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Submission guidelines

Contents

Submission information

Please prepare your manuscript following the detailed Instructions for Authors for this journal. They can be accessed from the For Authors and Editors Link Section on the right hand side of this page.

Please make sure to provide the following information with your manuscript:

  • E-mail address
  • Full postal address
  • Telephone and fax numbers

Instructions for Authors

Manuscript submission

Online manuscript submission

Authors should submit their manuscripts online. Electronic submission substantially reduces the editorial processing and reviewing times and shortens overall publication times. Please log in directly at:http://www.editorialmanager.com/mmmo and upload all of your manuscript files following the instructions.

A copy of the certification form included in each issue must be submitted with the manuscript.

Editorial Manager

Certification Form (Download pdf, 75 kB)

Peer-review system

The editorial board decides whether to accept or reject submitted papers in consultation with at least two referees.

Disclosure of confl icts of interest (COI)

When a manuscript is submitted, authors must disclose any financial relationships they have with business enterprises or for-profit corporate organizations (hereafter referred to as 'Commercial Entities') regarding the subjects or materials treated in the research, if the amount exceeds the criteria

specified below.

1) Position on the advisory board or board of directors at one or more Commercial Entity, if the compensation from one Commercial Entity exceeds ¥1,000,000 per year.

2) Equity ownership, if the profit from one Commercial Entity exceeds ¥1,000,000 per year.

3) Patent royalties from Commercial Entities, if the royalty fee from one Commercial Entity exceeds ¥1,000,000 per year.

4) Honoraria for speaking paid by one Commercial Entity, if the amount exceeds ¥500,000 per year.

5) Remuneration for writing paid by one Commercial Entity, if the amount exceeds ¥500,000 per year.

6) Research grants provided by one Commercial Entity, if the amount exceeds ¥1,000,000 per year.

7) Belonging to endowed departments provided by Commercial Entities.

If there is no such COI, the authors should make a statement as follows: The authors declare that they have no confl icts of interest.

These COI-related statements will appear after the Acknowledgments.

For Clinical Studies

If materials used in the study are from patients at clinics, it should be stated in the text that the study has been reviewed and approved by the ethics committee for clinical research in the research institutes where the study has been performed, accompanied by the number for the approval.

Types of articles

Medical Molecular Morphology welcomes articles on basic or clinical research in the fields of cell biology, molecular biology, and medical, veterinary, and dental sciences using techniques for structural research such as electron microscopy, confocal laserscanning microscopes, enzyme histochemistry, immunohistochemistry, X-ray microanalysis, in-situ hybridization, and computer-based 3D reconstruction.

Articles may be in the form of original papers, reviews, case reports, or letters. The maximum length for each type of article is 10, 15, 5, and 1 printed pages, respectively.

Manuscripts in electronic form

Complete manuscripts, including tables and figures, must be supplied in MS Word format; the abstract, text, references, tables and figure legends must be typed double-space with wide margins. A complete list of submitted materials must accompany each manuscript. Incomplete or improperly prepared manuscripts will be rejected without review.

A separate title page should be provided. The abstract, text, acknowledgments, references, tables, legends and figures should begin on separate pages and follow in that order. Standard abbreviations and units should be used. Abbreviations should be defined the first time they are mentioned, and their use in the title and abstract should be avoided.

The generic names of drugs and chemicals should be used.

All manuscripts must be written in English.

Authors who are not fl uent in English must seek the assistance of a colleague who is a native English speaker and is familiar with the field of work. Manuscripts that have been extensively modified in the editorial process will be returned to the authors for retyping.

For vector graphics figures, the preferred format is EPS; for halftones, please use TIFF format. MS Office files are also acceptable.

All files should be uploaded in the online submission system.

Title page

Titles should be brief, specific, and informative.

Include the full names of authors; academic affiliation; address to which proofs are to be sent, including a fax number, telephone number, and e-mail address; and 5–7 key words or phrases for indexing. Key words in the title should be included.

Abstract

A concise description (not more than 200 words) of the purpose, methods, results, and conclusions is required.

Text

The text of experimental articles should be divided into the following sections:

introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, and conclusion.

References

Number references consecutively in the order cited in the text, not alphabetically.

The accuracy of reference data is the authors’ responsibility. Personal communications and unpublished data should not be included in the reference list but may be cited in parentheses in the text. If such a citation is from someone other than the authors, a letter should be submitted in which the direct quotation is given with the signature of its author. In the reference list, provide

inclusive page numbers for all references and give the names of all authors (the use of “et al.” is unacceptable). Journal titles should be abbreviated according to the ISSN List of Title Word Abbreviations (http://www.issn.org/services/online-services/access-to-the-ltwa/). Reference citations in the text should be identified by numbers in square brackets, e.g., Abdelatif et al. [1], Matsuda and Ichida [2], and Morson [3].

1. Abdelatif OMA, Khankhanian NK, Crosby JH, Chamberlain CR Jr, Seigler MM, Tom GD (1989) Malignant fibrous istiocytoma and malignant melanoma: the role fimmunohistochemistry and electron microscopy in differential diagnosis. Mod Pathol 2:477–485

2. Matsuda Y, Ichida T (2006) p16 and p27 are functionally correlated during the progress of hepatocarcinogenesis. Med Mol Morphol 39:169–175

3. Morson PC (1975) Pathology of ulcerative colitis. In: Kirsner JB, Shorter RG (eds) Inflammatory bowel disease. Lea and Febiger, Philadelphia, pp 167–181

ISSN List of Title Word Abbreviations

Tables

Should be cited in the text. Each table should be given a number and a brief informative title and should appear on a separate page.

Explain in footnotes all abbreviations used.

Artwork

Line art

- Definition: Black and white graphic with no shading.

- Do not use faint lines and/or lettering and check that all lines and lettering within the figures are legible at final size.

- All lines should be at least 0.1 mm (0.3 pt) wide.

- Scanned line drawings and line drawings in bitmap format should have a minimum resolution of 1200 dpi.

- Vector graphics containing fonts must have

Halftone art

- Definition: Photographs, drawings, or paintings with fine shading, etc.

- If any magnification is used in the photographs, indicate this by using scale bars within the figures themselves.

- Halftones should have a minimum resolution of 300 dpi.

Combination art

- Definition: a combination of halftone and line art, e.g., halftones containing line drawing, extensive lettering, color diagrams, etc.

- Combination artwork should have a minimum resolution of 600 dpi.

Color art

- Color art is free of charge for online and print publication.

- Color illustrations should be submitted as RGB (8 bits per channel).

Figure lettering

- To add lettering, it is best to use Helvetica or Arial (sans serif fonts).

- Keep lettering consistently sized throughout your final-sized artwork, usually about 2–3 mm (8–12 pt).

- Variance of type size within an illustration should be minimal, e.g., do not use 8-pt type on an axis and 20-pt type for the axis label.

- Avoid effects such as shading, outline letters, etc.

- Do not include titles or captions into your illustrations.

Figure numbering

- All figures are to be numbered using Arabic numerals.

- Figures should always be cited in the text in consecutive numerical order.

- Figure parts should be denoted by lowercase letters (a, b, c, etc.).

- If an appendix appears in your article/chapter and it contains one or more figures, continue the consecutive numbering of the main text.

Do not number the appendix figures, “A1, A2, A3, etc.” Figures in online appendices (Electronic supplementary Material) should, however, be numbered separately.

Figure captions

- Each figure should have a concise caption describing accurately what the fi ure depicts. Include the captions in the text file of the manuscript, not in the figure file.

- Figure captions begin with the term Fig. in bold type, followed by the figure number, also in bold type.

- No punctuation is to be included after the number, nor is any punctuation to be placed at the end of the caption.

- Identify all elements found in the figure in the figure caption; and use boxes, circles, etc., as coordinate points in graphs.

- Identify previously published material by giving the original source in the form of a reference citation at the end of the figure caption.

Permissions

If you include figures that have already been published elsewhere, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner(s) for both the print and online format. Please be

aware that some publishers do not grant electronic rights for free and that Springer will not be able to refund any costs that may have occurred to receive these permissions.

In such cases, material from other sources should be used.

Accessibility

In order to give people of all abilities and disabilities access to the content of your figures, please make sure that

- All figures have descriptive captions (blind users could then use a text-tospeech software or a text-to-Braille hardware)

- Patterns are used instead or in addition to colors for conveying information (colorblind users would then be able to distinguish the visual elements)

- Any figure lettering has a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1.

Electronic Supplementary Material

Electronic supplementary material will be published in the online version only. It may consist of

- Information that cannot be printed: animations, video clips, sound recordings

- Information that is more convenient in electronic form: sequences, spectral data, etc.

- Large original data, e.g. additional tables, illustrations, etc.

Submission

- Supply all supplementary material in standard file formats.

- To accommodate user downloads, please keep in mind that larger-sized files may require very long download times and that some users may experience other problems during downloading.

Audio, video, and animations

- Always use MPEG-1 (.mpg) format.

- Text and Presentations

- Submit your material in PDF format; .doc or .ppt files are not suitable for long-term viability.

- A collection of figures may also be combined in a PDF file.

Spreadsheets

- Spreadsheets should be converted to PDF if no interaction with the data is intended.

- If the readers should be encouraged to make their own calculations, spreadsheets should be submitted as .xls files (MS Excel).

Specialized formats

- Specialized formats such as .pdb (chemical), .wrl (VRML), .nb (Mathematica notebook), and .tex can also be supplied.

- Collecting Multiple Files

- It is possible to collect multiple files in a .zip or .gz file.

Numbering

- If supplying any supplementary material, the text must make specific mention of the material as a citation, similar to that of figures and tables.

- Refer to the supplementary files as “Online Resource”, e.g., “... as shown in the animation (Online Resource 3)”, “... additional data are given in Online Resource 4”.

- Name the files consecutively, e.g. “ESM_3. mpg”, “ESM_4.pdf”.

Captions

- For each supplementary material, please supply a concise caption describing the content of the file.

Processing of supplementary files

- Electronic supplementary material will be published as received from the author without any conversion, editing, or

reformatting.

Accessibility

In order to give people of all abilities and disabilities access to the content of your supplementary files, please make sure that

- The manuscript contain a descriptive caption for each supplementary material

- Video files do not contain anything that fl ashes more than three times per second (so that users prone to seizures caused by such effects are not put at risk).

After acceptance

Upon acceptance of your article you will receive a link to the special Author Query Application at Springer’s web page where you can sign the Copyright Transfer Statement

online.

Once the Author Query Application has been completed, your article will be processed and you will receive the proofs.

You will also receive a separate e-mail for ordering offprints and OpenChoice.

OpenChoice

In addition to the normal publication process (whereby an article is submitted to the journal and access to that article is granted to customers who have purchased a subscription), Springer provides an alternative publishing option: Springer Open Choice. A Springer Open Choice article receives all the benefits of a regular subscription-based article, but in addition is made available publicly through Springer’s online platform SpringerLink.

Springer Open Choice [http://springer.com/openchoice]

OpenChoice

Authors will be asked to transfer copyright of the article to the Japanese Society for Clinical Molecular Morphology (or grant the Japanese Society for Clinical Molecular Morphology exclusive publication and dissemination rights). This will ensure the widest possible protection and dissemination of information under copyright laws.

Offprints

Offprints can be ordered by the corresponding author. Offprints of each paper are available in lots of 50.

Page charge

For reviews, free of page charge.

For original papers, case reports and letters, the page charge is ¥10,000 per printed page.

If the first author is a member of the Society, page charges for original papers, case reports and letters are also free of charge.

Color illustrations

Online and print publication of color illustrations is free

of charge.

Proof reading

The purpose of the proof is to check for typesetting or conversion errors and the completeness and accuracy of the text, tables and figures. Substantial changes in content, e.g., new results, corrected values, title and authorship, are not allowed without the approval of the Editor.

After online publication, further changes can only be made in the form of an Erratum, which will be hyperlinked to the article.

Online first

The article will be published online after receipt of the corrected proofs. This is the official first publication citable with the DOI. After release of the printed version, the paper can also be cited by issue and page numbers.

Open access publishing

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

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