Editorial - July 2011: Formatting your paper for NDR correctly

We have received many favourable comments about the new-look website and the way papers are presented. However, prospective authors are asked to follow the template for the manuscript available at http://ndrs.org.uk/submission.php and not copy the online format of published papers. Also, photos must be submitted individually as jpeg files (.jpg) and text figures including photos must not contain legends; instead, the figure legends should be placed at the end of the manuscript. We insist on these requirements because of the way that papers are uploaded on to the web pages for publication.

It is in authors' own interests to meet these simple requirements in order to avoid delays before their papers join the editorial pipeline - submissions incorrectly formatted according to our instructions will be returned to the authors for reformatting. Authors should also send photos in files of 'reasonable' size in relation to content and desired resolution. Whereas original photographs taken with many digital cameras may be several MB in size in the native file, there is usually no need for submitted photo files to be more than one MB at the very most while having adequate resolution; file size is easily adjustable with routine photo editing software. One caution, however, is to ensure that resolution of images of phylogenetic trees or other dendrograms is good enough for the text, such as isolate numbers or GenBank accession references, to be legible on magnification.

Finally, attention of authors is drawn to the conditions about use of DNA/RNA sequences to support identification as outlined in our submission instructions (http://ndrs.org.uk/submission.php):

Where DNA sequences are used to support identification of a pathogen, these sequences must be deposited in a public sequence database and the accession number(s) quoted in the paper. Approved papers will not be published until deposited sequences are publicly available.

Recently there has been a backlog of sequences awaiting publication in GenBank due to the high volume of sequences submitted. Authors therefore should not wait until their papers are accepted by NDR before submitting sequences to GenBank.

Next editorial: Who wants to publish in NDR and on what subjects?