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Instructions for Authors
The Open Ecology Journal is an Open Access online
journal, publishing original research articles and reviews
in the field of ecology, aiming to provide the most complete
and reliable source of information on current developments
in the field.
Each peer-reviewed article published in a Bentham OPEN
Journal is universally and freely accessible via the Internet
in an easily readable and printable PDF format.
Online Manuscript Submission: An online submission
and tracking service via Internet facilitates a speedy and
cost-effective submission of manuscripts. The full manuscript
has to be submitted online via Bentham's Content Management
System (CMS) at http://www.bentham-editorial.org/
View
Instructions
Alternatively, you may also submit your full manuscript by
e-mail to toecolj@benthamopen.org.
Manuscripts must be submitted by one of the authors of the
manuscript, and should not be submitted by anyone on their
behalf.
For all online submissions, please provide your complete manuscript
in the form of a single zipped folder containing soft copies
of all the materials (main text in MS Word or Tex/LaTeX),
figures/illustrations in one of the formats indicated under
figures/ illustrations below and chemical structures drawn
in ChemDraw (CDX)/ ISISDraw (TGF) as separate files, while
a PDF version of the entire manuscript must also be included,
embedded with all the figures/illustrations/tables/chemical
structures etc.
A successful electronic submission of a manuscript will be
followed by a system-generated acknowledgement to the principal/corresponding
author within 72 hours of the dispatch of the manuscript.
Any questions with regards to the preparation of and submission
of your manuscript to the journal should be addressed to toecolj@benthamopen.org
MANUSCRIPTS PUBLISHED: The Journal accepts
original research articles, forum articles (succinct presentation,
evaluation, and synthesis of one or more important concepts
or viewpoints) and review articles written in English.
SPECIAL ISSUES: The journal also consider
special Issues for publication. A special Issues will be a
collection of articles (minimum of 3, maximum of 20 articles)
based on a contemporary theme or topic of great importance
to the field. A special Issue can consist of either all review
articles or a mixture of review and research articles. The
Guest Editors' main editorial task is to invite the contributors
to the special Issue and to manage the peer review of submitted
manuscripts. A short summary
or proposal for editing a special Issue should be submitted
to Editor-in-Chief at e-mail toecolj@benthamopen.org
REVIEWING AND PROMPTNESS OF PUBLICATION:
All manuscripts submitted for publication will be immediately subjected to peer-reviewing, usually in consultation with the members of the Editorial Advisory Board and a number of external referees. Authors may, however, provide in their Covering Letter the contact details (including e-mail addresses) of four potential peer reviewers for their paper. Any peer reviewers suggested should not have recently published with any of the authors of the submitted manuscript and should not be members of the same research institution.
All peer-reviewing will be conducted via the Internet to facilitate rapid reviewing of the submitted manuscripts. Every possible effort will be made to assess the manuscripts quickly with the decision being conveyed to the authors in due course. Papers which are delayed by authors in revision for more than 30 days will have to be re-submitted as a new submission.
MANUSCRIPT PREPARATION: The manuscript should
be written in English in a clear, direct and active style.
All lines of text and pages should be numbered sequentially
to facilitate the reviewing an editing of the manuscript.
For further convenience, the customer support team available
at Bentham Publishing Services (www.benthampublishingservices.com)
can provide assistance to authors for the preparation of manuscripts.
MANUSCRIPT SECTIONS FOR PAPERS: Manuscripts
should be divided into the following sections, each of which
is further described below.
Covering letter (e-mail submission only)
Title page
Abstract
Text (with subsections)
List of abbreviations (if any)
Conflict of interest (if any)
Acknowledgements (if any)
References
Appendices
Figures/illustrations (if any)
Chemical structures (if any)
Tables (if any)
Supportive/supplementary material (if any)
COVERING LETTER (ONLY FOR E-MAIL SUBMISSIONS): A
signed copy of the downloaded covering letter must also be
submitted along with the manuscript by the author to whom
correspondence is to be addressed. Download
the Covering letter
TITLE PAGE: The title should be precise and
brief and must not be more than 120 characters. Words in the
title must begin with capital letters except for articles,
conjunctions and prepositions. Authors and their professional
affiliations and e-mail addresses should be listed. (Note:
when an article is submitted on behalf of a consortium, all
consortium members and their affilations must be listed after
the Acknowledgments.) The corresponding author should be indicated,
with complete mailing address, telephone number(s) and fax
number(s). Up to ten key words and a short “running
title” should be provided.
ABSTRACT: The abstract should not exceed 300 words,
summarizing the essential features of the article. Use of
abbreviations should be reduced to a minimum and references
should not be cited in the abstract.
TEXT: The main text should begin on a separate page
and should be divided into separate sections. For Research
Articles, the main text should ordinarily be subdivided into
Introduction, Methods, Results, and
Discussion sections and subdivided further as needed.
Forum Articles may or may contain topical headings if needed
but will not follow the Research Article format; they will
emphasize conceptual clarity, synthesis, and future directions.
A review article should begin with a general overview of the
topic, present and discuss the salient features of recent
developments, provide a novel synthesis of this body of work,
and address priorities for future work. For each of these
types of article, the main text should be followed by the
Acknowledgements (if any) and the list of references
For all articles, the manuscript style must be uniform throughout
the text, and 10 point Times New Roman font should be used.
The full term for an abbreviation should precede its first
appearance in the text unless it is a standard unit of measurement.
Italics should be used for binomial names of organisms (genus
and species), for emphasis and for unfamiliar words or phrases.
Non-assimilated words from Latin or other languages should
also be italicized, e.g. in vivo, in vitro, per
se, et al., etc. Protein and nucleic acid sequences and
genomic and proteomic studies may be included and should conform
to international databases. SI units must be indicated. The
generic name should be given on first mention of a species;
the taxonomic authority (e.g. Linnaeus) should be given for
all focal study organisms. Chemical formulae may not be used
as abbreviations in the text. Chemical nomenclature must conform
to the Subject Index of Chemical Abstracts.
If any of the following are to be used in the manuscript,
follow the appropriate link(s) for details: Microarray
data, Genetic
and drug abbreviations and acronyms, Accession
numbers, and
Greek
symbols and special characters
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS: Abbreviations should
be used sparingly. All non-standard abbreviations should be
listed in alphabetical order, along with their expanded form,
defining them upon the first use in the text. Non-standard
abbreviations should not be used unless they appear at least
three times in the text. If abbreviations are used in the
text, they should either be defined in the text where first
used, or a list of abbreviations can be provided.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST: Financial contributions to
the work being reported should be clearly acknowledged, as
should any potential conflict of interest.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Please acknowledge anyone (individual/company/institution)
who has contributed to the study by making substantial contributions
to conception, design, acquisition of data, or analysis and
interpretation of data, or who was involved in drafting the
manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual
content. Please list the source(s) of funding for the study,
for each author, and for the manuscript preparation in the
acknowledgements section.
This journal complies with the International Committee of
Medical Journal Editors' Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts
Submitted to Biomedical Journals www.icmje.org
and the FDA's Good Reprint Practices for the Distribution
of Medical Journal Articles and Medical or Scientific Reference
Publications on Unapproved New Uses of Approved Drugs and
Approved or Cleared Medical Devices http://www.fda.gov/oc/op/goodreprint.html
REFERENCES: Formatting of references follows the
Harvard system. References should be indicated in the text
by surname of the author(s) followed by the year of publication
as shown below.
References to more than one publication by an author in the
same year should be distinguished with lower-case letters,
e.g. (Smith 2003a, 2003b). The abbreviated author and date
reference should be placed in parentheses unless the name
forms part of the text, e.g. “Jones (2005) has established
that….” If no person is named as author, the name
of the appropriate body should be used, e.g. (Ecological Society
of America 2006).
Unpublished studies and personal communications should be
referred to in the text only, using the authors’ initials
and surname.
All authors’ names should be listed in the references.
The full list of references including names of all authors
should be typed in alphabetical order and double-spaced at
the end of the article, in accord with the following examples.
Journal titles should be in full, not abbreviated. Below are
a few examples of references listed in the Harvard style.
Journal References:
[1] Rolán-Alvarez, E, Carballo, M, Galindo,
J, Morán, P, Fernández, B, Caballero, A, Cruz,
R, Boulding, EG & Johannesson, K (2004) Nonallopatric
and parallel origin of local reproductive barriers between
two snail ecotypes. Molecular Ecology, 13, 3415-24.
[2] Wellborn, GA & Broughton, RE (2008) Diversification
on an ecologically constrained adaptive landscape. Molecular
Ecology, 17, 2927-36.
Book Reference:
[3] Sambrook, J, Fritsch, EF & Maniatis, T (1989) Molecular
Cloning a Laboratory Manual, 2nd ed, Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory Press, New York.
Book Chapter:
[4] Stevenson, WG, Friedman, PL (1999) In: Hennekens,
CH (Ed) Clinical Trials in Cardiovascular Disease,
Philadelphia, WB Saunders Co 217-30.
E-citations:
[5] Citations for articles/material published exclusively
online or in open access (free-to-view) , must contain the
exact Web addresses (URLs) at the end of the reference(s),
except those posted on an author’s Web site unless editorially
essential, e.g. ‘Reference: Available from: URL’.
Some important points to remember:
*All references must be complete and accurate.
*All authors must be cited and there should be no use of the
phrase et al.
*Online citations should include the date of access.
*Journal abbreviations should follow the Index Medicus/MEDLINE.
*Take special care of the punctuation convention as described
in the above-mentioned examples.
*Avoid using superscript in the in-text citations and reference
section.
*Abstracts, unpublished data and personal communications
(which can only be included if prior permission has been obtained)
should not be given in the reference section but they may
be mentioned in the text and details provided as footnotes.
APPENDICES: In case there is a need to present
lengthy, but essential methodological details, use appendices,
which can be a part of the article. An appendix must not exceed
three pages (Times New Roman, 12 point fonts, 900 max. words
per page).The information should be provided in a condensed
form, ruling out the need of full sentences. A single appendix
should be titled APPENDIX, while more than one can be titled
APPENDIX A, APPENDIX B, and so on.
FIGURES/ILLUSTRATIONS: Authors should provide the
illustrations as separate files, as well as within the text
file, numbered consecutively in the order of their appearance.
Each figure should include a single illustration. No charges
will be levied on the use of color figures except in reprints.
Each figure should be closely cropped to minimize the amount
of white space surrounding the illustration. If a figure consists
of separate parts, it is important that a single composite
illustration file be submitted, containing all parts of the
figure. Photographs should be provided with a scale bar if
appropriate, as well as high-resolution component files.
Formats: For illustrations, the
following file formats are acceptable.
• Illustrator
• EPS (preferred format for diagrams)
• PDF (also especially suitable for
diagrams)
• PNG (preferred format for photos
or images)
• Microsoft Word (version 5 and above;
figures must be a single page)
• PowerPoint (figures must be a single
page)
• TIFF
• JPEG (conversion should be done using
the original file)
• BMP
• CDX (ChemDraw)
• TGF (ISISDraw)
Bentham OPEN does not process figures submitted
in GIF format. If the large size of TIFF or EPS figures acts
as an obstacle to online submission, the authors may find
that conversion to JPEG format before submission results in
significantly reduced file size and upload time, while retaining
acceptable quality. JPEG is a 'lossy' format, however. In
order to maintain acceptable image quality, JPEG files should
be saved at high or maximum quality.
Please do not: (1) supply embedded graphics in your word processor
(spreadsheet, presentation) document; (2) supply files that
are too low in resolution, such as those optimized for screen
use (like GIF, BMP, PICT, WPG); or (3) submit graphics that
are disproportionately large for the content. See the following
links for information about acceptable
scaling and resolution and use
of image conversion tools
Chemical Structures: Chemical structures
MUST be prepared according to the guidelines below.
Structures should be prepared in ChemDraw and provided as separate file, submitted both on disk and in printed formats.
Structure Drawing Preferences:
[As according to the ACS style sheet]
Drawing Settings:
Chain angle 120°
Bond spacing 18% of width
Fixed length 14.4 pt (0.500cm, 0.2in)
Bold width 2.0 pt (0.071cm, 0.0278in)
Line width 0.6 pt (0.021cm, 0.0084in)
Margin width 1.6 pt (0.096cm)
Hash spacing 2.5 pt (0.088cm, 0.0347in)
Text settings:
Font Times New Roman
Size 8 pt
Under the Preference Choose:
Units points
Tolerances 3 pixels
Under Page Setup Use:
Paper US letter
Scale 100%
TABLES: Data tables should be submitted in
Microsoft Word table format. Each table should begin with
a heading, consisting of “Table n” (where “n”
stands for the table number) followed by a title in lower
case, except that the first letter is capitalized, with a
period at the end. Additional information should be supplied
as footnotes to the title and content of the table. Tables
should be numbered consecutively using Arabic numerals according
to their order of first mention in the text. Columns and rows
of data should be made visibly distinct by ensuring that the
borders of each cell are displayed as black lines. Tabular
data provided as additional files can be submitted as Excel
spreadsheets.
SUPPORTIVE/SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: We do
encourage to append supportive material, for example a PowerPoint
file containing a talk about the study, a PowerPoint file
containing additional screenshots, a Word, RTF, or PDF document
showing the original instrument(s) used, a video, or the original
data (SAS/SPSS files, Excel files, Access Db files etc.) provided
it is inevitable or endorsed by the journal's Editor.
Supportive/Supplementary Material intended for publication
must be numbered and referred to in the manuscript but should
not be a part of the submitted paper. In-text citations as
well as a section with the heading "Supportive/Supplementary
Material" before the "References" section should
be provided. Here, list all Supportive/Supplementary Material
and include a brief caption line for each file describing
its contents.
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 only on our Web
site. 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). Supportive/Supplementary Material must be provided in a single zipped
file not larger than 4 MB.
Authors must clearly indicate if these files are not for
publication but meant for the reviewers'/editors' perusal
only.
PERMISSION FOR REPRODUCTION: Published/reproduced
material should not be included without written permission
from the copyright holder, which should be forwarded to the
Editorial Office in case of acceptance of the article for
publication. For obtaining permission for reproducing any
material published in an article by Bentham Science Publishers
journal, the request FORM
needs to be filled in and sent to toecolj@benthamopen.org
for consideration.
LANGUAGE AND EDITING: Manuscripts submitted
containing many English typographical errors will not be published.
Manuscripts which are accepted for publication on condition
that the written English submitted is corrected, will be sent
a quote by Eureka
Science, a professional language editing company. Authors
from non-English language countries who have poor English
language written skills, are advised to contact the language
editing company prior to submitting their manuscript to the
journal. Please contact Eureka
Science for a language editing quote at e-mail: info@eureka-science.com
stating the total number of words of the article to be edited.
PROOF CORRECTIONS: To avoid delays following
acceptance for publication, proofs should be checked immediately
on receipt for typographical errors and returned within 48
hours. Major changes are not acceptable at the proof
stage. The corresponding author will be solely responsible
for ensuring that the revised version of the manuscript incorporating
all the submitted corrections receives the approval of all
the authors of the manuscript.
COPYRIGHT: Authors who publish in Bentham OPEN Journals
retain copyright to their work. Submission of a manuscript
to the respective journals implies that all authors have read
and agreed to the content of the Covering Letter or the Terms
and Conditions. It is a condition of publication that manuscripts
submitted to this journal have not been published and will
not be simultaneously submitted or published elsewhere. Plagiarism
is strictly forbidden, and by submitting the article for publication
the authors agree that the publishers have the legal right
to take appropriate action against the authors, if plagiarism
or fabricated information is discovered. Once submitted to
the journal, the author will not withdraw their manuscript
at any stage prior to publication.
Articles are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution non-commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/)
which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution
and reproduction in any medium, providing that the work is
properly cited.
PUBLICATION FEES: The
publication fee details for each article published in the
journal are given below:
Letters: The publication fee for each published
Letter article submitted is USD 250.
Research Articles: The publication fee for
each published Research article is USD 300.
Mini-Review Articles: The publication fee
for each published Mini-Review article is USD 250.
Review Articles: The publication fee for
each published Review article is USD 350.
Book Reviews: The open access fee for a published
book review is USD 450.
Once the manuscript is accepted for publication, the author
will receive an electronic invoice by email. The fee form
is also available on the web site at www.benthamscience.com/open/feeform.
REPRINTS: High quality printed copies of
published articles are available for purchase, if ordered,
with a minimum number of 100 reprints.
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