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.

Initial submissions

The journal General Physiology and Biophysics will accept manuscripts submitted using the electronic submission system MMPlus only. (For detail information, please read user guide.) Following types of manuscripts may be submitted: research article, review, short communication, hypothesis and letter to editor. It is presumed that manuscripts have not been published and have not been simultaneously submitted elsewhere.

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

Submissions of reviews and perspectives covering topics of current interest are welcomed and encouraged. 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

Contributions should be organized in the sequence: Title, Authors, Affiliations (plus present addresses), Abstract, Key words, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, References, Conflict of Interest, Acknowledgements (optional), Author contributions (optional) and Figure legends. All Figures, Tables and Supplementary material have to be submit as separate files; do not incorporate the manuscript text and figures together in a single file.

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. GPB encourages corresponding authors to provide their ORCID identification number during manuscript submission. ORCID is a persistent digital identifier that uniquely identifies contributors as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. For more information, and to register, please visit ORCID number should be listed after authors last name. If provided, ORCID number of corresponding author will be published in a final manuscript.

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 is limited to 150 words. Reference citations are not allowed.

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.

Materials and Methods

This section should be complete enough to allow experiments to be reproduced. However, only truly new procedures should be described in detail; previously published procedures should be cited, and important modifications of published procedures should be mentioned briefly. Comprehensive information on the statistical analyses used must be included. The methods must contain a statistics section where the statistical tests used are described. If the names of groups are stated in this section, use these names troughout the text of manuscript and also in Figures and Tables.

Results

The results of experiments should be presented with clarity and precision. The article may contain up to 7 Figures and 5 Tables (but 10 display items together - figures or 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.

Discussion

The 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.

Conflicts of Interest

This section is required 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

The references should be in alphabetical order according to the following format:

a) Articles from journals: Hodgkin AL, Huxley AF, Katz B (1952): Measurement of current-voltage relations in the membrane of the giant axon of Loligo. J. Physiol. 116, 424–448
b) Monographs: Zachar J (1971): Electrogenesis and Contractility in Skeletal Muscle Cells. University Park Press, Baltimore and London
c) Chapters from monographs: Haggis GH (1964): The structure and function of membranes. In: Introduction to Molecular Biology (Eds. GH Haggis, D Michie, AR Muir, KB Roberts and PMB Walker), pp. 151–192, Longmans, London

Figures

Figures should be submitted as separate image files and Legends should be included in the manuscript in a separate section. There will be a charge of E120 per colour figures on one printed page.
Figures must complain following criteria:

Graphics should be prepared using applications capable of generating high resolution TIFF or JPEG; each file should be no more than 20 MB. 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. Fig. 1A.)
Always use only Arial fonts in descriptions of figures
Images containing both grayscale and bitmap areas must be supplied at a minimum resolution of 600 dpi. For color figures, the resolution should be 300 dpi at the desired print size.
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).
Numbers, letters and symbols used in multipanelled figures must be consistent. The abscissa and ordinate should be clearly labeled with appropriately sized type, and units of measurement must be given in the 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.
Gray fills should be kept at least 20% different from other fills and no lighter than 10% or darker than 80%
Figures should have titles and legends containing sufficient detail to make the figure easily understood.
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.
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 the same type of font.

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
• Format tables with Word's Table function; do not use tabs or spaces to create a table
• Tables should not include colored text or shading
• 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

Authors submit the article using electronic publishing system MMplus2 (for more information, please read user guide). Authors are expected to pay attention to the instructions for authors and also indicate the category in which they are publishing if it is not a research article. Review process consits of following steps. First, two main editors check, if the article is within the scope of the journal and meet the scientific standards. After initial approval, manuscript is assigned to the editor-in-field who solicits two or more home and outside reviewers with the requisite expertise for preparing the reviewer comments. Editor-in-field make decision and announces it to the corresponding author (article may be accepted, rejected or sent out for next review with minor or major revision). The first decision is done on an average within 30 days to inform the status of the article, but the reviewing process may be delayed. After accepting of manuscript, corresponding author is requested via publishing system to put the invoice data for paying „open acces“ fee and subsequently author receive the invoice formular from Editorial office by e-mail. A "License Agreement" document will be sent as well to complete and confirm authors agreement to the license terms. An example of a license document can be found in the form. After paying the publishing fee, manuscripts are checked by technical editors for preparing to publishing (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. Final pdf of article will be send to the corresponding author. Articles appear in international scientific databases (WOS, PubMed, Scopus) after printing of issue.

Editorial policy of GPB

All manuscript submitted to General Physiology and Biophysics will be first evaluated and reviewed by the Editor-in-chief. He will decide whether the manuscript should be rejected or will be assigned an expert editor. Manuscripts will be rejected if they are out of the scope of the journal, or due to the insufficient methodological quality or the lack of novelty. Manuscripts assigned to the expert editor will be submitted to Crossref Similarity Check for the text similarity analysis. When no significant overlap with other publications including previous publications of authors themselves will be detected, manuscript will be send to peer review.

Open access

Articles published in the journal GPB are freely available for anyone to access and view under an open access publishing model. All accepted articles are published under the licence 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.
Authors pay a one-time Article Processing Charge (APC) in the amount of EUR 350 once an article is accepted for publication. This charge cover the costs of peer review administration and management, professional production of articles in PDF, in addition to other publishing functions. There are no charges for rejected articles, no submission charges, and no surcharges based on the length of an article or supplementary data.
Note: the fee for color figures (100 Euro for 1 color page) is not included in APC.