Guidelines for focus issues and invited articles

➔ For full details please refer to the Authors' Guidelines

Manuscripts submitted to AboutOpen: 

  • Must be an original contribution not previously published in any language or country (except as an abstract or preliminary report) and must not be under consideration for publication elsewhere.  
  • Are published after having successfully completing the peer review process.
  • Are published under the CC-BY-NC 4.0 license and area archives in Portico for permanent archiving.
  • Are covered by article processing charges paid by the author after acceptance:
    Full research paper, Mini-review and  Full-length review paper: Euro 750 (+ VAT as applicable)
    Short communication: Euro 500 (+ VAT as applicable)
    APCs, may be waived for contributions invited by Guest and Section Editors.

Manuscript formatting
Submit your manuscript as a word file, structuring it in Title page, Manuscript Text, Acknowledgments, Figure legends, References, Tables; submit figures as separate files; you may also include supplementary material, including videos or extended datasets.

The title page of your manuscript file must include the following information:

  • Full title (max 135 characters including letters and spaces), which must be concise and informative.
  • Short title (max 75 characters, including letters and spaces).
  • All authors, identified as indicated in our policy on authorship, listed as first name, initials, and last name (i.e., Paul M. Smith) with highest academic or medical degree first.
  • Institutional affiliation for each author, using superscripts and not symbols (e.g., Paul M. Smith1).
  • Corresponding author’s information (full mailing address, phone numbers, email address);
  • Clinical Trial Protocol number when submitting a Clinical Trial Protocol.
  • List of supplementary material, with a short description.
  • Abstract, not longer than 250 words and divided in the sections indicated in each content type
  • Keywords: provide up to 6 keywords in alphabetical order under which you believe the article should be indexed. Use terms from the Medical Subject Headings list from lndex Medicus whenever possible. A library of terms is available at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html.
  • Acknowledgements. List in this section:
    a) Any substantial contribution when provided by a person different from the author and list all other persons who do not fulfil authorship criteria. Written permission must be obtained to include the names of all individuals included in the Acknowledgments section.
    b) The assistance of medical writing experts.
    c) All participating group authors who do not meet the full authorship criteria.
    d) If your article was previously published as preprint, supply full reference and a link to the preprint version
  • Each author’s contributor role to the manuscript following the CredIt Taxonomy
  • Data Availability Statement (DASs): Provide a statement in the acknowledgments about where data supporting the results reported in a published article can be found, including, where applicable, unique identifiers linking to publicly archived datasets analyzed or generated during the study. Examples:
    a) Data publicly available : The data presented in this study are openly available in [repository name], reference number [reference number], [DOI] or [URL]
    b) Data available on request : The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to [insert reason here].
    c) 3rd party data: Restrictions apply to the availability of these data, obtained from [third party] and available at [URL] with the permission of [third party].
    c) Data sharing not applicable: No new data were created or analyzed in this study or The data presented in this study are available as supplementary material to this article
  • Disclosures for all authors :
    a) Conflict of interest: Financial conflict of interest may exist if any financial gain is brought to the author or to his/her family, business partners, or employer by direct or indirect commission; stock ownership or options in manufacturing company; involvement in any for-profit or not-for-profit corporation where the author or his/her family is a director or recipient of a grant, including consultant and travel costs reimbursement.
    Non-financial competing interest may be political, personal, or intellectual.
    b) Funding and financial support: Payment or services from a third party (government, commercial, private foundation, etc.) to support the research and the work reported.

Manuscript length (excluding figures and tables)
Original Research Article: max 3000 words | References: max 30 
Mini-review: max 4000 | References: max 40 
Full-length review: max 5000 |  References: max 50
Short communication: max 2000 |  References: max 7

➔ Go to submission page

Submission guidelines
Step 1: Register on the Journal website;
Step 2: Read these guidelines and prepare your submission files (Manuscript, figures, supplementary materials if included)
Step 3: Log in;
Step 4: Click on “Submit now”

For submission enquiries and for additional requests please contact Lucia Steele (Publication Manager): 
lucia.steele@aboutscience.eu