Journal Policies
Submitting your bioRxiv preprint to the journal
Permission to Reproduce Figures and Extracts
Manuscript Preparation Instructions
Peer review
The Journal uses the ANSI/NISO Standard Terminology for Peer Review. If you would like further description of the peer review terms used here, please refer to the most recent standard definitions. If further clarification is needed, please contact the editorial office at [email protected].
Peer review summary:
- Identity transparency: single anonymized
- Reviewer interacts with: editor
- Review information published: none
- Post publication commenting: none
Peer Review Model
The Journal operates single anonymized peer review, meaning that the identity of the authors is known to the editors and to the reviewers, but that the reviewers’ identities are known only to the editors and are hidden from the authors.
During peer review, reviewers communicate directly with the editors but not the authors or other reviewers.
Peer Review Process
Once a submitted manuscript passes initial assessment by the Journal’s Editor-in-Chief, it will then be passed to a handling editor, who will oversee peer review and recommend a final decision. The Editor-in-Chief makes the final decision on the submitted manuscript.
Editors and reviewers must not handle manuscripts if they have a conflict of interest with an author or the content. Editorial office staff and editors make every effort to avoid potential conflicts of interest in the assignment of editors and peer reviewers. For more information, please see the section on Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. During the peer review phase, your manuscript is typically sent to two reviewers.
You may suggest potential reviewers at submission. However, there is no guarantee the suggested reviewers will be selected by the Journal. Recommended reviewers should be experts in their field and able to provide an objective assessment of your manuscript without financial or interpersonal conflicts of interest with any authors. We encourage you to consider reviewers from a diverse range of backgrounds, including those from under-represented communities.
At the time of submission, you may request that specific individuals not be used as reviewers of your manuscript. Please do so in your cover letter, along with a brief explanation as to why you want them excluded. However, there is no guarantee these individuals will be excluded by the Journal.
If your manuscript is accepted for publication, no information about the review process or editorial decision process is published, unless one of the authors has a role on the journal. See the Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest section for more information in that case. For full details about the peer review process, see Fair editing and peer review.
Manuscript transfer
The Journal accepts original submissions as well as transfers from Nucleic Acids Research. Reviewer reports may be included in the transfer with reviewer consent. Transferred manuscripts may be sent out for additional peer review, and a decision will be made on the manuscript based on the feedback from all consenting reviewers and the judgment of the editorial team of Synthetic Biology.
Open access
All content published in Synthetic Biology is made freely available online under an Open Access model. After a manuscript is accepted for publication, the corresponding author must accept a mandatory license to publish agreement. Authors can use the Creative Common Attribution license (CC-BY), Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license (CC-BY-NC) and Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license (CC-BY-NC-ND) for their articles. Find out more about Creative Commons licenses.
The charges applicable for Open Access licenses are as follows:
CC BY
Regular charge - $3020
Free Developing country charge* - $0
CC BY-NC
Regular charge - $3020
Free Developing country charge* -$0
CC BY-NC-ND
Regular charge - $3020
Free Developing country charge* - $0
*Visit our Developing Countries page for a list of qualifying countries
Publication ethics
Authors should observe high standards with respect to publication ethics as set out by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Falsification or fabrication of data, plagiarism, including duplicate publication of the authors’ own work without proper citation, and misappropriation of the work are all unacceptable. Any cases of ethical misconduct will be treated seriously and will be dealt with in accordance with the COPE guidelines.
Ethics Statement
Any study using human subjects or materials that requires ethical approval should state the relevant Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval or relevant Institutional Animal Care approval. Please also list other relevant ethics approvals.
Plagiarism
Manuscripts submitted may be screened with iThenticate anti-plagiarism software in an attempt to detect and prevent plagiarism. Any manuscript may be screened, especially if there is reason to suppose part or all of the text has been previously published. Prior to final acceptance any manuscript that has not already been screened may be put through iThenticate. Please see more information about iThenticate.
Conflicts of interest
Each author should 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 this 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?
Statement of informed consent
Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. Identifying information, including patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that a patient who is identifiable be shown the manuscript to be published. Authors should identify individuals who provide writing assistance and disclose the funding source for this assistance. Identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. Complete anonymity is difficult to achieve, however, and informed consent should be obtained if there is any doubt. For example, masking the eye region in photographs of patients is inadequate protection of anonymity. If identifying characteristics are altered to protect anonymity, such as in genetic pedigrees, authors should provide assurance that alterations do not distort scientific meaning and editors should so note.
Commercially Available Resources
Manuscripts based on commercially available resources such as strains, reagents or software are welcome as long as authors fully disclose their conflict of interest. Authors reporting results produced with their company prouducts should keep in mind that their submissions need to meet Synthetic Biology's rigorous scientific standards and successfully go through peer-review. Submissions that read like promotional material are rejected without review.
Crossref Funding Data Registry
In order to meet your funding requirements authors are required to name their funding sources, or state if there are none, during the submission process. Further information on this process and the CHORUS initiative.
Data policy
Authors must provide access to the data supporting the results presented in their article at the time of submission as data is essential to review the manuscript. Manuscripts that do not comply with the data sharing policy will be returned to the authors without review.
We strongly encourage authors to make the data underlying their published research freely available to others, wherever legally and ethically possible in a format allowing readers to import the data in a computer software application for review or further analysis.
The purpose of this data sharing policy is to allow readers to use the data. Since sequences and data embedded in pdf files or in Word documents are extremely difficult to extract, manuscripts that embed data in document files will be deemed not compliant with this policy and will be returned to the author.
We request that authors make the availability and location of their data clear in a ‘Data Availability’ statement, in which accession numbers and editor/reviewer access information (token or user name/password) are provided for any data that has been deposited in a public repository, before the Acknowledgements section of their article. More details are available under the Basic formatting guide heading.
Authors are required to provide complete annotated sequences of all the new plasmids described in their manuscript. Annotated plasmid sequences should be provided using a standard bioinformatic file format such as GenBank files or similar formats.
Authors are required to provide the sequences of primers or DNA fragments used in their manuscript. Primers and DNA fragments should be provided as formatted text files (CSV, tab-delimited) or FASTA files that can be imported in standard bioinformatics software.
Authors of papers reporting new gene sequences must make them available on GenBank, or a similar database. Accession numbers must be provided in the manuscript as a condition of acceptance.
Authors are requested to provide mathematical models of gene networks as SBML files.
Authors are encouraged to provide data used to generate figures in a computer-readable format such as Excel, CSV, or other formatted text file. Authors are also encouraged to release both raw data generated by instruments, reduced data sets resulting from the analysis of raw data, and the scripts used to analyze data.
Where specialised, subject-specific public repositories are available, we encourage authors to deposit their data in these. See biosharing.org for a curated list of databases in the life sciences.
When no specialized repository is available, authors are encouraged to publish their data in the data repository, Figshare.com.
Alternatively, authors may also upload supplementary datasets as Supplementary Material with their paper for publication. Supplementary data should be submitted as “Supplementary Files for Review”.
Where none of these options are feasible, authors are required to make their data available upon reasonable request for the purposes of verification.
Software and source codes
Source code (or in justified situations - compiled, executable versions) for any specialized, in-house scripts or programs, that are necessary for the reproduction of results, must be deposited in a public repository such as GitHub, or uploaded as supplementary data.
Preprint policy
Authors retain the right to make an Author’s Original Version (preprint) available through various channels, and this does not prevent submission to the journal. For further information see our Online Licensing, Copyright and Permissions policies. If accepted, the authors are required to update the status of any preprint, including your published paper’s DOI, as described on our Author Self-Archiving policy page.
Submitting your bioRxiv preprint to the journal
You can submit your bioRxiv preprint directly from the bioRxiv server to Synthetic Biology. To do this, visit the Author Area in bioRxiv and select Synthetic Biology from the list of options.
This will transfer all manuscript files and author information to Synthetic Biology. You will then receive an email with a link to your submission in Synthetic Biology, where you will need to answer some additional questions and approve the manuscript for submission.
Authors submitting their bioRxiv preprint to Synthetic Biology should refer to the section on Preprints. In particular, you should note the following:
- You should not submit your preprint to more than one journal simultaneously.
- If your paper is accepted for publication in Synthetic Biology you are responsible for ensuring that the preprint is updated with the DOI of and a link to the published paper. bioRxiv does this automatically for most papers, but the process is imperfect, particularly if the preprint and paper titles are different. · For details on updating your preprint, please see our Author self-archiving policy.
Permission to reproduce figures and extracts
In order to reproduce any third party material, including tables, figures, or images, in an article authors must obtain permission from the copyright holder and comply with any requirements the copyright holder may have pertaining to this reuse. When seeking to reproduce any kind of third party material authors should request the following:
- non-exclusive rights to reproduce the material in the specified article and journal;
- electronic rights, preferably for use in any form or medium;
- the right to use the material for the life of the work; and
- world-wide English-language rights.
Further guidelines on clearing permissions are available.
Third-Party Content in Open Access papers
If you will be publishing your paper under an Open Access licence but it contains material for which you do not have Open Access re-use permissions, please state this clearly by supplying the following credit line alongside the material:
Title of content
Author, Original publication, year of original publication, by permission of [rights holder]
This image/content is not covered by the terms of the Creative Commons licence of this publication. For permission to reuse, please contact the rights holder.
Material sharing policy
In accordance with the principles established in ‘Sharing Publication-Related Data and Materials’, a condition of publication is that authors must make the materials and resources described in their article promptly available upon reasonable request from academic and researchers from non-profit organizations. In particular, we strongly encourage authors to deposit their plasmids with repositories such as Addgene, DNASU, or PlasmID and other repositories for biological resources.
Authors should include a Material Availability statement before the Acknowledgements section to provide information about the availability of the materials and resources described in the article, including any restrictions in availability or use such as a Material Transfer Agreement. We recommend the use of the Open Material Transfer Agreement. If the material is subject to a non-standard MTA, authors are encouraged to upload the MTA template as Supplementary Material as “Supplementary Files for Review”.
Authors submitting manuscripts describing plasmids are strongly encouraged to consider depositing them with Addgene, the nonprofit plasmid repository. Addgene accepts pre-publication deposits so plasmids can be ready to request concurrently with the article publication. More information is available under the Material sharing policy heading.
Authors are also encouraged to deposit their laboratory protocols on the protocols.io site, obtain a unique DOI and link directly to these from the Methods section of their articles. This resource makes it possible to provide a more detailed and reproducible description of the methods than is possible the Methods section of an article.
Material disclaimer
The opinions expressed in Synthetic Biology are those of the authors and contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the editors, the editorial board, Oxford University Press or the organization to which the authors are affiliated.
