Submissions

Author Guidelines

Join our community of authors and benefit from:

• An easy-to-use manuscript submission system, without manuscript formatting requirements.
• Free of charge, full language editing report at point of submission, to help you assess and improve your manuscript prior to peer review.
• Dedicated editors who are active in their specific communities.
• High editorial standards, ensuring all published manuscripts undergo an in-depth peer review process.
• Quick, efficient publication with full transparency on all publishing metrics and turnaround times.
• Greater impact, reach, and visibility of your research through open access.
• Retention of all ownership and copyright of your published research.
• Discount on a wide range of author services from leading providers, to help make your manuscript the best it can be.

Language editing and author services

We have partnered with a number of leading author services providers to offer our authors an exclusive 10% discount on a wide range of manuscript preparation and post-publication services. This discount applies to various language editing, translation, and research communication services.

You can make use of a free artificial intelligence (AI)-based language editing tool, Writefull, at the point of submission. Writefull will scan your manuscript and make suggestions to help improve the quality of your writing. The tool applies machine learning, trained on millions of published scientific articles, and suggests improvements to grammar, spelling, and academic language. 

Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted by one of the authors of the manuscript, the manuscript submission system for our journals. Only electronic Word (.doc, .docx, .odt, .rtf, .txt) files can be submitted through the manuscript submission system, and there is no page limit. Special characters should not be included in the file name of the main manuscript file. Submissions by anyone other than one of the authors will not be accepted. The submitting author takes responsibility for the manuscript during submission and peer review. For technical help, please contact help email. 

Terms of submission

Manuscripts must be submitted on the understanding that they have not been published elsewhere and are only being considered by this journal. The submitting author is responsible for ensuring that the article’s publication has been approved by all the other coauthors. It is also the submitting author's responsibility to ensure that the article has all necessary institutional approvals. Only an acknowledgment from the editorial office officially establishes the date of receipt. Further correspondence and proofs will be sent to the author(s) before publication, unless otherwise indicated. It is a condition of submission that the authors permit editing of the manuscript for readability. All inquiries concerning the publication of accepted manuscripts should be addressed to help office email. All submissions are bound by Ricos Biology terms of service.

Peer review

All submitted articles are subject to assessment and peer review to ensure editorial appropriateness and technical correctness.

Research published in the journal must be:

• Scientifically valid – adhering to accepted community standards of research.
• Technically accurate in its methods and results.
• Representative of a specific advance, or replication, or null/negative result, which is worthy of publication. 
• As reproducible as possible-sharing underlying data, code, and supporting materials wherever able.
• Ethically sound and transparent-adhering to best practice with respect to animal and human studies, consent to publish, and clear declaration of potential conflicts of interests, both real and perceived.

In the spirit of sharing findings through our open science mission, emphasis is not placed on novelty, interest, or perceived impact. Replication studies, particularly of research published in this journal, are encouraged.

In order for an article to be accepted for publication, the assigned editor will first consider if the manuscript meets the minimum editorial standards and fits within the scope of the journal. If an article is considered suitable for the journal, the editor will ideally solicit at least two external peer reviewers (who will remain anonymous to the authors unless they choose to disclose their identity by signing the review report) to assess the article before confirming a decision to accept. Decisions to reject are at the discretion of the editor.

Our research integrity team will occasionally seek advice outside standard peer review, for example, on submissions with serious ethical, security, biosecurity, or societal implications. We may consult experts and the editor before deciding on appropriate actions, including but not limited to: recruiting reviewers with specific expertise, assessment by additional editors, and declining to further consider a submission.

Concurrent submissions

In order to ensure sufficient diversity within the authorship of the journal, authors will be limited to having three manuscripts under review at any point in time. If an author already has three manuscripts under review in the journal, they will need to wait until the review process of at least one of these manuscripts is complete before submitting another manuscript for consideration. This policy does not apply to editorials or other non-peer-reviewed manuscript types.

Article processing charges

The journal is open access. Article processing charges (APCs) allow the publisher to make articles immediately available online to anyone to read and reuse upon publication.

Preprints

Ricos Biology supports the deposition of manuscripts in preprint servers, and does not consider this to compromise the novelty of the results. Articles based on content previously made public only on a preprint server, institutional repository, or in a thesis will be considered. The preprint should be cited.

Preregistration of studies

Authors are encouraged to indicate whether the conducted research was preregistered in an independent, institutional registry (e.g., http://clinicaltrials.gov/, https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/, http://osf.io/, https://egap.org/registry/, http://ridie.3ieimpact.org/). Preregistration of studies involves registering the study design, variables, and treatment conditions prior to conducting the research.

Preregistration of analysis plans

Authors are encouraged to indicate whether or not the conducted research was preregistered with an analysis plan in an independent, institutional registry (e.g., http://clinicaltrials.gov/, https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/, http://osf.io/, https://egap.org/registry/, http://ridie.3ieimpact.org/). Preregistration of studies involves registering the study design, variables, and treatment conditions. Including an analysis plan involves specification of sequence of analyses or the statistical model that will be reported.

ORCID

Prior to publication, an ORCID ID must be provided for the corresponding author(s). If you already have an ORCID ID, you will be asked to provide it. If you haven’t registered with ORCID yet, we’ll help you create an ID at the point of submission. The ORCID is not required for submission, or for peer review.

Article types

The journal will consider the following article types:

Research articles

Research articles should present the results of an original research study. These manuscripts should describe how the research project was conducted and provide a thorough analysis of the results of the project. Systematic reviews may be submitted as research articles.

Reviews

A review article provides an overview of the published literature in a particular subject area.

Formatting

An optional research article manuscript template can be downloaded here. We recommend that all manuscripts include line numbers and follow the structure below:

Title and authorship information

The following information should be included:

• Manuscript title
• Full author names
• Full institutional mailing addresses
• Email addresses

Affiliations. Ricos Biology remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in institutional affiliations. Responsibility for affiliations ultimately rests with the author, although Ricos Biology may request changes be made to countries listed in affiliations to ensure consistency across published output (for indexing and discovery reasons).

Abstract

The manuscript should contain an abstract. The abstract should be self-contained, citation-free, and should not exceed 300 words.

Introduction

This section should be succinct, with no subheadings.

Materials and methods

The methods section should provide enough detail for others to be able to replicate the study. If you have more than one method, use subsections with relevant headings, e.g. different models, in vitro and in vivo studies, statistics, materials and reagents, etc.

Ricos Biology journals have no space restriction on methods. Detailed descriptions of the methods (including protocols or project descriptions) and algorithms may also be uploaded as supplementary information or a previous publication that gives more details may be cited. If the method from a previous article is used then this article must be cited and discussed. If wording is reused from a published article then this must be noted, e.g. This study uses the method of Smith et al. and the methods description partly reproduces their wording [1].

If a method or tool is introduced in the study, including software, questionnaires, and scales, the license this is available under and any requirement for permission for use should be stated. If an existing method or tool is used in the research, the authors are responsible for checking the license and obtaining any necessary permission. If permission was required, a statement confirming permission was granted should be included in the materials and methods section.

Publishing protocols. We encourage authors describing any methodology, in particular laboratory-based experiments in the life sciences but also computational and bioinformatics protocols, to upload details of their methods to protocols.io. This is an open access website that allows researchers to record their methods in a structured way, obtain a DOI to allow easy citation of the protocol, collaborate with selected colleagues, share their protocol privately for journal peer review, and choose to make it publicly available. Once published, the protocol can be updated and cited in other articles.

You can make your protocol public before publication of your article if you choose, which will not harm the peer review process of your article and may allow you to get comments about your methods to adapt or improve them before you submit your article.

Results and discussion

This section may be divided into subsections or may be combined.

Main text (review only)

This section may be divided into subsections or may be combined.

Conclusions

This should clearly explain the main conclusions of the article, highlighting its importance and relevance.

Data availability

This statement should describe how readers can access the data supporting the conclusions of the study and clearly outline the reasons why unavailable data cannot be released.

Conflicts of interest

Authors must declare all relevant interests that could be perceived as conflicting. Authors should explain why each interest may represent a conflict. If no conflicts exist, the authors should state this. Submitting authors are responsible for coauthors declaring their interests.

Conflicts of interest (COIs, also known as ‘competing interests’) occur when issues outside research could be reasonably perceived to affect the neutrality or objectivity of the work or its assessment. For more information, see our publication ethics policy. Authors must declare all potential interests – whether or not they actually had an influence in the conflicts of interest section, which should explain why the interest may be a conflict. If there are none, the authors should state: “The author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest regarding the publication of this article”. Submitting authors are responsible for coauthors declaring their interests. Declared conflicts of interest will be considered by the editor and reviewers, and included in the published article.

Authors must declare current or recent funding (including for article processing charges) and other payments, goods or services that might influence the work. All funding, whether a conflict or not, must be declared in the funding statement. The involvement of anyone other than the authors who: i) has an interest in the outcome of the work; ii) is affiliated to an organization with such an interest; or iii) was employed or paid by a funder, in the commissioning, conception, planning, design, conduct, or analysis of the work, the preparation or editing of the manuscript, or the decision to publish must be declared.

You may be asked to make certain changes to your manuscript as a result of your declaration. These requests are not an accusation of impropriety. The editor or reviewer is helping you to protect your work against potential criticisms.

If you are in any doubt about declaring a potential conflict, remember that if it is revealed later, especially after publication, it could cause more problems than simply declaring it at the time of submission. Undeclared conflicts of interest could lead to a corrigendum or, in the most serious cases, a retraction.

Funding statement

Authors must state how the research and publication of their article was funded, by naming financially supporting body(s) (written out in full) followed by associated grant number(s) in square brackets (if applicable), for example: “This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [grant numbers xxxx, yyyy]; the National Science Foundation [grant number zzzz]; and a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant”.

If the research did not receive specific funding, but was performed as part of the employment of the authors, please name this employer. If the funder was involved in the manuscript writing, editing, approval, or decision to publish, please declare this.

Acknowledgments

All acknowledgments (if any) should be included at the very end of the manuscript before the references. Anyone who made a contribution to the research or manuscript, but who is not a listed author, should be acknowledged (with their permission).

References

Authors may submit their references in any style. If accepted, these will be reformatted in Chicago style by Ricos Biology. Authors are responsible for ensuring that the information in each reference is complete and accurate. All references should be numbered consecutively in the order of their first citation. Citations of references in the text should be identified using numbers in square brackets e.g., “as discussed by Smith [9]”; “as discussed elsewhere [9, 10]”. All references should be cited within the text and uncited references will be removed.

Citation standards. All data, program code, and other methods should be appropriately cited. Such materials should be recognized as original intellectual contributions and afforded recognition through citation.

Date formatting

Ricos Biology recommends writing dates out fully to avoid confusion with different all-numeral date styles. For example, 11/10/2018 could be 10 November 2018 or 11 October 2018 depending on the reader, therefore, the date should be written out in full. For example, the date September 1, 2018 should be used rather than 01/09/2018 or 09/01/2018.

Units of measurement

Units of measurement should be presented simply and concisely using the International System of Units (SI).

Preparation of figures

Upon submission of an article, authors should include all figures and tables in the PDF file of the manuscript. Figures and tables should not be submitted in separate files. If the article is accepted, authors will be asked to provide the source files of the figures. Each figure should be supplied in a separate electronic file. All figures should be cited in the manuscript in a consecutive order. Figures should be supplied in either vector art formats (Illustrator, EPS, WMF, FreeHand, CorelDraw, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.) or bitmap formats (Photoshop, TIFF, GIF, JPEG, etc.). Bitmap images should be of 300 dpi resolution at least unless the resolution is intentionally set to a lower level for scientific reasons. If a bitmap image has labels, the image and labels should be embedded in separate layers. 

Maps. Ricos Biology remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps. For reasons of consistency, authors are requested to use accepted standard maps as the basis for map figure drawing, for example using the latest standard base-map of Map Press. Responsibility for maps rests with the author and it is their responsibility to also provide any copyright or license information when using maps that are not owned or created by the author (e.g. Google Maps, etc.)

Preparation of tables

Tables should be cited consecutively in the text. Every table must have a descriptive title and if numerical measurements are given, the units should be included in the column heading. Vertical rules should not be used.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary materials are the additional parts to a manuscript, such as audio files, video clips, or datasets that might be of interest to readers. Authors can submit one file of supplementary material along with their manuscript through the manuscript submission system. If there is more than one file, they can be uploaded as a .ZIP file.

A section titled supplementary material should be included before the references list with a concise description for each supplementary material file. Supplementary materials are not modified by our production team. Authors are responsible for providing the final supplementary material files that will be published along with the article.

Proofs

Corrected proofs must be returned to the publisher within two to three days of receipt. The publisher will do everything possible to ensure prompt publication.

Copyright and permissions

Authors retain the copyright of their manuscripts, and all open access articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.

The use of general descriptive names, trade names, trademarks, and so forth in this publication, even if not specifically identified, does not imply that these names are not protected by the relevant laws and regulations. The submitting author is responsible for securing any permissions needed for the reuse of copyrighted materials included in the manuscript.

While the advice and information in this journal are believed to be true and accurate on the date of its going to press, neither the authors, the editors, nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein.

Reporting guidelines

Authors are strongly encouraged to use appropriate reporting guidelines when preparing and submitting manuscripts, to maximize transparency and reproducibility. Our editors and reviewers are also encouraged to use them in the review process. Completed checklists should be provided in the supplementary files on submission. We particularly encourage the use of:

• CONSORTfor randomized controlled trials
• TRENDfor non-randomized trials
• PRISMAfor systematic review and meta-analyses
• CAREfor case reports
• STROBEfor observational studies
• STREGAfor genetic association studies
• SRQRfor qualitative studies
• STARDfor diagnostic accuracy studies
• ARRIVEfor animal experiments

Microarray data submission

Before publication, the microarray data should be deposited in an appropriate database such as Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) or Array Express, and an entry name or accession number must be included in the manuscript prior to its publication. Microarray data should be MIAME compliant. During the review process, submitting authors are committed to provide the editor and the reviewers handling their manuscript with the login information by which they can access this information in the database.

Small molecule single crystal X-ray diffraction data

We recommend the use of SHELXL (2014 or later) for data processing, which embeds both the results file and structure factors into the finalized crystallographic information file (CIF).

We strongly encourage that all new small molecule single crystal X-ray diffraction data be deposited with the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC; https://www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/deposit) prior to submission of your article. The CCDC number(s) assigned to your structure(s) should be listed in the data availability statement, which permits retrieval of the crystallographic data for peer review purposes, and allows readers to find them once the article is published.

We would also ask you to check the integrity of your data using the IUCr's check CIF service (available here: http://checkcif.iucr.org/), and address significant unresolved problems (typically all A- and B-alerts) in the Validation Response Form portion of the CIF. The generation of the check CIF report and the response to A- and B-alerts can also all be done through the deposition to the CCDC.

If you choose to not deposit your data in the CCDC prior to submission, you must upload your CIF (and RES and HKL/FCF files if necessary), along with a PDF of the check CIF report (link above) as supporting information, at the same as uploading your manuscript. At acceptance, you should then submit your crystal data to an appropriate repository, and update the data availability statement in your manuscript to indicate how authors can retrieve the data.

The data availability section should reference crystallographic data in the following format: “Crystallographic data for the structures reported in this manuscript have been deposited with the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre under the CCDC numbers: xxxxxx (Compound name 1), xxxxxx (Compound name 2), and xxxxxx (Compound name 3). Copies of these data can be obtained free of charge from http://www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/data_request/cif.”

Ethical guidelines

In any studies on human or animal subjects, the following ethical guidelines must be observed. For any experiments on humans, all work must be conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (1964). Manuscripts describing experimental work that carries a risk of harm to human subjects must include a statement that the experiment was conducted with the human subjects’ understanding and consent, as well as a statement that the responsible ethics committee has approved the experiments. In the case of any animal experiments, the authors must provide a full description of any anesthetic or surgical procedure used, as well as evidence that all possible steps were taken to avoid animal suffering at each stage of the experiment.

Appeals

Authors may appeal if they feel that the decision to reject was based on: i) a major misunderstanding over a technical aspect of the manuscript; or ii) a failure to understand the scientific advance shown by the manuscript. Appeals requesting a second opinion without sufficient justification will not be considered. To lodge an appeal, please contact the journal by email, quoting your manuscript number. Appeals will only be considered from the original submitting author.

THE EDITORIAL BOARD IS VERY FIRM IN PLAGIARISM POLICY AS NO ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT SHOULD EXCEED 25% SIMILARITIES UNDER ANY CODITION.

THE EDITORIAL BOARD REJECT ANY MANUSCRIPT MANIBULATED BY AI.