Panel for Multiple Submission Projects

Multiple Submission Projects output regular reports that are amenable to a formulaic article template, such as consortia generated data or undergraduate CURE authored reports. For such formulaic submissions, we instantiate review panels composed of researchers and database curators. Invited researchers evaluate the reported results for being complete and technically sound. Database curators ensure the reported data meet community standards. These panels ensure consistency in peer-evaluation across all articles. Review panels are assembled based on the needs of the project, e.g. the number of submissions and the complexity of the articles. If you think your project will result in multiple output of similar articles, please contact us at editors@micropublication.org.

Following Acceptance - the Proof Stage

Articles go through an author-editable proof stage. While microPublication does not employ a copy-editor, microPublication Editors may request authors to address stylistic, grammatical, and or nonscientific issues of the article. Ultimately, authors are responsible for carefully proofreading their article with the goal of identifying grammatical or stylistic errors. Authors can make changes in the portal. Changes to the proof will be checked by an editor and any corrections that alter data, results, or experiment conclusions will be subject to further review.

Following Publication

Articles will be available on the microPublication Biology website as soon as possible after final proof approval. We will send authors an announcement when their article has been published and available on our live site. Two weeks after going live, the article will be uploaded to PubMedCentral. Authors should check the microPublication Biology online version, both the html and PDF, for possible errors in assembly or content, see "Corrections After Publication" below.

Corrections After Publication

microPublication Biology is amenable to fixing unintentional mistakes (e.g., incorrect author list, incorrect strain name, etc.) as we do not consider such mistakes to be misconduct. If these mistakes are caught within two weeks of publication, no corrigendum is necessary. However, after two weeks from publication, the article will be considered the final version for indexing and any further correction will require a Corrigendum (or Erratum if the error was an editorial oversight). If errors are found, authors are instructed to contact us at editors@micropublication.org. We will convey all corrections to our indexing services (e.g. PubMed Central).

Data handling
Once the final version of the article for indexing has been established, we will send curated data to the relevant authoritative database and hyperlink known biological entities to that database. Published data will appear on the database website based on the database’s release cycle. If you do not see your data in the expected database after a couple releases, please contact that database.

As we are an online journal, we do not provide hard-copy versions of articles.

Copyright and Licensing

Authors retain copyright for all submitted content published in articles by microPublication Biology under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

​For all accepted submissions, authors agree to their data being delivered for integration into Model Organism Databases (or other authoritative repositories) by microPublication Biology. Each of these repositories contain their own copyright and licensing agreements. See each repository for more information.

Rejected articles and data there-in will not be stored bymicroPublication Biology, nor will they be deposited in collaborating repositories.

Scientific Misconduct

microPublication Biology takes allegations of scientific misconduct seriously and will investigate each on a case by case basis when brought to our attention, either by authors or concerned readers. We consult the guidelines provided by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).

microPublication Biology reserves the right to contact the authors’ institutions, funders, or regulatory bodies if needed. Should the allegations occur prior to publication of the article, we reserve the right to halt the peer review and publication process until the investigation is complete. In the case of published articles we will take the appropriate steps to correct the scientific record. These may include issuing an expression of concern or retraction of the published article.

Please address any concerns or questions to our editorial team (editors@micropublication.org).

Author Fees

As part of our long-term sustainability plan, we will institute article processing charges (APCs) starting April 2nd, 2022. We charge $250 per article, which should cover costs but not new initiatives. No article will be refused because of an author’s inability to pay page charges. To request a waiver, please fill out this form. microPublication grants waivers on a case by case basis. Contact billing@micropublication.org for any further questions.

Appeals

Authors or Associated Principal Investigators, in the case they were not included in authorship, who wish to appeal a decision on an article or make a complaint, should contact a member of the editorial team at once. The contacted editorial staff member will provide information about the journal’s complaints procedure and relay the issue to senior editorial staff members.