Submission guidelines
Instructions for Authors
Publication Fees
There are no fees to submit or publish unless an author chooses to publish an article with color figures in print or if an author chooses to publish Open Access.
Research Data Policy
A submission to the journal implies that materials described in the manuscript, including all relevant raw data, will be freely available to any researcher wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes, without breaching participant confidentiality.
The journal strongly encourages that all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely should be available to readers. We encourage authors to ensure that their datasets are either deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main manuscript or additional supporting files whenever possible. Please see Springer Nature’s information on recommended repositories.
General repositories - for all types of research data - such as figshare and Dryad may be used where appropriate.
Datasets that are assigned digital object identifiers (DOIs) by a data repository may be cited in the reference list. Data citations should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite: authors, title, publisher (repository name), identifier.
Where a widely established research community expectation for data archiving in public repositories exists, submission to a community-endorsed, public repository is mandatory. Persistent identifiers (such as DOIs and accession numbers) for relevant datasets must be provided in the paper
For the following types of data set, submission to a community-endorsed, public repository is mandatory:
| Mandatory deposition | Suitable repositories |
| Protein sequences | Uniprot |
| DNA and RNA sequences | Genbank DNA DataBank of Japan (DDBJ) EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database (ENA) |
| DNA and RNA sequencing data | NCBI Trace Archive NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) |
| Genetic polymorphisms | dbSNP dbVar European Variation Archive (EVA) |
| Linked genotype and phenotype data | dbGAP The European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA) |
| Macromolecular structure | Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB) Biological Magnetic Resonance Data Bank (BMRB) Electron Microscopy Data Bank (EMDB) |
| Microarray data (must be MIAME compliant) | Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) ArrayExpress |
| Crystallographic data for small molecules | Cambridge Structural Database |
For more information:
Research Data Policy Frequently Asked Questions
Data availability
The journal encourages authors to provide a statement of Data availability in their article. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found, including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. Data availability statements can also indicate whether data are available on request from the authors and where no data are available, if appropriate.
Data Availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):
- 1. The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS]
- 2. The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
- 3. The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
- 4. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
- 5. All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
More examples of template data availability statements, which include examples of openly available and restricted access datasets, are available:
Springer Nature provides a research data policy support service for authors and editors, which can be contacted at researchdata@springernature.com.
This service provides advice on research data policy compliance and on finding research data repositories. It is independent of journal, book and conference proceedings editorial offices and does not advise on specific manuscripts.
