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# Nucleic Acids Research

# GENERAL POLICIES OF THE JOURNAL

Authors' responsibilities
Submission of a manuscript implies that it reports unpublished work and that it is not under consideration elsewhere. The submission process must be carried out by the corresponding author. The corresponding author checks the relevant boxes during online submission on behalf of all authors to indicate that they are in complete agreement with the contents of the manuscript and are prepared to abide by the general policies of NAR as listed below. If the corresponding author is not the senior author, then full contact details of the latter must be included in the submission. Under certain circumstances the journal may need to communicate with the senior author of the manuscript. The email addresses of all co-authors must also be provided.

During submission, authors are requested to upload a cover letter containing additional information which will aid the processing of the manuscript. This must include details of any previous submission of the work to NAR, either partial or in entirety, which has been rejected, regardless of any changes in authorship. The manuscript number of the earlier submission must be provided, together with a file containing the responses to any editorial or referee reports and a summary of the changes that have been made. The cover letter should also contain details of any data obtained from other groups which is cited in the manuscript as a personal communication(s). The corresponding author must confirm that permission has been obtained for each inclusion.

Authors must also advise the journal of any related manuscripts currently under consideration by NAR or any other journal, especially where the related manuscript describes work that may impinge significantly on the results or interpretation of the current NAR submission. A file of the related manuscript should be uploaded into the online submission system.

Conflicts of Interest
NAR policy requires that EACH author of all manuscripts reveal any financial interests or connections, direct or indirect, or other situations that might raise the question of bias in the work reported or the conclusions, implications, or opinions stated - including pertinent commercial or other sources of funding for the individual author(s) or for the associated department(s) or organization(s), personal relationships, or direct academic competition. When considering whether you should declare a conflicting interest or connection please consider the conflict of interest test: Is there any arrangement that would embarrass you or any of your co-authors if it was to emerge after publication and you had not declared it?

It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to ensure that all co-authors adhere to this policy and to confirm whether they have any conflicts to declare. The corresponding author should then, during the submission process, complete the conflict of interest field on behalf of all co-authors.
If the corresponding author is unable to do this, then each co-author must complete and return an individual copy of the form available at the following link (Conflict of Interest Form). It is the corresponding author's responsibility to co-ordinate the completion and return of written forms. The forms should be faxed to either the UK (+44 2380 597748) or the US (+1 978 380 7406) Senior Editorial Office before the manuscript is accepted.
In the event of one or more co-authors declaring a conflict of interest, details should be provided either online during the submission process or in the faxed form, and a prominent paragraph included in the submitted manuscript. If the manuscript is published, this information will be communicated in a statement in the published paper.
If you are in any doubt as to what constitutes a conflict, please read the FAQs or contact one of the Senior Editorial Offices.

Ethical conduct
NAR expects that authors will observe high standards with respect to publication ethics. For example, the following practices are unacceptable: (1) falsification or fabrication of data, (2) plagiarism, including duplicate publication of the authors' own work, in whole or in part without proper citation, (3) misappropriation of the work of others such as omission of qualified authors or of information regarding financial support. Allegations of unethical conduct will be discussed initially with the corresponding author. In the event of continued dispute the matter will be referred to the author's institution and funding agencies for investigation and adjudication.

Oxford Journals, publisher of NAR, is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and the journal strives to adhere to the COPE code of conduct and guidelines. For further information see http://www.publicationethics.org.uk.

Copyright
Copyright of any article published in NAR will belong to the author or their designee. However, it is a condition of publication in the journal that authors grant an exclusive licence to publish to Oxford University Press. A copyright licence form should be completed and returned to Oxford University Press at the time of acceptance of the manuscript. This ensures that requests from third parties to reproduce articles are handled efficiently and consistently and allows the article to be as widely disseminated as possible. As part of the licence agreement, authors may use their own material in other publications provided that the Journal is acknowledged as the original place of publication and Oxford University Press as the Publisher. Information about the New Creative Commons licence can be found here.

Author Self-Archiving/Public Access policy
For information about this journal's policy, please visit our Author Self-Archiving policy page.

Authorisations
If previously published tables, illustrations or more than 200 words of text are to be included in an article in NAR, then the copyright holder's permission must be obtained, and copies of such permission letters should be forwarded to the production office upon acceptance of the manuscript. Authors must obtain authorisation for all personal communications.

Joint first authorship
Such a footnote is allowed, provided that the relevant boxes are completed during the initial online submission. The footnote should contain the statement: "The authors wish it to be known that, in their opinion, the first x authors should be regarded as joint First Authors". Other statements concerning joint authorship will not be published. Joint senior/last authorship is not permitted.

Back-to-back publication
The Editors will honour requests for back-to-back publication only if the manuscripts are submitted simultaneously and the relevant boxes completed during online submission.

Proofs
Corresponding authors will be sent proofs in PDF format by email. It is the authors' responsibility to check proofs thoroughly.

Post-publication corrections
Corrections are made if the publication record is seriously affected by the accuracy of published information. NAR operates a rapid online publication model, 'Advance Access'. Advance Access publication constitutes definitive publication and is not subject to informal changes. However if a significant error is discovered after publication of an Advance Access article, which necessitates correction to the online version, a new version will be published online with a footnote to outline the changes made. Both versions will ocntinue to be available online.

Corresponding authors who wish to have considered the publication of a correction that materially affects the data or conclusions of their already published paper should contact the editor who handled their manuscript.

Page charges
ALL papers are made freely available under an Open Access model at the NAR website http://www.nar.oxfordjournals.org) and also at PubMed Central (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/) immediately upon publication.
For all papers published in 2007 there is an Open Access charge of $1185/£625/935 euros for authors from member institutions, and $2370/£1250/1870 euros for authors from institutions without NAR membership.
For all papers published in 2008 the charge for authors at institutions with NAR membership will be $1335/£685/1025 euros. The charge for authors at institutions without NAR membership will be $2670/£1370/2050 euros.

There are no charges for colour figures (use of colour is subject to editorial discretion), and no excess page charges for papers that occupy 9 pages or less. Papers published in 2007 that occupy more than 9 pages incur an additional charge of $170/£90/135 euros for each page in excess of 9. Papers published in 2008 that occupy more than 9 pages will incur an additional charge of $195/£100/150 euros for each page in excess of 9.
Waivers or discounts will be considered sympathetically for corresponding authors from developing countries and those in genuine hardship. An NAR Author Loyalty Discount may also be available. Further information is available from our website http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/openaccess.
Orders from UK will be subject to a 17.5% VAT charge. For orders from the rest of the EU, we will assume that the service is provided for business purposes, please provide a VAT number for yourself or your institution and ensure you account for your own local VAT correctly.

Offprints
The publisher will provide free online access to the full text (both HTML and PDF) of the article. Print offprints, including online-only papers, are available for a charge. Offprints of papers containing colour figures are subject to a 100% surcharge. An offprint order form detailing these options should be completed and returned directly to the publisher on acceptance.

Availability of materials

- Research materials: including strains, clones, cell lines, hybridomas, X-ray and NMR co-ordinates, algorithms and computer programs that are described in publications in the Journal should be made available to any qualified investigator promptly upon request. Materials must be available freely or at reasonable cost to members of academic institutes
- Databases: must be freely available to all via the web and not be password protected. Authors are encouraged, but not required, to make the contents of their databases freely available as flat or relational files upon request.
- Web server:: Authors are encouraged, but not required, to make the code available for their web tools upon request.

The Editors are prepared to deny further publication rights in the Journal to authors unwilling to abide by these principles.

Deposition of sequence and structural data
Sequence information, co-ordinates used to create molecular models described in a manuscript, and structural data must be submitted in electronic form, prior to acceptance, to the appropriate database for release no later than the date of publication of the corresponding article in the Journal. Deposition numbers and/or accession numbers provided by the database should be included in the manuscript and entered into the relevant boxes during online submission or communicated to the Executive Editor handling the manuscript as soon as received. In cases where there may be no appropriate database, atomic co-ordinates may be included in the publication as supplementary material. Manuscripts will not be published until the Journal is in receipt of the deposition number.

For papers reporting novel nucleic acid sequences
Nucleic acid sequence information must be deposited with one of the three major collaborative databases (EMBL/GenBank/DDBJ). For sequences obtained from a public or private web site, it is the author's responsibility to ensure that any sequence used within the manuscript is deposited before publication. It is necessary to submit sequences to one database only since data are exchanged between EMBL, GenBank and DDBJ on a daily basis. New sequence names and their accession numbers should be listed at the beginning of the Materials and Methods section to aid searches by readers. In order to allow new methods of data search, NAR encourages authors to cite GenBank accession numbers when referring to established sequences within their manuscript. Contact details for submission to databases.

For papers reporting novel three-dimensional structures
Atomic co-ordinates and the related experimental data (structure factor amplitudes/intensities and/or NMR restraints) must be deposited with a database. Authors must agree to release the atomic coordinates and experimental data when the associated article is published.
The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) is appropriate for deposition of data on nucleosides, nucleotides and other small molecules.
A member site of the Worldwide Protein Data Bank (www.wwpdb.org): RCSB PDB (www.pdb.org), MSD-EBI (www.ebi.ac.uk/msd), PDBj (www.pdbj.org), or BMRB (www.bmrb.wisc.edu) is appropriate for deposition of data on proteins determined by X-ray crystallography and for all macromolecules determined by NMR methods.
The Nucleic Acid Database (NDB) is appropriate for atomic co-ordinate and structure factor data for crystal structures of nucleic acids. Contact details for submission to databases.
Contact details for submission to databases.

For papers reporting novel protein sequences
Protein sequences, which have been determined by direct sequencing of the protein, must be submitted to UniProt (i.e. TrEMBL, Swiss-Prot and PIR) using the interactive submission tool SPIN. Please note that they do not provide accession numbers, IN ADVANCE, for protein sequences that are the result of translation of nucleic acid sequences. These translations will forwarded automatically from the nucleotide sequence databases (EMBL/GebBank/DDBJ) and assigned UniProt accession numbers on incorporation into UniProt. Results from characterization experiments should also be submitted to UniProt: for novel sequences, these should be included with the sequence submission. Existing UniProt entries should also be updated. This can include information such as function, subcellular location, subunit, etc. Contact details for submission to databases.

Microarray data All authors must comply with the 'Minimal Information About a Microarray Experiment' (MIAME) guidelines published by the Microarray Gene Expression Data Society, which can be found at http://www.mged.org/Workgroups/MIAME/miame_checklist.html. NAR also requires submission of microarray data to the GEO (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/) or ArrayExpress (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/arrayexpress/) databases, with accession numbers at or before acceptance for publication.

## The Journal

- About this journal
- NAR Methods online
- 2007 Database Issue
- 2007 Web Server Issue
- Referee Information
- Rights & Permissions
- Dispatch date of the next issue

### Impact factor: 6.317

### Senior Executive Editors

#### R.J.Roberts, Ipswich, MA, USA

#### K.R.Fox, Southampton, UK

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## For Authors

- Instructions to authors
- Scope and Criteria for Consideration
- Online submission instructions
- Submit a manuscript now
- Self-archiving policy

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