INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS

I. General

The editors of the Current Topics in Biophysics are prepared to accept direct experimental reports, reviews and theoretical articles. Papers submitted may deal with any problems related to biophysics.

Manuscripts of articles must be submitted in English. Electronic form of articles should be mailed to CTB@amu.edu.pl. The submission of the manuscript is regarded as the author’s statement that it has not been published (or submitted for publication elsewhere).

Manuscripts prepared according to the attached CTB-template.rtf should be submitted by one of the authors of the manuscript. Regardless of the source of the word-processing tool, only electronic files can be submitted through the Internet. Only online submissions are accepted to facilitate rapid publication and minimize administrative costs. Submissions by anyone other than one of the authors will not be accepted. The submitting author takes responsibility for the paper during submission and review. If for some technical reason submission through the Internet is not possible, the author can send it on CD/diskette to Prof. Andrzej Dobek, Department of Biophysics, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Umultowska 85, 61-614 Poznań, Poland, to one of the Co-Editors or Support-Editors.

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 of a paper that the authors permit editing of the paper for readability. All enquiries concerning the publication of accepted papers should be addressed to CTB@amu.edu.pl.

All manuscripts are subject to review and are expected to meet standards of academic excellence. Submissions will be considered by an editor and—if not rejected right away—by reviewers, whose identities will remain anonymous to the authors. Author(s) will be asked upon submission to provide the names of 4 proposed reviewers who are not affiliated to the same institution of the submitting author(s) accompanied with their email addresses. In addition, these proposed reviewers should be acting within the research field of interest and should not have had any input into the manuscript submitted or have had any collaboration with one of the authors during last 2 years. The editors of the journal may or may not take these suggestions into account during the reviewing process.

Current Topics in Biophysics is an open access journal. Open access charges allow publishers to make the published material available for free to all interested online visitors.

II. Specific

Manuscript accepted for publication will be published in electronic form on web side http://ctbo.pl It should be prepared according to the attached CTB-template.rtf in camera ready form and editor will not interfere in the graphics of the articles. The length of manuscript is not limited.

Submitted manuscripts should be typed in clear, grammatical, idiomatic English. Abbreviations should be spelled out at their first occurrence.
Units of measurement should be presented simply and concisely using System International (SI) units.

Accepted manuscripts must be supplied in RTF format.

The abstract should be self-contained, citation-free and should not exceed 150 words. Independently on the abstract placed in template.rtf form, it should be provided separately in the “plain text file” form.

The full list of references should be typed on the end of the article. It should include the names of all the authors and their initials, the year of publication in parentheses, the full title of the article or book, the standard abbreviated name of the journal, the volume number and the pages; and, for books, the city of publication and the publisher. See attached CTB-template.rtf form.

All photographs, graphs, diagrams and tables should be situated in the text with a proper size and consecutive Arabic numerals. They should be referred to as „Figures” (abbreviated to „Fig”) with the legends on the bottom, except tables on the top. See attached CTB-template.rtf form.

Corrected proofs must be returned to the publisher within 2-3 days of receipt. The publisher will do everything possible to ensure prompt publication.
It will therefore be appreciated if the manuscripts and figures conform from the outset to the style of the journal.

Open Access authors retain the copyrights of their papers, 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. 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.

III. Editorial workflow

Once a manuscript is submitted to the Chief-Editor, one of the Co-Editors, or to one of the Support-Editors of the journal, called further Editor, he check the manuscript. If he determines that the manuscript is not of sufficient quality to go through the normal review process or if the subject of the manuscript is not appropriate to the journal scope, they reject the manuscript with no further processing.

If the submitted manuscript is of sufficient quality and falls within the scope of the journal, it is sending it to two or more external reviewers for review. These external reviewers may or may not be from the list of potential reviewers suggested by the authors of the manuscript. The reviewers submit their reports on the manuscripts along with their recommendation of one of the following actions:

If the reviewer recommends “Publish Unaltered,” the Editor is notified of the recommendation so he can inspect the manuscript and the review reports. The Editor can either the override the reviewer recommendation in which case the manuscript is rejected or approves the reviewer recommendation in which case the manuscript is accepted for publication.

If the reviewer recommends “Publish Again after Minor Changes,” the Editor is notified of the recommendation so he can inspect the manuscript and the review reports. If the Editor overrides the reviewer’s recommendation, the manuscript is rejected. If the Editor approves the reviewer’s recommendation, the authors are notified to prepare and submit a final copy of their manuscript with the required minor changes suggested by the reviewer. Only the Editor, and not the external reviewers, reviews the revised manuscript after the minor changes have been made by the authors.
Once the Editor is satisfied with the final manuscript, the manuscript can be accepted.

If the reviewer recommends “Review Again after Major Changes,” the recommendation is communicated to the authors. The authors are expected to revise their manuscripts in accordance with the changes recommended by the reviewers and to submit their revised manuscript in a timely manner. Once the revised manuscript is submitted, the original reviewers are contacted with a request to review the revised version of the manuscript. Along with their review reports on the revised manuscript, the reviewers make a recommendation which can be “Publish Unaltered” or “Publish after Minor Changes” or “Reject.”

If the reviewer recommends “Reject” the manuscript, either after the first or the second round of reviews, the rejection is immediate.

The editorial workflow gives the Editor the authority in rejecting any manuscript because of inappropriateness of its subject, lack of quality, or incorrectness of its results. (However, only the Chief-Editor can approve a manuscript for publication).

The Editor can neither assign himself as a reviewer.

The review process is single blinded, i.e., the reviewers know who the authors of the manuscript are, but the authors do not have access to the information of who the reviewers are. CTB has an acknowledgement page for the researchers who have performed the review process for one or more the journal manuscripts in the past year. Without the significant contributions made by these researchers, the publication of the journal would not be possible.

Contact

Current Topics in Biophysics publishes the original biophysical research, reviews and theoretical articles in English.

Manuscripts should be submitted in electronic form to Prof. Andrzej Dobek,
Molecular Biophysics Division, Faculty of Physics, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, ul. Uniwersytetu Poznańskiego 2, 61-614 Poznań, POLAND.
e-mail: ctb@amu.edu.pl or dobek@amu.edu.pl

or by e-mail to one of the Co-Editors :

Andrzej Hendrich: hendrich@biofiz.am.wroc.pl
Przemysław Płonka: mieszko@mol.uj.edu.pl

or by e-mail to one of the Support Editors:

Redouene Borsali: borsali@enscpb.fr
Damian Labuda: damian.labuda@umontreal.ca
Robert Pecora: pecora@stanford.edu