Submissions

Author Guidelines

Submitting your manuscript
At Molecular Medicine Communications, we are of the view that researchers should have significant ease in submitting their manuscript and linked supplementary information and date to the journal. Authors wishing to submit a manuscript can do so through our online manuscript submission system. There are no page limits for the submitted manuscripts. Submitted files are only accepted in Word (.doc, .docx, .rtf) or PDF (.pdf) formats. The submitting author is responsible for the manuscript during the submission, peer review, and further manuscript processing.

Terms of Submission
Submitted manuscripts are processed on the assumption that they have not been published elsewhere nor are being considered for publication anywhere. The submitted manuscript must be approved by all the contributing coauthors. All the relevant institutional approvals must be obtained by the submitting author before making a submission. The date of receipt is established by the acknowledgment from the editorial office. The submitted manuscript may be edited for improved readability. Further correspondence regarding the manuscript will be carried out through the corresponding author before the publication of the manuscript. Any inquiry concerning the accepted manuscript should be directed towards the editorial office.

Peer review
At Molecular Medicine Communications, we believe that robust and well-conducted peer review supports the advance of research and discovery by ensuring that research results are robust and trustworthy. Therefore, peer review is an integral part of publishing at Molecular Medicine Communications. All submitted articles go through initial editorial assessment and then through peer review for editorial appropriateness, ethical standards, and technical soundness. A handling editor will first assess the submitted manuscript for editorial standards and whether the manuscript is within the scope of Molecular Medicine Communications. If the manuscript meets the basic editorial standards and lies within the scope of the journal, the editor will solicit the reviews of at least two external reviewers in a single blind design where the reviewer’s names are not disclosed to the authors. The reviewers will assess the manuscript as per the journals guidelines and send their assessments to the editor who will make a decision to accept or reject the manuscript. The editors make their decisions independent of the management of the journal. Occasionally, with submissions having serious societal, ethical, biosecurity, and security implications, our editors may seek advice outside standard peer review.

Concurrent submissions
Authors are not allowed to have more than 3 manuscripts submitted to the journal at a time. This is done to ensure sufficient diversity within the authorship of the journal. This policy applies only to peer-reviewed articles.

Preprints
Molecular Medicine Communications supports and encourages manuscript deposition in preprint servers. Deposition in preprint servers does not compromise the novelty of the manuscript. However, preprint must be cited in the manuscript. All manuscripts previously appeared in institutional repositories, and/or in a thesis will also be considered for publication.

Article types
The following type of articles will be considered for publication in Molecular Medicine Communications.
(i) Research Articles
Articles presenting the results of original research studies are welcomed. The submitted manuscript should include the methods used to carry out the study and a thorough analysis of the results of the study.
(ii) Reviews
Molecular Medicine Communications accepts reviews including systematic reviews and meta-analyses providing an overview of the published studies in a particular subject area. Sometimes reviews are invited.

(iii) Clinical Case Reports

Molecular Medicine Communications accepts clinical case reports which convey unique or rare, important, and best practice messages. We welcome case reports from all areas of Medicine if the report investigates and discusses molecular aspects of the case.

Formatting
All manuscripts submitted to Molecular Medicine Communications include page and line numbers and should be structured as follows:
Title and Authorship Information
The following information should be included:

• Manuscript title
• Full author names
• Full institutional mailing addresses
• Email addresses

Institutional Affiliations
At Molecular Medicine Communications, we believe that it should be simple for authors to link their institutions to their publications. The readers should also be able to understand these affiliations and that the institutions should have access to the published work by both past and present employees. Responsibility for affiliations rests with the authors and the journal is neutral to jurisdictional claims in institutional affiliations.

Corresponding authors
At Molecular Medicine Communications, we believe that the corresponding author should be empowered to act on behalf of all co-authors during the manuscript assessment and publication process.

Abstract
Each manuscript must be accompanied by an abstract. The abstract should be self-contained, citation-free, and should not contain more than 250 words.

Introduction
An introduction section must be a part of the manuscript where the authors present their research hypothesis and objectives. It should be succinct, with no headings.

Materials and Methods
This section should describe the methods used to carry out the study in sufficient detail to allow other researchers replicate their results if they so desire. This section can be further subdivided inti several sections if more than one method is used, e.g., materials and reagents, in vitro and in vivo studies, different animal models, statistical analysis, etc. If methods from previous articles are used, those articles must be cited. Checking for the license requirements and permissions for methods, software, tools, questionnaires if any, are the responsibilities of the authors.

Results
This section should contain results of the experiments conducted during the course of the study.  Results should be properly analyzed before their description in text, tables or figures. Extensive repetition of the results in tables and figures should be avoided if already described in the text.

Discussion
This section should discuss the results obtained in the study and how they relate to the existing literature. Novel findings should be justified on the basis of unambiguous results. Authors are encouraged to carefully make informed speculations on the basis of their results. However, claims not supported by the results should be avoided.

Main Text (Review only)
Reviews may be divided into various sections or may be combined.

Conclusions
This section should highlight the findings of the study and its main conclusions citing their relevance and significance.

Data Availability
Manuscript should include a data availability statement describing how readers can access the data obtained in the study. Authors should clearly outline the reasons if data could not be released.

Conflicts of Interest
Authors must declare conflict of interest if any. Authors should also explain why a research interest may represent a conflict. If authors do not have any conflict of interest, they should still make a statement to that effect. Submitted authors are responsible for these statements on behalf of other coauthors.

Funding Statement
At Molecular Medicine Communications, we believe that due credit should be given to the funding sources by the authors. The readers should also be made aware of these funding sources and that the funding sources should have access to the published work that they sponsor. If the research was performed as part of an employment and the researchers did not obtain specific funding for the study, name of the employer should be mentioned. Please declare if the funding agency had any role in the manuscript writing, editing, and approval of the manuscript.

Author Contributions

The journal requires detailed information about individual contributions to the work. This information should be provided on submission. However, if not provided on submission, this information can be provided at subsequent revision stages, facilitated by the Editorial Office. The responsibility for ensuring that the contributions of all authors are mentioned correctly lies with the submitting author. 

Acknowledgments
Anyone who contributed to the study or manuscript, and who is not on the authors list, should be acknowledged. All acknowledgements should appear at the end of the manuscript just before the references.

References
Manuscripts may be submitted with any referencing style. Authors are responsible for the completeness and accuracy of the references. No uncited references should be present in the ‘References’ section. Please remove any uncited reference if present. If the manuscript is accepted, the references will be changed to Chicago style.

Units of measurement
International Systems of Units (SI) should be used to measure and describe any quantity, with appropriate units.

Preparation of figures
Figures and tables should be provided within the main submission file in the PDF format. They should not be sent as separate files. If the manuscript is accepted, authors will be requested to provided each figure electronically in a separate file. Figures should be provided in the following formats; (Illustrator, EPS, WMF, FreeHand, CorelDraw, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.) or bitmap formats (Photoshop, TIFF, GIF, JPEG, etc.). All figures must be cited in the text.

Preparation of tables
Each table must have a descriptive title. If numerical units are used, the units should be provided in the column heading. Tables should be cited consecutively in the manuscript. Vertical rules should not be used.

Supplementary materials
Authors can provide additional files related to the manuscript that might be of interest to the readers. Authors are responsible to provide supplementary information in the complete, ready to publish form. Our production team will not modify supplementary information. “Supplementary Information” title should be added before the ‘References’ section with concise description of each supplementary file.

Proofs
Proof of the accepted manuscripts will be sent to the submitting authors. Corrected proofs should be retuned within 3days after which they will be promptly published.

Copyright and permissions
For an article to be published certain publishing rights are required which are obtained in the form of a publishing agreement between Molecular Medicine Communications and the author. Authors retain the copyright of their manuscripts, and all Open Access articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.

Reporting guidelines
In order to maximize the reproducibility and transparency of the manuscripts, authors are encouraged to use appropriate reporting guidelines. Reviewers and editors are requested to use the same in the review process. Following guidelines for relevant article types are encouraged.

• SRQRfor qualitative studies
• CONSORTfor randomized controlled trials
• STREGAfor genetic association studies
• PRISMAfor systematic review and meta-analyses
• CAREfor case reports
• TRENDfor non-randomized trials
• STROBEfor observational studies
• STARDfor diagnostic accuracy studies
• ARRIVEfor animal experiments

Ethical guidelines
Ethical guidelines must be observed in any study on human or animal subjects. For any experiments on humans, all work must be conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (1964). 

Consent of human participants
The consent of human participants in research is of utmost importance prior to taking biometric, biomedical, and clinical data. The participants should be clearly and explicitly informed about the research details and no form of coercion or manipulation should be involved in order to gain consent.

Correction and Retractions
At Molecular Medicine Communications, it is our duty to ensure that the published literature meets the highest standards of integrity and we must act quickly to address any concerns regarding the work that we publish.

Personal data
We, at Molecular Medicine Communications believe that personal data should be disclosed only with the full permission of the individual to whom the data pertains.

Plagiarism
We believe that Molecular Medicine Communications has a responsibility to investigate any instances of plagiarism that it detects.

Research data
We believe that Molecular Medicine Communications should support community best practices in the sharing and archiving research data.

Third-Party Submissions
At Molecular Medicine Communications, we believe in legal publishing and reuse, and therefore, it is vital to secure the correct rights to third-party content.

Image Integrity
Adding, removing, enhancing, obscuring, or introducing features into images is not allowed. Adjusting color, contrast and brightness are acceptable if and only they do not obscure the content that is depicted in the original image. To improve clarity, image manipulation is acceptable. However, manipulation for other purposes could be seen as scientific and ethical abuse and will be dealt with accordingly.

Appeals
Molecular Medicine Communications would consider appeals by the submitting authors whose papers have been rejected only if they are accompanied by sufficient justification.  If the authors feel that their manuscript was rejected due to a misunderstanding of a technical or scientific aspect of the manuscript, they can lodge an appeal by quoting the original manuscript number.