Manuscript Submission
Manuscripts must be submitted online using the following URL:
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hum
Please read all the instructions to authors before submitting your article.
To help defray the cost of printing, the Publisher requests that page charges of $75 per printed page be paid by all authors who have funds available from research grants or from their institutions. It should be noted that ability to pay page charges is not a prerequisite for publication in the Journal.
Manuscript Submission and Copyright Agreement Form
The Copyright Agreement form should be submitted once your paper has been accepted for publication. Manuscripts cannot be published without this form. The corresponding author is responsible for obtaining signatures of coauthors. Authors not permitted to release copyright must still return the form signed under the statement of the reason for not releasing the copyright. Upon acceptance of your paper, please fax the Copyright Agreement form to 914-740-2101.
Manuscripts should be submitted with the understanding that they have neither been published, nor are concurrently under consideration for publication elsewhere, except in the form of an abstract. Prior abstract publications should be described in the form of a footnote to the title. Published manuscripts become the sole property of the Journal and will be copyrighted by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. By submitting a manuscript to the Journal, the author(s) agree(s) to each of the above conditions. In addition, the author(s) explicitly assign(s) any copyrighted ownership he/she (they) may have in such manuscript to the Journal.
Upon acceptance of any manuscript, all authors will receive a follow-up email with instructions on how to complete our online Copyright Agreement form. It is critical to ensure the accuracy of ALL authors’ email addresses when uploading submissions to Manuscript Central to ensure the proper delivery of all email communications.
FAILURE BY ALL AUTHORS TO SUBMIT THIS FORM MAY RESULT IN A DELAY OF PUBLICATION.
The corresponding author is responsible for communicating with coauthors to make sure they have completed the online copyright form. Authors not permitted to release copyright must still return the form acknowledging the statement of the reason for not releasing the copyright.
Changes to Authorship
Changes to the author list are NOT permitted after submission. If it becomes necessary to add or remove an author, the corresponding author should notify the editorial office at hgt@mail.med.upenn.edu. All authors will be required to sign a document acknowledging the change.
Journal Selection
During submission, you will be asked to designate your manuscript to Human Gene Therapy or Human Gene Therapy Methods. Or you may select ‘‘Either,” in which case, the Editor-in-Chief will designate your manuscript to the appropriate journal. If the Editor-in-Chief disagrees with your journal selection, the corresponding author will be notified via e-mail and will have 2 weeks to agree or decline to switching Journals. If the corresponding author declines or does not respond within 2 weeks, the manuscript will be automatically withdrawn from Manuscript Central.
Consideration of Unsolicited Papers
Human Gene Therapy and Human GeneTherapy Methods invite pre-submission enquiries for Reviews, Commentaries, and Letters to the Editor. Please send an abstract or brief outline to the Editor-in-Chief at wilsonjm@mail.med.upenn.edu for consideration prior to formal submission via Manuscript Central.
Preparation of Manuscript
Manuscripts submitted to Human Gene Therapy must not be under consideration elsewhere or have been previously published.
NOTE:
All submitted manuscripts will be processed through plagiarism detection software. Plagiarized manuscripts will be rejected immediately.
Articles must be submitted via upload in a word processing format, preferably in Microsoft Word. Please do not include artwork within the text document. Figures and tables should be supplied in separate files, be labeled clearly, and should be in TIFF or EPS formats. Please see the Tables and Illustrations section for further details on art submission.
On the first page, give the title of the article, name(s) of author(s), institutional affiliation(s), and the name (with complete address and phone number) to whom correspondence should be directed; supply a running title of 50 characters including spaces. On the second page, supply an Abstract of no more than 250 words, stating the aims, results, and conclusions drawn from the study. This should be followed by the Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, Acknowledgments, Disclosure Statement, and References. Results and Discussion may either be separate sections or combined. Begin each of these sections on a separate page. Authors should review the style and clarity of their manuscripts with colleagues before submission. Please follow the protocol described herein to avoid delay in publication. Authors should note that manuscripts may be edited if needed to ensure clear grammatic English usage. The Editors welcome suggestions concerning potential reviewers.
INSTANT ONLINE PUBLICATION
The Journal publishes all accepted papers within 72 hours of acceptance in their unedited, uncorrected format. It is important to note that the information that is published online, and in all indexing services, is pulled directly from the data that is populated into the fields in Manuscript Central – NOT from the manuscript file – when the paper is originally uploaded to the system for peer review. Consequently, any errors contained in the system will remain on our website and all indexing services, including Medline, until the next revision of the article is published. As such, it is critical that authors enter all authors’ names correctly into the system at the time of submission.
The next revision will take place after the corresponding author sees page proofs, makes any necessary corrections, and returns the changes to the Publisher. Once the alterations are completed, the revised version will be published on our website, and the newly corrected information will then be released to Medline/PubMed, in addition to any other indexing services in which the Journal is included.
Please note that the typical time between acceptance of a paper and page proof distribution is approximately 4-8 weeks depending on the length and complexity of the paper.
Tables and Illustrations
Use Arabic numerals to number tables. Do not repeat information that is given in the text, and do not make a table for data that can be given in the text in one or two sentences. Provide titles for all tables. Define all acronyms in table footnotes. All other types of table footnotes should be designated using superscript letters, not symbols.
Please follow these guidelines for submitting figures:
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Upload each image as a separate file.
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Do NOT embed art files into a Word or PDF document. Figures provided in this format cannot be used for production purposes.
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Line illustrations must be submitted at 900 DPI.
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Halftones and color should be submitted at a minimum of 300 dpi.
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Save as either TIFF or EPS files. JPEG files are for screen representation-quality only and will print very poorly
during the printing process. To ensure proper print quality, please submit only TIFF or EPS files.
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Color art must be saved as CMYK - not RGB. (NB: If RGB files are submitted, the files will be converted to CYMK and some color variation will occur.)
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Black and white art must be submitted as grayscale – not RGB.
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Do NOT submit PowerPoint, PDF, Bitmap, or Excel figure or table files. When naming your figure files, please label them with the main author’s last name, followed by a period (.), and then list the figure number. Ex: Smith.Figl. Label figures and tables inside the files in addition to naming the file with the figure or table number. (ie: When figures or table files are opened, the figure or table number should appear inside the file.)
When naming your figure and table files, please label them with the corresponding author’s last name, followed by a period (.), and then list the figure number. (Ex: Jones.Figl; Jones.Tablel).
Additional Information about Converting Figure Files:
Converting Word or Excel files: Perhaps the best and easiest way to convert Word or Excel files into a format which is suitable for print is to scan them using the below guidelines:
If you need directions on how to convert a Power Point slide to acceptable format go to: www.liebertpub.com/MEDIA/pdf/ppconvert.pdf
A legend should be supplied for each illustration, and all legends numbered consecutively and provided (double spaced) on a separate page. All symbol definitions should be in figure legend, not as a key within the figure. If possible please use Arial font for figure text. Figures should be numbered in the order cited in the text. Images should not show the name of the manufacturer or reveal patients’ names. Please keep in mind that the figures will be reduced, so please do not submit large figures/graphs that contain small type, as the text within the figure will not be readable after reduction.
The Journal will publish color photographs, but the author will be charged for the cost of color printing at the rate of $275 per piece of color art plus $1,200 per page of color. The Publisher will provide the author with a more precise cost estimate when the figures are received. For further details, contact the Publisher.
Supplemental Data
You are permitted to upload supplemental data, which will only be published online. Insert supplemental tables, figures and legends as separate files.
References
All references in text should be cited alphabetically, within year, by authors and dates. e.g. The ribosomal RNA (rrn) operons in E. coli contain single copies of each of the 16S, 23S, and 5S r(RNA) genes (Pace, 1973; Rogers and Smith, 1973; Andrews et al., 1978).
If more than two authors are involved, use et al. after the first author’s name.
e.g. (Sogin et al., 1971).
If several articles by the same authors are cited, use a lower case letter designation to indicate the individual articles.
e.g. (Dunn and Studier, 1973a,b). Use same designation in reference list.
All references in the reference section should be double spaced and listed in alphabetical order at the end of the article. References should include complete titles of cited articles.
Journal citation: Pace, N. (1973). Structure and synthesis of the ribosomal ribonucleic acid of prokaryotes. Bacteriol. Rev. 37, 562–603.
Book citation: Brosius, J. (1987). Expression vectors employing A, trp, lac, and lpp-derived promoters. In Vectors, a Survey of Molecular Cloning Vectors and Their Uses. R.L. Rodriguez and D.T. Denhardt, eds. (Butterworth Publishers, Stoneham, MA) pp. 205–225.
When dates from an unpublished source are given, supply the researcher’s name. If work is in press, give journal in which it is to be published or name of publisher. Abbreviations of journal names should follow the style of MEDLINE.
Permissions
The author must obtain permission whenever it is required in conjunction with the reproduction of material such as figures and tables from copyrighted material. Written permission must be obtained from the publisher of the journal or book concerned. The publication from which the figure or table is taken must be listed in the reference list. Finally, a footnote to a reprinted table, or of the legend of a reprinted figure should read, ‘‘Reprinted by permission from Jones et al.’’ and list the appropriate reference. All permissions listings must be shown in the manuscript—they cannot be entered on proofs.
Acknowledgments
Any contributor who does not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgments section. Examples of a contributor may be individuals who provided technical support, writing assistance, or provided research materials. All funding sources, institutional and corporate, should be listed in this section.
Disclosure Statement
Immediately following the Acknowledgments section, there should be a header entitled, Author Disclosure Statement. The corresponding author should prepare this statement and include the appropriate information for EACH author, thereby representing that competing financial interests of all authors have been appropriately disclosed according to the policy of the Journal. It is important that all conflicts of interest, whether they are actual or potential, be disclosed.
If no conflicts exist, the authors must state ‘‘No competing financial interests exist.’’
Articles submitted without an ‘‘Author Disclosure Statement’’ will not be reviewed.
Definitions
Competing Interests: A competing interest exists when an individual (or the individual’s institution) has financial or personal relationships that inappropriately influence his actions. These competing interests may be potential or actual, financial or other.
Competing Financial Interests:
Personal Financial Interests: Stocks or shares in a company that may gain or lose financially from publication of the article; consulting fees or other remuneration from an organization that may gain or lose financially from publication of the article; patents or patent applications that are owned by or licensed to companies/institutions that may gain or lose value from publication of the article.
Funding: Research support by organizations that may gain or lose financially from publication of the article. This support includes salary, equipment, supplies, honoraria, reimbursement or prepayment for attending symposia, and other expenses.
Employment: Recent (within the past 5 years), current, or anticipated employment by an organization that may gain or lose financially from publication of the article.
Other Competing Interests:
Any personal relationship which may inappropriately affect the integrity of the research reported (by an author) or the objectivity of the review of the manuscript (by a reviewer or Editor), for example, competition between investigators, previous disagreements between investigators, or bias in professional judgment.
Competing Interest for Reviewers
The Editors leave it to the discretion of the invited reviewer to state whether or not they have any type of conflict with any of the authors on the manuscript. Such conflicts might include recent or ongoing collaborations with the authors; having previously reviewed the manuscript in its draft stages; the reviewer is in direct competition with the authors or has a financial interest in the outcome of the manuscript. Editors will take this information into consideration when deciding whether or not to use the reviewer, or in evaluation of the reviewer’s comments.
Should the reviewers feel they cannot be objective in their review for financial, personal or other reasons, they should decline to review the manuscript.
We do not exclude reviewers who previously reviewed a specific manuscript for another journal. The comments offered by a qualified reviewer are valuable to the peer-review process and it is important for the reviewer to consider that the author may have already revised the manuscript based on his/her previous comments.
Competing Interest for Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editors
The Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editors will recuse themselves from participating in the review process of any manuscript in which there is a potential or actual competing interest.
Confidentiality
Editors and Reviewers must maintain strict confidentiality of manuscripts during the peer-review process. Sharing a manuscript in whole or in part, outside the scope of what is necessary for assessment, is impermissible prior to the manuscript’s official publication date.
Sharing of Materials Policy
Authors must honor any reasonable request for materials, methods, or data necessary to reproduce or validate the research findings.
Cover Art
Authors of manuscripts accepted by Human Gene Therapy who have interesting images related to their paper, regardless of whether the images are published within the manuscript itself, are encouraged to submit them for consideration for the Journal Cover. Please ensure they are not submitted or published elsewhere. Images should be high resolution- 300 dpi, 5” x 5,” .EPS or .TIFF files, and CMYK. Send images or questions to hgt@mail.med.upenn.edu
Reprints
Reprints may be ordered by following the special instructions that will accompany the proofs, and should be orderedat the time the corresponding author returns the corrected page proofs to the Publisher. Reprints ordered after the issue is printed will be charged at a substantially higher rate.
Human Gene Therapy will distribute or make available short press releases on newsworthy articles.
Publisher
With the addition of Human Gene Therapy Methods in 2012, 18 issues are published annually by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., 140 Huguenot Street, 3rd Floor, New Rochelle, NY 10801-5215. Telephone: 914-740-2100; Fax: 914-740-2101; Email: info@liebertpub.com; Online: www.liebertpub.com; www.liebertpub.com/hum