Chemistry Central Blog
A view from the inside: pre-accepted manuscripts
Last week I gave you a lot of information about the peer-review process. Once the peer-review process is finished, the manuscript moves into the pre-acceptance stage, so called, because many formatting checks must be made before a manuscript can be accepted for publication. The editorial production team checks the manuscript for style and formatting, making sure that the manuscript is up to scratch. The most common formatting changes made pertain to the references, the tables and figures, section headings, and the corresponding author’s details.
The biggest challenge for the production team is properly tagging all the citations in the text with the references listed by the author, which is why it is imperative that authors correctly cite their sources. We encourage all submitting authors to use a reference program, such as EndNote 5 (or later versions) or Reference Manager 10. These programs are especially helpful because they automatically tag all the references in the article, so that we do not have to send the manuscript to an outside team. Using EndNote or similar programs saves us time and money, so we pass those savings on by offering a £30 discount.
Another major concern for the production team is the figures and tables in the manuscript. These must be properly oriented and cropped, and have corresponding labels. Cropping is especially important for the graphical abstracts, which look unprofessional and untidy on the website if improperly cropped. Tables must be divided into cells/fields with clear and consistent text alignment, or else tables with large amounts of text can look muddled and confusing. Tables and figures must also be properly labelled in the order in which they are cited, because all tables and figures will be tagged to their respective references in the text.
One thing that authors frequently do not include is permission to use pictures or figures in their manuscript. If a figure or picture is copyrighted, then the author must obtain explicit permission to use it in his manuscript.
The section headings are another frequently neglected area. Chemistry Central Journal has specific names for its sections and all articles published must reflect this – ‘Introduction’ must be labelled ‘Background’, etc. The sections must also appear in a certain order – ‘Experimental’ after ‘Conclusions’, etc.
Last but not least, it is absolutely essential that a corresponding author be clearly identified on the title page of the manuscript. All articles published in Chemistry Central Journal are deposited in PubMed, which requires a corresponding author before it will accept articles. For more information about proper formatting see our Instructions for Authors.
Typically changes to be made are sent to the author, who responds to these before sending the revised manuscript back. Occasionally, the editorial team may also make changes to the manuscript that the author must approve. The manuscript may get sent back and forth several times before all the appropriate changes are made. Once all the formatting is appropriate, the manuscript is accepted and published in the form of a provisional PDF on the Chemistry Central Journal website. The provisional PDF is not the final version, but our top priority is to provide open-access to information by publishing articles as soon as possible.
Posted by Andrea Albright at 16:31 Comments (0)
