Submission guidelines

Molecular & Cellular Toxicology (MCT)

Molecular & Cellular Toxicology (MCT) is owned and published by The Korean Society of Toxicogenomics and Toxicoproteomics (KSTT). The journal is published four times a year in a printed and electronic forms. Its editorial policies are the responsibility of the editor, the associate editors, and the editorial board under the general authority of the Publications Committee and the Council.

Scope of Journal

MCT publishes original Research Articles, and Mini Reviews in all areas of the complex interaction between the cell’s genome, chemicals in the environment, and disease. Acceptable manuscripts are the ones that deal with some topics of toxicology, including those that lie in the domains of analytical chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology, genomics, epigenomics, proteomics, bioinformatics and environmental biology with the aspects of molecular and cellular levels. Emphasis will be placed on toxic effects observed at relevant genomics and proteomics, which have direct impact on drug development, environmental health, public health policy, food safety, forensic medicine, and preventive medicine.

Publication Ethics

Manuscripts submitted for publication must contain a statement to the effect that all human studies have been approved by the appropriate ethics committee and have therefore been performed in accordance with the ethical standards laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments. It should also be stated clearly in the text that all persons gave their informed consent prior to their inclusion in the study. Details that might disclose the identity of the subjects under study should be omitted.

The editors reserve the right to reject manuscripts that do not comply with the above-mentioned requirements. The author will be held responsible for false statements or failure to fulfill the above-mentioned requirements. Experiments causing pain or discomfort to animals must be performed according to the guidelines of the International Association for the Study of Pain as published in Pain 1983; 16:109-110. In accordance with these guidelines, authors performing such experiments must justify explicitly that the procedures used are scientifically necessary and that the minimum possible pain or stress has been imposed on the animals. For all animal studies which extend beyond a first hypothesis generation, a sample size calculation should be provided. Authors should also indicate whether the experimental work was reviewed by an ethics committee or its equivalent.

Other ethical considerations should be in keeping with the most recent guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (www.icmje.org). In addition, a statement must be provided as part of a covering letter, signed by all authors, which approves the manuscript for publication, states that the manuscript has not been published in part or as a whole elsewhere and indicates source(s) of funding and absence of any possible conflicts of interest.

Clinical trials should be presented in accordance with the revised CONSORT statement as published in several leading journals (e.g. http://www.biomedcentral. com/1471-2288/1/2). As outlined in this statement, a patient flow chart should be included in all clinical trials submitted for publication.

The MCT journal is a part of iThenticate, which is an initiative to help editors verify the originality

of submitted manuscripts. Every manuscript will be submitted to the program to compare with the database.

Types of papers

Two types of manuscripts are accepted, full-length research articles and mini reviews. Authors are urged to keep the length of manuscripts below eight printed pages for research articles and mini reviews (24 typed pages of manuscript in double spacing including figures and tables). All mini reviews are by invitation only, and subjects are chosen by the MCT editors.

Language of paper

All manuscripts should be written in English. Authors, who are unsure of proper English usage, should have their manuscripts checked by someone with English proficiency (or native English speaker).

Manuscripts may be editorially rejected, without review, on the basis of poor English or lack of conformity to the standards set forth in these Instructions.

All manuscripts submitted for publications will be screened for English by the professional English editor in MCT.

Publication charges

Corresponding authors of articles accepted for publication will receive an email notifying them how to pay page and any other applicable publication charges before publication.

● Traditional publishing model:

When an article is accepted for publication, the author/s or funder/s pay an Publication charge.

Corresponding author will be charged

￦700,000 (Paid member from Korea)

￦800,000 (Non-paid member from Korea)

￦1,000,000 (Non-member from Korea)

US$800 (Overseas)

US$3,280 (Open Choice)

per article after final acceptance. Non-member corresponding authors may join KSTT to obtain discounts on publications charges. Authors may join KSTT and renew or upgrade membership.

● Open Access:

when an article is accepted for publication, the author/s or funder/s pay an Article Processing Charge (APC).

Open Choice allows you to publish open access in more than 1900 Springer Nature journals, making your research more visible and accessible immediately on publication.

Benefits:

• Increased researcher engagement: Open Choice enables access by anyone with an internet connection, immediately on publication.

• Higher visibility and impact: In Springer hybrid journals, OA articles are accessed 4 times more often on average, and cited 1.6 more times on average*.

• Easy compliance with funder and institutional mandates: Many funders require open access publishing, and some take compliance into account when assessing future grant applications.

It is easy to find funding to support open access – please see our funding and support pages for more

information.

*) Within the first three years of publication.

Springer Nature hybrid journal OA impact analysis, 2018.

Open Choice

Funding and Support pages

Copyright and license term – CC BY

Open Choice articles do not require transfer of copyright as the copyright remains with the author. In opting for open access, the author(s) agree to publish the article under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

Find more about the license agreement

Copyright

Submission of a manuscript implies: that the work described has not been published before (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture, review, or thesis); that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere; that its publication has been approved by all coauthors, if any, as well as tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities at the institution where the work was carried out. The author warrants that his/her contribution is original and that he/she has full power to make this grant. The author signs for and accepts responsibility for releasing this material on behalf of any and all coauthors. Transfer of copyright to KSTT and Springer becomes effective if and when the article is accepted for publication. After submission of the Copyright Transfer Statement signed by the corresponding author, changes of authorship or in the order of the authors listed will not be accepted by KSTT and Springer. The copyright covers the exclusive right (for U.S. government employees: to the extent transferable) to reproduce and distribute the article, including reprints, translations, photographic reproductions, microform, electronic form (offline, online) or other reproductions of similar nature. An author may self-archive an author created version of his/her article on his/her own website. He/she may also deposit this version on his/her institution’s and funder’s (funder designated) repository at the funder’s request or as a result of a legal obligation, including his/her final version, provided it is not made publicly available until after 12 months of official publication. He/she may not use the publisher’s PDF version which is posted on www.springerlink.com for the purpose of self-archiving or deposit. Furthermore, the author may only post his/her version provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer’s web-site. The link must be accompanied by the following text: “The original publication is available at https://www.springer.com/journal/13273/.” All articles published in this journal are protected by copyright, which covers the exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute the article (e.g., as offprints), as well as all translation rights. No material published in this journal may be reproduced photographically or stored on microfilm, in electronic data bases, video-disks, etc., without first obtaining written permission from the publishers. The use of general descriptive names, trade names, trademarks, etc., in this publication, even if not specifically identified, does not imply that these names are not protected by the relevant laws and regulations. While the advice and information in this journal is believed to be true and accurate at the date of its going to press, neither the authors, the editors, nor the publishers can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publishers make no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein.

Materials availability

By publishing in the journal, the authors are obligated to honor any reasonable request by qualified investigators for unique propagative materials, such as cell lines, hybridomas, and DNA clones, that are described in the paper. Authors must disclose upon submission of the manuscript any restrictions on the availability of materials or information.

Peer Review process

All manuscripts are considered to be confidential and are reviewed by the editors, members of the editorial board, or qualified ad hoc reviewers in a single-blinded manner. All manuscripts submitted to MCT are reviewed critically, and it is the responsibility of the editors, the associate editors, and editorial board to determine their suitability for publication. After receipt of a manuscript by the editor, it is sent to an associate editor who usually assigns it to members of the editorial board or qualified ad hoc reviewers working in the similar fields. The board member then makes a definitive recommendation for acceptance, revision, or rejection based on the scientific merit and technical quality of the studies reported. Referees may be consulted when additional expertise is required. All board members and referees who review a manuscript remain unknown to the authors. Every manuscript is treated by the reviews as a privileged communication. All the listed authors are required to submit the signed copy of Manuscript Content Verification form as a condition of agreement to publish the article along with the manuscript. The process will not proceed without a signed copy of the agreement form. In cases where a manuscript is not accepted, the agreement shall become null and void. The form is available at https://www.tox.or.kr or https://www.springer.com/journal/13273/. Upon acceptance of the manuscript, the authors are required to submit the signed copyright transfer agreement as a condition of agreement to publish

the article.

Manuscript submission

All submitted manuscript should contain original research that has not been published previously and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Submit a digital file including high quality graphics prepared in appropriate formats. Our online submission system will guide you through the process of manuscript submission. The system converts your article files to a single PDF file used in the peer review process. The preferred format is Microsoft Word. Editable files are required to typeset your article for final publication. All correspondence, including notification of the Editor’s decision and requests for revision, is sent by email. Please electronically submit your article via https://www.springer.com/journal/13273/. A cover letter indicating the address, telephone and email address of the corresponding author must be included.

Corresponding authors must now supply an ORCID identifier during the submission process. Please make sure to register with ORCID before submitting manuscripts to the journal.

Preparation of manuscript

Contributions should be double spaced and written in English (spellings as in the Oxford English Dictionary). Contributions should be organized in the sequence: title, author list, text, methods, acknowledgements, references, Supplementary Information line (if any), tables, and figure legends. When providing word counts for the editors, authors need only state the number of words in the text (and, separately, methods and total figure legends). Title, acknowledgement and other matter do not need to be included in the word count.

Title: Titles do not exceed 90 characters (including spaces), and do not normally include numbers, acronyms, abbreviations or punctuation. Title should clearly and concisely reflect the emphasis and content of the paper. They should include sufficient detail for indexing purposes but be general enough for readers outside the field to appreciate what the paper is about. Please provide “running title” of paper with less than 50 words.

Author list: MCT prefers authors to be listed without details of relative status, but instead to specify the contribution made by their coauthors in the acknowledgements. MCT strongly encourages coauthors to specify their contributions in this way. If authors regard it as essential to indicate that two or more coauthors are equal in status, they may be identified by a symbol with the caption ‘these authors contributed equally to the work’ immediately under the address list. Present addresses appear immediately below the author list; all other essential author related explanation is in the acknowledgements.

Text: Full length papers should be no more than 8 typeset pages of MCT. An uninterrupted page of text contains about 300 words. A typical papers and reviews contain about 3,000 words of text and, additionally, five small display items (figures and/or tables) with brief legends. When submitting new or revised manuscripts, authors should state in a cover letter to the editor their rough estimate of the length of their paper in terms of number of pages of MCT and fill out the format checklist. Longer papers are sometimes allowed but only if explicitly suggested by the editor. Authors of contributions that significantly exceed the limits stated here or specified by the editor will have to shorten their papers before acceptance, inevitably delaying publication.

Abstract: The abstract of an original article should be its clear, concise and accurate summary of the main findings, having no more than 300 words. Use of abbreviations should be avoided and the references should not be cited in the abstract. The abstract should be divided into explicit sub-headings, such as backgrounds, objectives, results, and conclusion. In case of a review article, the abstract should have the purpose of review and recent findings to represent the purpose of the review and the summary of the articles in 300 words or fewer. A short list of keywords up to 10 should be included immediately after the abstract as index words. These words or phrases are used for indexing or searching services. Because the abstract will be published separately by abstracting services, it must be complete and understandable without reference to the text.

Introduction: Introduction should be as concise as possible, without subheadings. The introduction should present the purpose of the studies reported and their relationship to earlier work in the field. It should allow the reader to understand and evaluate the results of the present study without referring to previous publications on the topic.

Materials and Methods: If brief (less than 200 words in total), they can be included in the text at an appropriate place. Otherwise, they should be described at the end of the text in a ‘Methods’ section, subdivided by short, bold headings referring to methods used. Descriptions of methods already published should be avoided; a reference number can be provided to save space, with the new addition or variation briefly stated. This whole section should not exceed 800 words and should ideally be shorter. If more space is required for Methods, the editor may suggest use of online only supplementary information for this purpose after submission and after receiving referees’ reports. Supplementary material is also peer reviewed.

Results and Discussion: Results and Discussion sections should be written as separate paragraphs.

● Results section should be clear and concise and should be organized into subheadings.

● Discussion section should explore the significance of the results of the topic without dividing into subheadings. Avoid extensive citations and discussion of published literature.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are brief and follow the reference list. Authors are encouraged to include a statement to specify the contributions of each coauthor. Acknowledgements contain grant or contribution numbers, but do not contain thanks to anonymous referees and editors, or effusive comments.

Author contribution

The contributions of all authors must be described. Examples include designing research studies, conducting experiments, acquiring data, analyzing data, providing reagents, and writing the manuscript. Multiple contributions may be listed for a single individual, and more than one individual may be associated with a single contribution. For manuscripts with 2 or more co–first authors, the method used in assigning the authorship order among co–first authors must be stated.

Compliance with ethical standards

It consists of Conflict of interest and Ethical approval. These sections should be written as separate paragraphs.

● Conflict-of-interest statement: MCT requires all authors to disclose any potential conflicts of interest at the end of the manuscript text and in the cover letter. When the authors submit a manuscript, they are responsible for recognizing and disclosing financial and other conflicts of interest that might bias their work. The authors should acknowledge all financial support for the work and other financial or personal connections to the work in the manuscript. In those content, all authors should be listed separately.

Examples to be used:

author A declares that he/she has no conflict of interest

author B declares that he/she has no conflict of interest

author C declares that he/she has no conflict of interest

● Ethical approval: When the submitted manuscript is reporting experiments on human subjects or animals, the authors should indicate in the manuscript that all the experimental procedures were performed in accordance with the ethical standards as recommended by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (http://www.icmje.org/rum_full.pdf) or the Institutional Committee of Review Board of authors’ institute. Even if Animal / Human samples are not used, be sure to write the phrase ‘This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors’.

Data availability statement: Data Availability Statement (DAS) is a short sentence that describes where the data used in the article is available and under what conditions it can be accessed. Data can include not only numerical data but also qualitative data or evidence in a broad sense. To submit manuscript, authors need to write a Data Availability Statement as follows.

“The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.”

References

In the text of the manuscript, a reference should be cited by author and year of publication, no more than two authors may be cited per reference, if there are more than two authors, only the first author should be given, followed by ‘et al.’ (i.e. Jones et al., 2006). In the reference list, citations should be listed in alphabetical order and authors should be included unless there are more than five, in which case only the first author should be given, followed by ‘et al.’. Only articles that have been published or submitted to a named publication should be in the reference list; papers in preparation should be mentioned in the text with a list of authors (or initials if any of the authors are coauthors of the present contribution). Published conference abstracts, numbered patents and preprints on recognized servers may be included in reference lists.

● Authors should be listed surname first, followed by a comma and initials of given names.

● Titles of articles cited in reference lists should be in upright, not italic text; the first word of the title is capitalized, the title written exactly as it appears in the work cited, ending with a full stop. Book titles are italic with all main words capitalized. Journal titles are italic and abbreviated according to common usage; authors can refer to MCT, the Index Medicus or the American Institute of Physics style manual for details.

● The publisher and city of publication are required for books cited.

● References to web only journals should give authors, article title and journal name above, followed by url in full or doi if known and the year of publication in parentheses.

● References to websites should give authors if known, title of cited page, url in full, and year of posting in parentheses.

● Examples:

Reference to a journal publication

Jones RB, Gordus A, Krall JA and MacBeath G (2006) A quantitative protein interaction network for the ErbB receptors using protein microarrays. Nature 439:7073: 168-174.

Pincus SH et al. (2017) Design and in vivo characterization of immunoconjugates targeting HIV gp160. J Virol 91: e01360-16

Reference to a book

McKusick VA in Mendelian Inheritance in Man 12th Ed. (John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore,1998).

Reference to a chapter in an edited book

Bruce ME, Fraser H, McBride PA, Scott JR and Dickinson AG in Prion Diseases of Humans and Animals (eds Prusiner SB, Collinge J, Powell J and Anderton B) 497-508 (Ellis Horwood, New York, London, 1992).

Reference to a website

Global Effluent Guidelines, www.levistrauss.com/Downloads/GEG2007.pdf (2007).

Funding Statement

All authors must disclose any financial supports received for the work from the organizations and should provide the grant number if necessary.

Informed consent

The manuscripts related to the studies on human subjects or samples obtained from humans should receive the informed consent as recommended by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (http://www.icmje.org/rum_full. pdf) or the Institutional Committee of Review Board of authors’ institute. When informed consent has been obtained, it should be indicated in the submitted article. In addition, even when consent has been given, the personal identifying information such as subjects’ names, initials, and personal identification numbers should not be used. The identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential.

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Information (SI) is limited to data and other materials that directly support the main conclusions of a paper but cannot be included in the main paper for reasons such as space or file format restrictions, or may also be related to the Experimental Procedures section of the paper. SI should not be used to present data that are preliminary or that conceptually go beyond the main point of the paper. Each type of Supplemental Data should be continuously numbered independent of the main figure numbering (example: Figure S1, Figure S2; Table S1, Table S2; Movie S1, Movie S2, etc.). Once the SI is posted on our website, author cannot alter it after the paper has been accepted for publication. The total size of SI files should not exceed 160 MB (movies should not exceed 50 MB).

Tables

Table should each be presented on a separate page, portrait (not landscape) orientation, and upright on the page, not sideways. Tables have a concise title in bold text. Upright roman (not bold or italic) type of the same size as the rest of the text is used. The body of the table should not contain horizontal or vertical rules; these will be added by MCT when necessary after the paper has been accepted for publication. Tables should be as small as possible. Bear in mind the size of a MCT page as a limiting factor when compiling a table and ensure it will reduce appropriately. Symbols and abbreviations are defined immediately below the table, followed by essential descriptive material as briefly as possible, all in double spaced text. The preferred format for regular tables is Microsoft Word; however, Acrobat PDF is also acceptable. Note that a straight Excel file is not currently an acceptable format. Excel files must be either embedded in a Word document or converted to PDF before being uploaded.

Figures

All graphics should be submitted at their intended publication size; the image uploaded should be100% of its print dimensions so that no reduction or enlargement is necessary. The maximum width for a 1 column figure is 8 cm, and for a 2 column figure is 145 cm. Each figure should be able to fit on a single page. The appropriate minimum resolution is at least 300 dpi for color in RGB mode and black and white in grayscale, 600 dpi for combination art (lettering and images), and 1200 dpi for line art. TIFF format is preferred for electronic artwork; PNG, JPEG, or PDF formats are also acceptable. For lettering on the figures, you should embed fonts in the figures and only use the following fonts in your artwork using a clear, sans-serif typeface (for example, Helvetica, Arial); the same typeface should be used for all figures in a paper. Different panels should be labeled with capital letters (A, B, etc) located at the top left corner. The figure number should be placed well outside the boundaries of the image itself. Font size should be 7.5 points. All display items should be on a white background, and should avoid excessive boxing, unnecessary color, spurious decorative effects (such as three dimensional histograms) and highly pixelated computer drawings. Scale bars should be used rather than magnification factors, with the length of the bar defined in the legend rather than on the bar itself. Any type of lines including thick and solid lines should be no finer than 1 point in thickness. We place an upper limit of 20 MB on individual figure files.

Figure legends: Figure legends should be listed one after the other, as part of the text document, separate from the figure files. Please do not write a legend below each figure. Each figure legend should begin with a brief title for the whole figure and continue with a short description of each panel and the symbols used. In legends, visual cues rather than verbal explanations such as “open red triangles” should be used.

To find out more about publishing your work Open Access in Molecular & Cellular Toxicology, including information on fees, funding and licenses, visit our Open access publishing page.