Information for Authors and Reviewers

We welcome original manuscripts intended for a broad audience of professional biologists and advanced students. A wide variety of subject matter is suitable, including summaries of recent advances in biological research, opinion pieces on policy issues important to biologists, and essays on teaching biology. Other topics may include discussions of computers and biology, essays on biology history and philosophy, pieces on the practice of the biological profession, and letters about material previously published in BioScience.

How to Prepare a Manuscript for BioScience

All submissions to BioScience are now made through ScholarOne Manuscripts. Paper submissions are no longer accepted. To submit a manuscript, please go to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ucpress-bio and create an account.

AIBS provides a PDF document, Information for Contributors (81 KB PDF), which should be consulted by authors who wish to submit to BioScience. Manuscripts submitted should comply with the format requirements detailed there. A comprehensive guide to BioScience style is available as well.

The AIBS Publication Agreement (also known as the Copyright Form) is also available as a PDF document. Please do not send a completed publication agreement until an article has been accepted for publication; our receiving a signed agreement does not imply acceptance of an article. The University of California Press provides publication services to AIBS.

Supplementary materials that could benefit researchers may be hosted online. They can be supplied as text, audio, or video files and uploaded as supplementary materials during the submission process. Supplementary material files will not be edited and should conform to BioScience style. Audio and video files should be no more than 10 minutes in length. Video files may be supplied by authors in .3gp, .avi, .mov, .mp4, .mpg, .flv, .swf, .mkv format, codec H.264, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 preferred. Audio files should be MP3 or AAC Codec. 3-Dimensional Objects and Geographic Information System data should be KMZ (compressed KML) files.

If you have further questions about manuscript preparation, please contact .

Policy on Authorship

1. Authorship should be restricted to those individuals who have met each of three criteria: (a) made a significant contribution to the conception and design or the analysis and interpretation of data or other scholarly effort, (b) participated in drafting the article or reviewing and/or revising it for content, and (c) approved the final version of the manuscript.

2. In the case of papers with multiple authors, the senior author (generally the first or last author) has the responsibility for: (a) including as coauthors all those who meet the three criteria defined in part 1 of this policy and excluding those who do not; and (b) obtaining from all coauthors their agreement to be designated as such, as well as their approval of the final version of the manuscript. Of course, any person can refuse to be a coauthor if he or she elects to do so.

3. Coauthors assume full responsibility for all work submitted under their names and, as a coauthor, acknowledge that they meet each of the three criteria for authorship as defined in part 1 of this policy.

4. Honorary or courtesy authorships are inconsistent with the principles of this policy and, as such, are unacceptable.

Published Authors' Rights

Through the standard BioScience/University of California Press Publication Agreement, you (if the original creator of the article) hold the following royalty-free rights for your work published in BioScience:

• to use the article for internal education, classroom, or research purposes of your own institution or company
• to publish the article or permit it to be published by other publishers, as part of any book or anthology of which you are the author or editor, unless the anthology is drawn primarily from BioScience
• to post the article on your personal Web site or within institutional or subject repositories
• to post the article, no sooner than 6 months after its publication in BioScience, in your funding body's archive

For additional information, contact Jennifer Williams at , 703-674-2500 x209.

All copies and uses made of the work under any of the conditions described above must include notice of the publisher's copyright. In the case of Web posting, we kindly ask that you adhere to the following requirements:

Preprints: If you deposit an unedited "working paper" or preprint to a Web site, you must clearly state on the site that your article has been accepted for publication in BioScience and note where (in JSTOR) and when it will be published.

Postprints: Once your article is published, you must remove the preprint from the site and replace it with a postprint. You may use the Publisher-generated PDF, and you must display the following Publisher's Statement in tandem with posting:

"Published as [provide complete bibliographic citation, as appears in the print version of BioScience]. © [Year] by the Regents of the University of California on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS). Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the Regents of the University of California on behalf of AIBS for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® on [JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/r/ucal)] or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center, http://www.copyright.com."

Funding-body archives: For deposits to PubMed Central and other funding-body archives, please be aware that University of California Press asks that you post no sooner than 6 months after final publication.

NOTICE: If your article is not available online, you may scan your article from the paper edition of your journal and post a PDF copy online as per the guidelines above.

Note to All Other Parties

Please purchase permissions to reproduce BioScience content through the Copyright Clearance Center — see Copyright Permissions.

Instructions for BioScience Reviewers and Editorial Board Members

All reviews and recommendations on reviewers for BioScience manuscripts are now provided through ScholarOne Manuscripts. Editorial Board members and reviewers should log on at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ucpress-bio to either write a review or decline an assignment.

Reviewers should disclose any information about employment affiliation and financial interests that is relevant to articles they are asked to review. If a reviewer has a conflict of interest, financial or otherwise, that could affect his or her ability to provide a fair review, he or she should decline to review.