Instructions for Contributors (Revised July 1, 2024)
General Rules
1. THE JOURNAL OF GENERAL AND APPLIED MICROBIOLOGY (JGAM) is issued by Applied Microbiology, Molecular and Cellular Biosciences Research Foundation. JGAM is a bimonthly, an international, peer-reviewed and Open Access journal publishing outstanding and informative articles in general and applied microbiology. Original papers (Full Papers and Short Communications) and Invited Reviews written in English are considered for publication. Papers already published, in press or under consideration elsewhere are not accepted.
2. SCOPE OF THE JOURNAL: JGAM is going to publish scientific reports containing novel and significant microbiological findings, which are mainly devoted to the following categories:
Antibiotics and Secondary Metabolites: Papers in this category must include new findings concerning chemical structures or biological activities of the small molecular microbial products.
Biotechnology and Metabolic Engineering: Papers in this category should describe the directed modulation of metabolic pathways for overproduction of metabolites or the modification of microorganisms to achieve socially beneficial objectives. Experimental approaches for the elucidation of metabolic pathways and their manipulation by genetic means are presented. Papers just describing the studies on optimization of culture conditions will not be considered for publication.
Developmental Microbiology: This category deals with the subjects related to developmental aspects of microorganisms including morphological differentiation, biofilm formation, and cell-cell interactions.
Environmental Microbiology and Bioremediation: This category covers manuscripts that focus on researches related to microorganisms in the natural environmental, bioremediation, and water treatment processes regardless of specific organisms or a whole community. Papers describing the microbiology of metabolic capacity for natural and man-made chemicals, ecological relationships in an ecosystem, and community-level studies will be considered for publication.
Enzymology: Papers in this category deal with identification and studies on a sufficiently purified enzyme with particular utilities from microbial origins. In addition, description of partial or complete amino acid sequence information is required for consideration.
Eukaryotic Microbiology: This category deals with genetic, genomic, biochemical, molecular, and cell biological studies of yeast, fungi, and other simple eukaryotic organisms.
Evolution and Phylogenetics: Papers in this category must include findings on evolutionary relationships among microbes and/or evolutionary mechanisms of microbial genomes (or genes). Papers dealing with taxonomic description of a new taxon are NOT suitable.
Genome Integrity and Plasticity: Manuscripts submitted to this category must report findings on the cellular processes underlying maintenance of genome stability or genome dynamics, including repair (or processing) of DNA damage and various types of DNA recombination.
Photosynthetic Microorganisms: Papers in this category must contain findings in molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, and biotechnology on photosynthetic microorganisms.
Microbiology for Food: This category deals with microbial cell physiology or fermentation mechanism concerning brewing or fermented foods production. It also includes studies on prebiotics and probiotics from the point of view of microbiology but not those focusing solely on responses of hosts.
Molecular Genetics: This category deals with the subjects related to genetics and heredity at gene and genome level. Papers in this category should include precise information of gene(s) or genome(s) of interest.
Physiology and Cell Surface: This category covers metabolic pathways and their regulation, bioenergetics, transport, responses to environmental changes including stress and starvation, biosynthesis of metabolites and macromolecules, structure of cell surface including wall, membrane, and extracellular polysaccharides, function of cell surface, and biosynthesis of cell surface.
Synthetic and Systems Microbiology: This category is particularly for the new discovery or invention in design and synthesis of complex genetic systems ranging from genetic circuits and metabolic pathways. New computational or experimental tools aiding the design/ analysis/ building of genetic systems are also considered. Mere description of genetic circuits and metabolic pathways are NOT considered unless it clearly states the novelty of their making.
Authors are requested to choose one of the above categories corresponding to the contents of the manuscript at the time of submission. In case you consider the manuscript is not included in any of these categories, or if there is any special request to editor(s), please choose “Editor in Chief” and explain the reason in cover letter in such cases. However, manuscripts for technical subjects, such as PCR primer design and application, will not be considered.
3. All manuscripts are first reviewed and evaluated by the assigned Editor, and can be declined if they do not fit to the scope of this journal at this stage. Further evaluation is performed by the Editor usually supported by at least two expert referees. The acceptance and the order of appearance in JGAM are also determined by the Editors. The Editors may change or unify wording, figures and/or tables. The revised manuscript must be returned within two months (or within periods indicated by the Editor) of the authors’ receipt of the Editors’ report. Revised manuscripts not returned within two months (or within periods indicated by the Editor) are considered to have been withdrawn.
Submission of Manuscript
4. Manuscript should be submitted as electronic files via our website.
Go to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jgam to login. If you do not have your account, select “If you do not have an account, click Here” in header of web page for registration. Enter the necessary information and upload your manuscript.
If you are unable to complete the submission, contact to the editorial office by E-mail: hensyu02@aiselect.co.jp, or by postal service: Editorial Office of “The Journal of General and Applied Microbiology”, Aiselect, Co. Ltd., 5-30-6 Nishinippori, Arakawa, Tokyo, 116-0013, Japan.
Preparation of Manuscript
5. Full papers are well-documented articles of original, comprehensive and complete works. Therefore, the papers of this category should have originality and high scientific merit. The text of a full paper should be as brief as possible and basically no more than 8 printed pages including tables and figures. The standard format includes adequately classified headings as: Summary, Keywords, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, Acknowledgments and References. Where appropriate, Results and Discussion may be combined.
These should be preceded by: The title of the article, name(s) of author(s), institution(s) and a brief running head of less than 40 letters including spaces; a footnote on the mailing address of the author to whom all correspondence should be addressed, and on nonstandard abbreviations used, if any.
Authors are requested to avoid numbered subtitles unless all the papers submitted are considered as simultaneous publications in JGAM. All pages (including references, tables and figure legends) should be numbered consecutively. Place the last items after the Reference section.
6. Short communications (less than four printed pages in principle, including figures, tables and references) are also accepted. Papers of this category, reporting timely novel findings, are brief accounts of original research results, and should have a similar standard of quality and scientific merit as full papers. Do not use section headings for short communications.
7. Invited reviews should follow the style of full papers, but the use of the appropriate headings is suggested.
8. Authors will be responsible for ensuring that papers are written clearly and are advised to use a language editing service before submission. If the contents of a manuscript are difficult to understand due to poor English quality, it will be rejected without review.
9. Illegible manuscripts printed with dot matrix printers will not be accepted.
10. Include a summary before the text for both full papers and short communications. The summary should not exceed 240 words in full papers or 120 words for short communications.
11. Make titles short but informative. Omit names of authors of taxa.
12. Each article must contain not more than eight key words identifying the content of the paper, as an aid to making the index. The name of the subject organism should always be among the key words. Insert the key words or phrases in alphabetical order immediately after the summary (Full Paper) or the address (Short Communication), on a separate indented line. Each key word is to be separated by a semicolon ( ; ).
13. Tables and figures with their respective serial numbers and brief explanatory headings should be presented on separate pages. All tables and figures should have a short title and a short legend, respectively. Legends for figures should be assembled on separate sheets; thus, separate sheets are requested for: text, tables with legends, and figures and their legends.
14. Designate all illustrations (photographs, graphs, line drawings) as figures (abbreviations: Fig., Figs.). All figures should be numbered (e.g., Fig. 1). All photographs should be numbered and treated as figures. If a color photograph is to be printed in monochrome, please provide in grayscale.
15. Footnotes should be avoided whenever possible. Essential footnotes should be indicated by superscript figures in serial numbers throughout the text and written on the bottom of the respective sheets. Abbreviations of culture collections should be indicated in the Materials and Methods section or in a footnote to the table in which the microbial strains studied are shown.
16. References should be arranged in alphabetical and chronological order in the Reference section. References should include, in the following order; authors’ names, year of publication in brackets, article or chapter title, title of the journal or book, editors (books only), name and address of publisher (books only), volume number, and the first and last page numbers. If there are more than one work by the same author(s) in the same year, a letter (a, b, c, etc.) should be added to the year both in the text and in the References. Reference should not be numbered. If the number of authors exceeds five, please describe names of the first five authors, and use “et al.” for more names.
17. The pre-publication articles, available online prior to their inclusion in a printed issue, can be cited in the text and reference list, with their DOI (Digital Object Identifier) in place of volume number and page range. Web site citations should not be included in the reference list. Complete URL (http://host.name/path/file.html) can be cited in the text, but limit to as few as possible. Follow the styles shown in the examples below.
1) Reference for journal article:
Ishida, T., Yokota, A., and Sugiyama, J. (1997) Phylogenetic relationships of filamentous cyanobacterial taxa inferred from 16S rRNA sequence divergence. J. Gen. Appl. Microbiol., 43, 237–241.
2) Reference for book as general:
Singer, R. (1975) The Agaricales in Modern Taxonomy, 3rd ed., J. Cramer, Vaduz, 912 pp. +84 pls.
3) Reference for book chapter in edited volume:
Kurtzman, C. P. (1988) Nuclear DNA hybridization: Quantitation of close genetic relationships. In The Yeasts, A Taxonomic Study, 4th ed., ed. by Kurtzman, C. P. and Fell, J. W., Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 63–68.
4) Reference for materials in a book:
Stanier, R., Ingraham, J. L., Wheelis, M. L., and Painter, P. R. (1986) The Microbial World, 5th ed., Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, pp. 16–42.
5) Reference for serial publication treated like a journal:
Bruns, T. D., White, T. J., and Taylor, J. W. (1991) Fungal molecular systematics. Ann. Rev. Ecol. Syst., 22, 525–564.
Citations in the text should be indicated the author and the publication year (Name-Date System); for two authors, both should be given (e.g., Sato and Yoshida, 1980); for more than 3 authors, only the first author’s name is required (e.g., Sato et al., 1960). Citations of two or more works in the text must be given in alphabetical order (e.g., Ando, 1990; Sato et al., 1960, 1965; Yoshida, 1958). The name of journals should be abbreviated according to the latest Edition of BIOSIS Serial Sources.
Only the papers accepted for publication but not yet published may be cited as “in press” in the References. They must be accompanied by the name of the journal. Two copies of the accepted manuscript cited as “in press” should accompany a hardcopy submission. A PDF file of it should be included in the supplemental materials in electronic submission. References not yet accepted should be cited in the text as unpublished results, giving the names(s) of the author(s) such as (Yoshida, S., pers. comm.) or (Sato, E., unpubl.). Such papers should not appear in the References.
18. The correct name of organisms must be used. For the use of Latin names and descriptions of new taxa of microorganisms, consult the relevant current Bacteriological, Botanical and Zoological Codes. The Latin diagnosis and description should be checked by an expert of Latin for its accuracy prior to submission.
19. All nucleotide and amino acid sequences must be deposited in an appropriate database. The accession number must be obtained before submission of the manuscript, and it should be indicated in the text.
20. For further details concerning the forms, style and abbreviations, authors should consult the CBE Style Manual, Cambridge University Press, New York, U.S.A.
21. The authors are responsible for reading the first galley proof. No change of the content of the paper is permitted on the galley proof. If the Editors recognize the necessity of a change, this change will be made at the author’s expense. If too many corrections for spelling or grammatical errors and/or incorrect data are made against the original manuscript, the author may be charged for corrections.
APC (Article Processing Charge)
22. With the approval of the Editors, additional pages can be published with page charges (22,000 yen per page). In addition, the author will be charged for color pages if any. Color page charges are 110,000 yen for 1 or 2 color pages. When color pages exceed 3, 55,000 yen will be charged for each additional page. For example, 165,000 yen will be charged for 3 color pages.
23. The publication of Online Supplementary Materials will cost 11,000 yen (both monochrome and color).
24. In addition, authors from overseas will be charged an additional 6,500 yen as other charges if the above article publication fees are incurred.
25. There are no page charges when the printed pages do not exceed the page limits and no complimentary reprints. Authors can purchase the reprints (100 copies minimum) by ordering at the return of the galley proof. If the author/authors is/are unable to pay the excess charge, we cannot publish the article and the accepted article may be retracted.
Copyright
26. The copyrights for articles published in JGAM belong to Applied Microbiology, Molecular and Cellular Biosciences Research Foundation. All articles in the journal are Open Access. Authors can choose the following Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International). The license allows users to share unmodified articles, noncommercially, as long as appropriate credit is given. Some funding bodies require articles funded by them to be published under a specific Creative Commons license. Before submitting your work to the journal, check with the relevant funding bodies to ensure that you comply with any mandates.