Instructions for Authors

Medical Microbiology Reports (MMR), brings articles in all areas related to medical microbiology. MMR welcomes the submission of manuscripts that meet the general criteria of significance and scientific excellence. Papers will be published approximately 15 days after acceptance.

Submit manuscripts at Online Submission System or an e-mail attachment to the Editorial Office at  manuscripts@scitechnol.com

A manuscript number will be emailed to the corresponding author within 72 hours.

Submission of an Article:

In order to reduce delays, authors should adhere to the level, length and format of the SciTechnol Journals at every stage of processing right from manuscript submission to each revision stage. Submitted articles should have a 300 words summary/abstract, separate from the main text. The summary should provide a brief account of the work by clearly stating the purpose of the study and the methodology adopted, highlighting major findings briefly. The text may contain a few short subheadings of no more than 40 characters each.

Formats for SciTechnol contributions: SciTechnol accepts various formats of literary works such as research articles, reviews, abstracts, addendums, announcements, article-commentaries, book reviews, rapid communications, letters to the editor, annual meeting abstracts, conference proceedings, calendars, case-reports, corrections, discussions, meeting-reports, news, orations, product reviews, hypotheses and analyses.

Open Access:

In recent times, there has been a lot of debate on the implementation of Open Access for research publications. Realizing the potential of Open Access in terms of greater visibility within and beyond the scientific community, there has been a tremendous boost to Open Access movement through various Open Access publishers. Considering the importance of OA SciTechnol is offering open option to authors.

Open Option/Author pays model that operates alongside an established subscription model. Submission of an article remains free. If article accepted for publication, the author is given the choice to pay a fee to make their article open access.

Benefits:

Benefits of Open Access include greater visibility, accelerated citation, immediate access to the full text versions, higher impact and authors retain the copyright to their work. All open access articles are published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. It also allows immediate deposit of the final published version in other repositories without restriction on re-use.

Article Processing Charges (APC) :

Average Article prorcessing time (APT) is 45 days and  all the accepted articles will be online within 5 to 7 working days

Note: All the published articles are in double-columned pages.

APC includes peer-reviewing, editing, publishing, archiving and other costs associated with publication of the articles.

If author wants to make their article on subscription mode then author need to pay the basic production cost of 919 Euros which includes (Pre- quality, review, Graphic, HTML). If author wants to withdraw the article after 78 Hours of receiving the author need to pay the 20% of  open Access article processing fees.Since, the review process requires input of Editors, Reviewers, Associate Managing Editors, Editorial Assistants, Content Writers, Editorial Managing System & other online tracking systems to ensure that the published article is of good quality and is in its best possible form.

Authors submitting from OMICS Group member institutions have their APC covered in full or in part by their institutions. Find out more about our Open Access membership program.

Copy Rights:

Publisher reserves the copyright and any extensions or renewals of that term thereof throughout the world, including but not limited to publish, disseminate, transmit, store, translate, distribute, sell, republish and use the contribution and material contained therein in print and electronic form of the journal and in other derivative works, in all languages and any form of media of expression available now or in the future and to license or permit others to do so.

Article Preparation Guidelines:

• Authors are expected to attach an electronic covering letter completely mentioning the type of manuscript (e.g, Research article, Review articles, Brief Reports, Case study etc.) Unless invited on a special case, authors cannot classify a particular manuscript as Editorials or Letters to the editor or concise communications.
• Confirm that each individual named as an author meets the uniform requirements of the Journal criteria for authorship.
• Please make sure that the article submitted for review/publication is not under consideration elsewhere simultaneously.
• Clearly mention financial support or benefits if any from commercial sources for the work reported in the manuscript, or any other financial interests that any of the authors may have, which could create a potential conflict of interest or the appearance of a conflict of interest with regard to the work.
• A clear title of the article along with complete details of the author/s (professional/institutional affiliation, educational qualifications and contact information) must be provided in the tile page.
• Corresponding author should include address, telephone number, fax number, and e-mail address in the first page of the manuscript and authors must address any conflict of interest with others once the article is published.
• Number all sheets in succession, including references, tables, and figure legends.
• Title page is page 1. On the first page, type the running head (short title for top of each page), title (which cannot include any acronyms), names of the authors and their academic degrees, grants or other financial supporters of the study, address for correspondence and reprint requests, and corresponding author's telephone and fax numbers and e-mail address.

Guidelines for Research Articles:

• Research articles are articles written based on the empirical/secondary data collected using a clearly defined research methodology, where conclusion/s is drawn from the analysis of the data collected.
• The information must be based on original research that adds to the body of knowledge.
• Article/s should provide a critical description or analysis of the data presented while adding new and rapidly evolving areas in the field.
• Include an abstract of maximum 300 words with 7 to 10 important keywords.
• The abstract should be divided into Objective, Methods, Results, and Conclusion.
• Research articles must adhere to a format constituting the introduction followed by a brief review of relevant literature, methodology applied (to collect the data), discussion and References, Tables, and Figure Legends.

Review Articles:

• Review articles are written based mostly on secondary data that is falling in line with the theme of the journal. They are brief, yet critical discussions on a specific aspect of the subject concerned. Reviews generally start with the statement of the problem with a brief abstract of 300 words and few key words. Introduction generally brings the issue forward to the readers followed by analytical discussion with the help of necessary tables, graphs, pictures and illustrations wherever necessary. It summarizes the topic with a conclusion. All the statements or observations in the review articles must be based on necessary citations, providing complete reference at the end of the article.

Commentaries:

• Commentaries are opinion articles written mostly by the veteran and experienced writers on a specific development, recent innovation or research findings that fall in line with the theme of the journal. They are very brief articles with the title and abstract that provides the gist of the topic to be discussed, with few key words. It straight away states the problems and provides a thorough analysis with the help of the illustrations, graphs and tables if necessary. It summarizes the topic with a brief conclusion, citing the references at the end.

Case Study:

• Case studies are accepted with a view to add additional information related to the investigative research that advances in the field of journal.
• It should add value to the main content/article submitted, by providing key insights about the core area. Cases reports must be brief and follow a clear format such as Cases and Methods Section (That describe the nature of the clinical issue and the methodology adopt to address it), discussion section that analyzes the case and a Conclusion section that sums up the entire case.

Editorials:

• Editorials are concise commentaries on a currently published article/issue on journal theme. Editorial office may approach for any such works and authors must submit it within three weeks from the date of receiving invitation.

Clinical Images:

• Clinical Images are nothing but photographic depictions of clinical or medical studies and it should not exceed more than 5 figures with a description, not exceeding 300 words. Generally no references and citations are required here. If necessary, only three references can be allowed.
• Do not add separate figure legends to clinical images; the entire clinical image text is the figure legend. Images should be submitted with the manuscript in one of the following formats: .tiff (preferred) or .eps.

Letters to the Editor/Concise Communications:

• Letters to the editor should be limited to commentaries on previous articles published with specific reference to issues and causes related to it.  It should be concise, comprehensive and brief reports of cases or research findings. It does not follow a format such as abstract, subheads, or acknowledgments. It is more a response or the opinion of the reader on a particular article published and should reach the editor within 6 months of article publication.

Acknowledgement: This section includes acknowledgment of people, grant details, funds, etc.

Note: If an author fails to submit his/her work as per the above instructions, they are pleased to maintain clear titles namely headings, subheadings and respective subtitles.

References: 

Only published or accepted manuscripts should be included in the reference list. Meetings abstracts, conference talks, or papers that have been submitted but not yet accepted should not be cited. All personal communications should be supported by a letter from the relevant authors.SciTechnol uses the numbered citation (citation-sequence) method. References are listed and numbered in the order that they appear in the text. In the text, citations should be indicated by the reference number in brackets. Multiple citations within a single set of brackets should be separated by commas. A range should be given where there are three or more sequential citations. Example: "... now enable biologists to simultaneously monitor the expression of thousands of genes in a single experiment [1, 5-7, 28]." Make sure the parts of the manuscript are in the correct order for the relevant journal before ordering the citations. Figure captions and tables should be at the end of the manuscript.Authors are requested to provide at least one online link for each reference as following (preferably PubMed).Because all references will be linked electronically as much as possible to the papers they cite, proper formatting of the references is crucial. Please use the following style for the reference list:

Examples:  

Published Papers:

1. Laemmli UK (1970) Cleavage of structural proteins during the assembly of the head of bacteriophage T4. Nature 227: 680-685.
2. Brusic V, Rudy G, Honeyman G, Hammer J, Harrison L (1998) Prediction of MHC class II- binding peptides using an evolutionary algorithm and artificial neural network. Bioinformatics 14: 121-130.
3. Doroshenko V, Airich L, Vitushkina M, Kolokolova A, Livshits V, et al. (2007) YddG from Escherichia coli promotes export of aromatic amino acids. FEMS Microbiol Lett 275: 312-318.

   Note: Please list the first five authors and then add "et al." if there are additional authors.

Electronic Journal Articles Entrez Programming Utilities

National Library of Medicine

Books:

1. Baggot JD (1999) Principles of drug disposition in domestic animals: The basis of Veterinary Clinical Pharmacology. (1st edtn), W.B. Saunders company, Philadelphia, London, Toranto.
2. Zhang Z (2006) Bioinformatics tools for differential analysis of proteomic expression profiling data from clinical samples. Taylor & Francis CRC Press.

Conferences: 

Hofmann T (1999) The Cluster-Abstraction Model: unsupervised learning of topic hierarchies from text data. Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Tables:

These should be used at a minimum and designed as simple as possible. We strongly encourage authors to submit tables as .doc format. Tables are to be typed double-spaced throughout, including headings and footnotes. Each table should be on a separate page, numbered consecutively in Arabic numerals and supplied with a heading and a legend. Tables should be self-explanatory without reference to the text. Preferably, the details of the methods used in the experiments should be described in the legend instead of in the text. The same data should not be presented in both table and graph form or repeated in the text. Cells can be copied from an Excel spreadsheet and pasted into a word document, but Excel files should not be embedded as objects.

Note: If the submission is in PDF format, the author is requested to retain the same in .doc format in order to aid in completion of process successfully.

Figures: The preferred file formats for photographic images are .doc, TIFF and JPEG. If you have created images with separate components on different layers, please send us the Photoshop files.All images MUST be at or above intended display size, with the following image resolutions: Line Art 800 dpi, Combination (Line Art + Halftone) 600 dpi, Halftone 300 dpi. See the Image quality specifications chart for details. Image file must be cropped as close to the actual image as possible.Use Arabic numerals to designate figures and upper case letters for their parts (Figure 1). Begin each legend with a title and include sufficient description so that the figure is understandable without reading the text of the manuscript. Information given in legends should not be repeated in the text.

Figure legends should be typed in numerical order on a separate sheet.

Tables and Equations as Graphics:

If equations cannot be encoded in MathML, submit them in TIFF or EPS format as discrete files (i.e., a file containing only the data for one equation). Only when tables cannot be encoded as XML/SGML they can be submitted as graphics. If this method is used, it is critical that the font size in all equations and tables is consistent and legible throughout all submissions.

• Suggested Equation Extraction Method
• Table Specifications
• Equation Specifications

Supplementary Information:

Discrete items of the Supplementary Information (for example, figures, tables) referred to an appropriate point in the main text of the paper.

Summary diagram/figure included as part of the Supplementary Information (optional).All the Supplementary Information must be supplied as a single PDF file and file size should be within the permitted limits. Images should be maximum of 640 x 480 pixels (9 x 6.8 inches at 72 pixels per inch) in size.

SciTechnol Policy Regarding the NIH Mandate:

SciTechnol will support authors by posting the published version of articles by NIH grant-holders to PubMed Central immediately after publication.

Proofs and Reprints:

Electronic proofs will be sent as an e-mail attachment to the corresponding author as a PDF file. Page proofs are considered to be the final version of the manuscript. With the exception of typographical or minor clerical errors, no changes will be made in the manuscript at the proof stage. Authors will have free electronic access to the full text (HTML, PDF and XML) of the article.

Fast Editorial Execution and Review Process (FEE-Review Process):
Medical Microbiology Reports is participating in the Fast Editorial Execution and Review Process (FEE-Review Process) with an additional prepayment of $99 apart from the regular article processing fee. Fast Editorial Execution and Review Process is a special service for the article that enables it to get a faster response in the pre-review stage from the handling editor as well as a review from the reviewer. An author can get a faster response of pre-review maximum in 3 days since submission, and a review process by the reviewer maximum in 5 days, followed by revision/publication in 2 days. If the article gets notified for revision by the handling editor, then it will take another 5 days for external review by the previous reviewer or alternative reviewer.

Acceptance of manuscripts is driven entirely by handling editorial team considerations and independent peer-review, ensuring the highest standards are maintained no matter the route to regular peer-reviewed publication or a fast editorial review process. The handling editor and the article contributor are responsible for adhering to scientific standards. The article FEE-Review process of $99 will not be refunded even if the article is rejected or withdrawn for publication.

The corresponding author or institution/organization is responsible for making the manuscript FEE-Review Process payment. The additional FEE-Review Process payment covers the fast review processing and quick editorial decisions, and regular article publication covers the preparation in various formats for online publication, securing full-text inclusion in a number of permanent archives like HTML, XML, and PDF, and feeding to different indexing agencies.