Guide to Authors

Welcome to the electronic manuscript submission website for Genes and Immunity. The instructions below are structured so you can quickly and easily answer the following questions:

1. Is my manuscript suitable for Genes and Immunity? (Scope + Editorial Note)
2. How do I format my manuscript for Genes and Immunity? (Format of Papers)
3. How do I submit my manuscript to Genes and Immunity? (Submission of Papers)

OTHER LINKS

• About the journal
• Format of papers
• Preparation of Original Articles
• House style
• Submission of papers
• Editorial policy
• Ethics and bioethics
• Peer review policy
• Corrections
• About NPG online services

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Scope

Topics Covered
Genetics, genomics and immunology, and clinicians in relevant specialities, including rheumatology, dermatology, transplantation, gastroenterology, neurology and endocrine disorders, etc.

Editors	Grant Gallagher, PhD, Hamilton, NJ, USA, Michael F Seldin, MD, PhD, Davis, CA, USA
Frequency	8 issues a year
Abstracted in	MEDLINE EMBASE/Excerpta Medica ISI SCI Expanded Reference Alert Biotechnology Citation Index

Editorial Note

Genes and Immunity emphasises the emergence of functional immunogenetics and genomics and their role in understanding the immune system and the pathogenesis of immune-mediated diseases, including autoimmunity, infectious diseases, chronic inflammatory disorders and malignancy.

FORMAT OF PAPERS

Article Types Table

Article Type	Description
Original Article	These should follow the structure outlined below
Review	These will usually consist of 5-10 typeset pages and include a 200-300 word abstract. Authors are responsible for the structure of the article in sections under headings suitable to the chosen topic. Authors submitting unsolicited manuscripts are reminded that although many review articles will be invited, acceptance depends on both editorial assessment and having space available in the journal.
Short Communications	These will normally consist of 3-4 typeset pages and should include a 150-word abstract. Results and Discussion should be incorporated into a single section; Materials and Methods should be included as legends to figures and tables; legends should be brief but comprehensive enough to allow reproduction of the experiment.

Preparation of Original Articles

1. Cover letter (must include a Conflict of Interest statement)
2. Title page (excluding acknowledgements)
3. Abstract and keywords
4. Introduction
5. Results
6. Discussion
7. Materials (or patients) and methods
8. Acknowledgements
9. Conflict of Interest
10. References
11. Tables
12. Figures

Abstract and Keywords
The abstract should not exceed 200 words and three to six keywords should be included to aid web searches after publication.

Introduction
The Introduction should assume that the reader is knowledgeable in the field and should therefore be as brief as possible but can include a short historical review where desirable.

Results and Discussion
The Results section should briefly present the experimental data in text, tables or figures. Tables and figures should not be described extensively in the text, either. The discussion should focus on the interpretation and the significance of the findings with concise objective comments that describe their relation to other work in the area. It should not repeat information in the results. The final paragraph should highlight the main conclusion(s), and provide some indication of the direction future research should take.

Materials / subjects and Methods
This section should contain sufficient detail, so that all experimental procedures can be reproduced, and include references. Methods, however, that have been published in detail elsewhere should not be described in detail. Authors should provide the name of the manufacturer and their location for any specifically named medical equipment and instruments, and all drugs should be identified by their pharmaceutical names, and by their trade name if relevant.

Acknowledgements
These should be brief, and should include sources of support including sponsorship (e.g. university, charity, commercial organization) and sources of material (e.g. novel drugs) not available commercially.

Conflict of interest
Authors must declare whether or not there is any competing financial interests in relation to the work described. This information must be included at this stage and will be published as part of the paper. Conflict of interest should also be noted on the cover letter and as part of the submission process. See the Conflict of Interest documentation in the Editorial Policy section for detailed information.

References
Only papers directly related to the article should be cited. Exhaustive lists should be avoided. References should follow the Vancouver format. In the text they should appear as numbers starting at one and at the end of the paper they should be listed (double-spaced) in numerical order corresponding to the order of citation in the text. All authors should be quoted for papers with up to six authors; for papers with more than six authors, the first six only should be quoted, followed by et al. Abbreviations for titles of medical periodicals should conform to those used in the latest edition of Index Medicus. The first and last page numbers for each reference should be provided. Abstracts and letters must be identified as such. Papers in press and papers already submitted for publication may be included in the list of references but no citation is required for work that is not yet submitted for publication.

Journal article, up to six authors:
DiRienzo JM, Slots J, Sixou M, Sol MA, Harmon R, McKay TL et al. Specific genetic variants of Actinobacillus actinomycetemcomitans correlate with disease and health in a regional population of families with localized juvenile periodontitis. Infect Immun 1994; 62: 3058–3065.

Journal article, e-pub ahead of print:
Schulze HA, Häsler R, Mah N, Lu T, Nikolaus S, Costello CM et al. From model cell line to in vivo gene expression: disease-related intestinal gene expression in IBD. Genes Immun 2008; e-pub ahead of print 13 March 2008; doi:10.1038/gene.2008.11.

Journal article, in press:
Gallardo RL, Juneja HS, Gardner FH. Normal human marrow stromal cells induce clonal growth of human malignant T-lymphoblasts. Int J Cell Cloning (in press).

Complete book:
Gordon MY, Barre AJ. Bone Marrow Disorder: the Biological Basis of Clinical Problems. Blackwell Scientific Publishers: Oxford, 1985.

Chapter in book:
Greenberger JS. Long-term hematopoietic cultures. In: Golde DW (ed). Hematopoiesis. Churchill Livingstone: New York, 1984, pp 203–242.

Abstract:
Feig SA, Lenarsky C, Moss T, Gallardo RL, Juneja HS, Gordon MY et al. Bone marrow transplantation for neuroblastoma. Exp Hematol 1985; 13(Suppl 2): 362 (abstract 102).

Letter to the Editor
Raum D, Alper CA, Stein R. Genetic markers for insulin dependent diabetes mellitus [letter]. Lancet 1985; i: 106.

EndNote users should select the Genes and Immunity output style for the correct reference style.

Personal communications must be allocated a number and included in the list of references in the usual way or simply referred to in the text; the authors may choose which method to use. In either case authors must obtain permission from the individual concerned to quote his/her unpublished work.

House Style

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS

Upon submission of an original research paper, authors can indicate within the manuscript tracking system whether they wish to pay a one off fee to allow their article to become freely available immediately upon publication. The fee is £2,000/$3,000/€2,400 (plus VAT where applicable) and can be paid via credit card or by requesting an invoice be raised.

By paying this fee authors are permitted to post the final, published, pdf of their article on a website, institutional repository or other free public server immediately on publication.

Upon acceptance, authors must fill out and send back a payment form. This is mandatory and failure to send in the payment form along with the Licence to Publish form will result in the article being published as a standard paper behind access control. The licence to publish form has been amended to offer authors the choice of which licence to use on their paper and these choices are described below:

The first is the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported Licence and allows readers to download the article and share it with others as long as they mention the author and link back to the original article. The article cannot be changed in any way or used commercially.

The second is the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported Licence and allows readers to alter, transform, or build upon the article and then distribute the resulting work under the same or similar license to this one. The work must be attributed back to the original author and commercial use is not permitted.

For further information please see the Genes & Immunity Open FAQs and payment form.

Colour charges

Page Charges

The cost for each printed page of published manuscripts is £59 ($118) per page for the first 6 pages, then £118 ($235) for each additional page.

Further information
To find out who to contact for advertising, subscriptions, permissions, papers in production or publishing a supplement, please visit our publisher’s contacts page. Alternatively, you can write to: Genes and Immunity, Nature Publishing Group, Academic Journals, 75 Varick Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10013.

EDITORIAL POLICY

Statement of Ethics

Peer-review policy

Correction and retraction process

Non-Native Speakers of English
Researchers who are not native speakers of English who submit manuscripts to international journals sometimes receive negative comments from referees or editors about the English-language usage in their manuscripts, and these problems can contribute to a decision to reject a paper. To help reduce the possibility of such problems, we strongly encourage such authors to take at least one of the following steps:

• Have your manuscript reviewed for clarity by a colleague whose native language is English.
• Use one of the many English language editing services that are available, such as that offered by Nature Publishing Group Language Editing. An editor will improve the English to ensure that your meaning is clear and to identify problems that require your review.

Please note that the use of Nature Publishing Group Language Editing is at the author's own expense and in no way implies that the article will be selected for peer review or accepted by an NPG journal (or any other journal). The decisions that the editors of any NPG journal make based on the quality and suitability of a manuscript for that journal are entirely independent of whether that manuscript has been language-edited by Nature Publishing Group Language Editing.

Please press HOME to continue.