General Physiology and Biophysics

An International Journal

Instructions for Authors

This section provides a description of all types of articles published in General Physiology and Biophysics, and detailed instructions for submitting and preparing all types of manuscripts and any supplementary information.

Open access

All articles published in the journal General Physiology and Biophysics are freely available for anyone to access and view under an open access publishing model. All accepted articles are published under the license Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial (CC BY NC), which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non‐commercial.

Open access publication fee

The cost of “open access” publication is covered by the Article Processing Charge (APC). A fee is payable by the authors, or their institution in the amount of EUR 500 per the accepted article. There are no charges for rejected articles, no submission charges, and no surcharges based on the length of an article or supplementary data. Authors, who choose to publish the color figures in printed version of the journal, are required to pay 120 EURO per one color page. However, if the color figures are not distinguishable in black/white printed version, author will be asked to pay the fee for color figures.

Initial submissions

To submit your manuscript, register and log in to the submission website of the electronic submission system MMPlus only. (For detail information, please read user guide.) Authors are expected to pay attention to the instructions for authors and also to indicate the category in which they are publishing if it is not a research article. It is presumed that manuscript has not been published and has not been simultaneously submitted elsewhere. The following types of manuscripts are acceptable for publishing: Research article, Review, Short Communications, Hypothesis and letter to Editor. To facilitate reviewing process, for an initial submission authors should create a pdf file containing all figures and figure legends inserted at an appropriate place in the main text. During revision following favorable review authors will be asked to submit it separately according to the instructions below.

Research article

Original experimental articles dealing with topics within the scope of the journal are preferentially accepted. The length of a full paper should be the minimum required to describe and interpret the work clearly.

Review

Reviews should be concise, non-limited in length, but it should contain minimal 8,000 words except references.

Short Communications

The main text must be limited to 4,000 words and not contained the section headings. Maximum of three figures and one table is allowed. Abstract is limited to 150 words.

Hypothesis

Theoretical contributions are acceptable as for as they formulate testable hypotheses.

Letter to Editor

Letters to Editor with comments on only the findings published in the journal will be accepted. Article should be no more than 1,000 words and contain a maximum of 10 references and 1 figure.

Preparation of manuscript

Manuscripts should be in English, typed double-spaced with 2.5 cm margins, and an unjustified right margin. Use a standard 12-pt font Times New Roman throughout the main text of manuscript. All pages must be numbered in sequence. To facilitate reviewing process, for an initial submission authors should create also a pdf file containing all figures and figure legends inserted at an appropriate place in the main text. Manuscripts should be organized in the sequence: Title, Authors, Affiliations, Abstract, Key words, Highlights (optional), Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, References, Conflict of Interest, Acknowledgements (optional), Author contributions (optional) and Figure legends. In the main text, the relevant reference should be cited in this way: the name of the author and the year of publishing (e.g. Polak 2020); in the case of two authors include both names (e.g. Smith and Clark 2015) and for more authors, the first author should be named followed by “et al.” (Chen et al. 2019). Each paper should be consistent within itself as to abbreviations, symbols and units. Authors should use SI units wherever possible and when these are not used should provide a conversion factor to SI units.

Title

The title should contain no more than 150 characters (including spaces). Avoid non-standard abbreviations.

Authors

The names of authors should be listed as follows: given name, initials of middle name, surnames. List of author affiliations should be indexed according to order of author names. Strictly follow this rule; you will avoid potential problems when inserting into scientific databases. Affiliations should contain the following information: department(s)/subunit(s); institution; city, state/region, postal code; country. We encourage the authors to provide their ORCID identification number.

Abstract

Text of abstract should be informative and completely self-explanatory, briefly present the topic, state the scope of the experiments, indicate significant data, and point out major findings and conclusions. Abstract should contain max 200 words (in Short communications 150 words). Reference citations in Abstract are not allowed.

Highlights

Highlights section should describe briefly physiological significance of reported results.

Key words

Maximum of five key words should be provided.

Introduction

Section of the introduction should provide a clear statement of the problem, the relevant literature on the subject, and the proposed approach or solution. The current state of the research field should be reviewed carefully and key publications cited correctly. Finally, briefly mention the main aim of the work and highlight the main conclusions.

Materials and Methods

Results

The results of experiments should be presented with clarity and precision. The article may contain maximal 7 Figures and 5 Tables. Additional display items may be published online as Supplementary Material at the discretion of the editor (please see the Supplementary Material section for more information). For all statistics (including error bars), provide the exact n values used to calculate the statistics (reporting individual values rather than a range if n varied among experiments). For representative results, report the number of times that the measurements were repeated. Where relevant, provide exact values for both significant and non-significant p values. For ANOVAs, provide F values and degrees of freedom. For t-tests, provide t-values and degrees of freedom. In order to ensure the integrity and scientific validity of results documented on electrophoretic gels and blots, we ask the authors to provide complete Western blots including corresponding molecular weight ladders. In order to check for the credibility of published data, please upload original, uncut and untreated complete images as supplementary material upon first submission. Data will be available for inspection by reviewers and will not be published together with the article in case of its acceptance, unless authors will wish so.

Discussion

Discussion should interpret the findings in view of the results obtained in this and in past studies on this topic. Conclusions in a few sentences may be included at the end of the paper. Avoid extensive citations and discussion of published literature.

Conflicts of Interest

This section is mandatory for all papers. Authors are required to disclose any private‐sector financial conflicts of interest that might be construed to influence either the results or their interpretation in the manuscript.

Acknowledgements (optional)

Keep acknowledgements brief, with thanks to colleagues or other persons contributing to quality improvement of paper. Names or numbers of grants may be acknowledged.

Author contributions (optional)

You may include a statement that specifies the individual contributions of each co-author.

References

References must follow journal style and sorted in alphabetical order. Please ensure that every reference cited in the text is also present in the reference list (and vice versa). Unpublished results and personal communications are not recommended in the reference list, but may be mentioned in the text. Citation of a reference as "in press" implies that the item has been accepted for publication.

The format for references to research articles, books and chapters from books:

1. The format for references to research articles must give the names of the first 10 authors (with initials, followed by “et al.”), year of publishing, title of article, name of journal (PubMed abbreviation in NLM catalog), volume, first and last page numbers. Example: Patke A, Young MW, Axelrod S (2020): Molecular mechanisms and physiological importance of circadian rhythms. Nat. Rev. Mol. Cell Biol. 21, 67-84
2. For book references, give name(s) of author(s), year of publishing, title of book (edition), publisher. Example: Alberts B, Heald R, Johnson A, Morgan D, Raff M, Roberts K, Walter P (2022): Molecular Biology of the Cell (7th Ed.), W. W. Norton & Company
3. For chapters from books give name(s) of author(s), year of publishing, title of chapter, title of book, editors, pages, publisher. Example: Macdonald JR, Johnson WB (2005): Fundamentals of impedance spectroscopy. In: Impedance Spectroscopy: Theory, Experiment, and Applications. (Eds. Barsoukov E, Macdonald JR), pp. 155-171, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Figures

Figures should be submitted as separate image files. Text of legends should be included in a separate section of the manuscript (Figure Legends) and should contain sufficient detail to make the figure easily understood without reading the text of the manuscript. If a manuscript contains color figures, authors are asked to state during submission whether they would like to pay for the figures to be in color in print. Authors, who choose to publish the color figures in printed version of the journal, are required to pay 120 EURO per one color page – the invoice will be sent to corresponding author by e-mail. If the color figures are not distinguishable in black/white printed version, author will be asked to pay the fee for color figures. No charge is made for color figures online. Authors wishing to have figures in color online but black and white in print must submit both color and black and white versions of the figures for review. A single legend must apply to both the color and black and white figures.
Figures must complain following criteria:

Graphics should be prepared using applications capable of generating high resolution TIFF or JPEG (min 600 dpi). Conversion of images between file types (especially loss formats such as JPEG) should be kept to a minimum to avoid degradation of quality. We cannot accept figure files in certain applications, such as Microsoft Office (PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Access). They are not intended for high-resolution imaging necessary for publication.
Use Arabic numerals to designate figures and capital letters for their parts (e.g. Figure 1A.).
Always use only Arial font for the figure description.
In figures and graphs, use standard symbols found in Microsoft Word.
Appropriately sized numbers, letters, and symbols should be used so they are no smaller than 2 mm after reduction to a single column width (8 cm), a 1.5-column width (12.5 cm), or a full two-column width (17 cm).Choose the size of the image appropriately for the given data; please check that all descriptions in figures are readable.
Numbers, letters and symbols used in multipaneled figures must be consistent. The abscissa and ordinate should be clearly labeled with appropriately size font type, and units of measurement must be given in the round brackets.
Ensure that the error bars are defined throughout the figures. Symbols and abbreviations used in figures must be explained in the text of legend.
For preparing figures use quality graphic programs so that the lettering and lines do not look a little blurry and jagged. To check if the final version is acceptable, enlarge the view of PDF on-screen to 300 or 400%. The font and lines should stay crisp, clear and of the same type of font
If bar graphs will not be color, change the filing in the graphs (shades of gray) to be more different and clearly distinguishable. Gray fills in graphs should be kept at least 20% different from other fills.
The invoice for color images will be made after sending the proof of manuscript.

Tables

Tables should be kept to a minimum and be designed to be as simple as possible. Do not include tables in the manuscript, but submit tables as a separate file.
When creating tables, please adhere to the following guidelines:

Tables are to be typed one-spaced throughout, including headings and footnotes
For formatting tables use Word's Table function; do not use tabs or spaces to create a table
Tables should not include colored text or shading (except Review)
Do not use line breaks or spaces to separate data within a cell. Use separate cells for all discrete data elements within a table
If bold or italic font is used within a table to indicate some feature of the data, please give an explanation of its usage in the legend
All abbreviations within a table must be defined in the table legend or footnotes
The same data should not be presented in both table and graph forms or repeated in the text.

Supplementary Material

In general, Supplementary Material (SM) contains large data sets, methods, calculations, figures, tables and video those directly support the main conclusions of your paper but cannot be included in the main paper due to space or file format restrictions. If a manuscript has accompanying SM, authors are asked to refer to discrete items at an appropriate point in the main text of manuscript. SM is available online-only as a part added at the end of article.

Review process

The review process consits of following steps:

First, Editor-in-chief checks whether the submitted article falls within the scope of the journal and whether it meets the scientific standards. After initial approval, the manuscript is assigned to Editor-in-field who solicits two or more expert reviewers for preparing the reviewer comments. The first decision about the status of the article is done by Editor-in-field on an average within 30 days (article may be accepted, rejected or sent out for next review with minor or major revision).
When the reviewers' requirements are met and manuscript is accepted, corresponding author is requested via publishing system to put the invoice data for paying „open access“ fee. Subsequently author will receive the invoice form from Editorial office by e-mail. After paying, manuscripts are checked by technical editors for preparing to publish (language and grammatical editing, figures quality assessment). Technical editing is done after the referee process is completed.
Prior to publication, editorial office will send galleys proofs to the authors for last checking before printing. No edits may be made after galleys are approved; only minor corrections are allowed. The final pdf article will be sent to the corresponding author free of charge. Articles appear in international scientific databases (WOS, PubMed and Scopus) after printing of issue.