Oxford Journals

EDITORIAL POLICY

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Manuscript preparation
Instructions for manuscript submission

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All material to be considered for publication in Molecular Biology and Evolution should be submitted in electronic form via the journal's online submission system (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mbe). Full instructions for online manuscript submission can be found here or via the online submission site. If for exceptional reasons you are unable to submit your manuscript via the online submission system, please contact the Editorial Office.

Editorial policy

MBE welcomes manuscripts reporting both empirical and theoretical work, as well as significant new statistical and computational methods. All work must have a solid biological basis. MBE is a primary research journal, but review articles are also published.

MBE will only publish work focused on taxonomy and systematics or descriptive studies of genetic diversity and population structure, if they are of interest and relevance to a broad audience.

MBE considers two types of manuscripts for publication, Research Articles (conventional papers without strict length limitations) and Letters (short communications that contain findings of outstanding interest to the broad readership of MBE). Letters have a strict, non-negotiable length limit (see Manuscript preparation).

The decision to accept or reject a manuscript will be made as rapidly as possible. MBE receives many more manuscripts than can be published. To be accepted for publication, a manuscript must make a substantial contribution to the field and be of interest to a broad audience. Manuscripts that report work not suitable for publication in the journal may be returned to authors without detailed review. Authors may seek advice from the Editor on the suitability of a manuscript before submission.

Note that publication in MBE incurs charges that must be paid in full before an article is published. We do not, however, refuse publication to authors who cannot pay charges. Contact the Editorial Office if you think this applies to you.

Manuscripts are considered for publication in MBE on the understanding that authors have complied with all ethical and privacy guidelines and/or legislation covering the work being reported. Manuscripts will only be considered for publication in MBE that are not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Any manuscript or any part of a manuscript that has been published or submitted for publication elsewhere cannot be accepted.

Corresponding authors are required to sign an agreement licensing use of their material to the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution before the paper can be published. Material published in the journal cannot be reproduced or published elsewhere (including on the Internet) without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Publication is taken to imply that the authors are prepared to make available, on request and at reasonable cost, any alignment data, strains, cell lines, or clones used in reported experiments, and any public-domain computer programs on which the reported work is based. Authors may be required to provide computer programs as part of the review process.

Substantial programs that have not previously been published must be provided for publication as Supplementary Material, unless they are already available through the World Wide Web, in which case a URL must be supplied. Newly reported nucleic acid and amino acid sequences, and structural coordinates must be submitted to appropriate public databases (e.g., GenBank http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/; the EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database http://www.ebi.ac.uk/embl/index.html, DNA Database of Japan http://www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp/; the Protein Data Bank http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/; Swiss-Prot http://www.ebi.ac.uk/swissprot/).

Proofs and offprints

The corresponding author will receive a unique URL that gives access to the electronic version of their published paper free of charge. Order forms for purchasing print offprints will be sent to the corresponding author with page proofs. Requests for electronic access and print offprints by other authors should be channelled via the corresponding author.