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 Cadmus Rapid Review. Paper submissions are no longer accepted. To submit a manuscript through Rapid Review, please go to http://www.rapidreview.com/AIBS2/CALogon.jsp 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. The University of California Press provides publication services to AIBS.

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 , 202-628-1500 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 request a link to the version of the article as published in BioScience.

Note to All Other Parties

Please purchase permission through the Copyright Clearance Center — see Copyright Permissions.

Publication Services

Through its in-house production facilities, AIBS can provide a full range of prepress services for both print publishing and electronic media. See Publication Services for details. Fee-based services include

  • Conversion/keying/OCR (data processing)
  • Page layout/composition (pagination in Word, Quark, PageMaker, etc.)
  • Image handling (scanning of artwork, color correction, press-ready proofs, etc.)
  • Electronic conversion (PDF, SGML, XML, HTML, Adobe Reader)

Instructions for BioScience Reviewers and Editorial Board Members

All reviews and recommendations on reviewers for BioScience manuscripts are now provided through Cadmus Rapid Review. Editorial Board members and reviewers should log on at http://www.rapidreview.com/AIBS2/CALogon.jsp to either write a review or decline an assignment.