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Instructions for authors

General information

Contributions should be written in grammatically correct English. Either British or American spelling is permitted, but one must be used consistently within a manuscript. Authors are advised to follow styles outlined in The CBE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers (6th Ed., Cambridge University Press). Poorly written manuscripts will be returned to authors without further consideration.

Nomenclature of genera and species names must agree with the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), International Trust for Zoological Nomenclature, London, 1999; or the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature, adopted by XIV International Botanical Congress, Berlin, 1987. Biochemical nomenclature should agree with “Biochemical Nomenclature and Related Documents” (A Compendium, 2nd edition, 1992), International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, published by Portland Press, London and Chapel Hill, UK. New nucleic acid or amino acid sequences will be published only if they are also deposited in an appropriate data bank (e.g. EMBL, GeneBank, DDBJ). Except for cases where tradition dictates, SI units are to be used.

All manuscripts that conform to the Instructions for Authors will be fully peer-reviewed by members of Editorial Board and expert reviewers. The Author will be requested to return a revised version of the reviewed manuscript within four (4) months of receiving the reviews. If a revised manuscript is received later, it will be considered to be a new submission.


Copyrights: Since 2021 journal allow authors to retain the copyright of their papers without restrictions. Authors grants the publisher the non-exclusive unlimited license to the Work for the multiple release and distribution. Copyrights include mechanical, electronic, and visual reproduction and distribution. Use of previously published figures, tables, or brief quotations requires the appropriate copyright holder’s permission, at the time of manuscript submission; acknowledgement of the contribution must also be included in the manuscript. Submission of a manuscript to Acta Protozoologica implies that the contents are original, have not been published previously, and are not under consideration or accepted for publication elsewhere.

Registering articles at Zoobank

Acta Protozoologica has been electronic-only journal since 2018. Therefore there is need for authors to observe the ICZN (2012) amendments. In particular, when articles include nomenclatural acts (such as describing a new species), it is necessary to register the work (not the name, although this is best practice) with ZooBank and to include the ZooBank registration number within the work itself (see Article 8.5.3; ICZN, 2012). Without this registration the name will not be valid.


ICZN = International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. 2012. Amendment of Articles 8, 9, 10, 21 and 78 of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature to expand and refine methods of publication. Bull. Zool. https://zookeys.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=3096.


ZooBank tutorial on how to register the paper can be found at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbvF2_xIlqk.

Publication charges

Acta Protozoologica has been both an online and print publication for many decades, and now will become fully an online publication. Previously, the journal had no publication fees.  However, given the increasing costs of publication, especially the costs of maintaining an online journal, Acta Protozoologica will need to establish a publication fee of 250 Euros per article. There is no fee for submitting a manuscript to be considered for publication. However, due to the cost of production and publication the 250 Euro fee will be invoiced to the author(s) when a manuscript is approved for publication. All published papers will be freely accessible on journal’s website as before.


 
Currently, there are two ways to pay the fee for publishing an article:
1. Payment via the Publisher's online store
2. Payment after receiving a Proforma invoice
 
In order to pay the publication fee, Author must first contact the journal's editorial office to provide details regarding the settlement of payments and declarations necessary to settle the payments. 
Contact details: Krzysztof Wiackowski (Editor-in-Chief), k.wiackowski@uj.edu.pl.

Transfer details:
Bank Name: PEKAO S.A O/KRAKÓW
Bank Address: ul. Pijarska 1, 31-015 Kraków, Poland
IBAN: PL 80 1240 4722 1111 0000 4856 3325
BIC: PKOPPLPW
Bank Account: 1111 0000 4856 3325
Name of Account holder Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, ul. Gołębia 24, 31-007 Kraków
Transfer title: Acta Protozoologica, article title (or its first fragment)

 

Link for Payments: Pre-publication fee (250 Euro/1150 PLN)
.

Submission

Authors should submit manuscripts electronically by e-mailing preferably as a single PDF file to the editor: Dr Krzysztof Wiąckowski, E-mail: k.wiackowski@uj.edu.pl. In addition to the full manuscript in pdf format, the title page with abstract should be provided as a single file in MS Word format. The manuscript and illustrations should be prepared in accordance with the standards of the journal (see below) except for the resolution of figures, which at this stage should be reduced to permit easy mailing. At the time of submission, authors are encouraged to provide names, E-mails, and postal addresses of four researchers who might act as reviewers.


When a manuscript is accepted, the authors should submit the final version as attachments to mails or by providing links to download all necessary files. The final electronic copy of the accepted manuscript should consist of a single MS Word *.DOC file (containing text and tables). Illustrations should be provided as separate files in appropriate graphic format and resolution (see below).

Organization of manuscripts

Text: The manuscript should be organized into the following sections: Title page, Abstract, Keywords, Abbreviations (optional), Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, Acknowledgements, References, Tables, and Figure legends. The Title Page should include the title of the manuscript, first name(s) in full and surname(s) of author(s), the authors’ institutional affiliations, page heading of up to 40 characters (including spaces), and the address for correspondence with the name, full postal address and E-mail of the corresponding author. Footnotes should be avoided.
Manuscripts must be double-spaced, with numbered pages (12 pt, Times Roman). The text lines should be continuously numbered. When necessary, use only italic, bold, subscript, and superscript formats; do not use other electronic formatting such as multiple font styles, ruler changes, or graphics inserted into the text. Please, do not right-justify the text or use of the hyphen function at the end of lines; avoid the use of footnotes; distinguish the numbers 0 and 1 from the letters “l” and “O”; avoid repetition of illustrations and data in the text and tables. Tables should be prepared with appropriate tools for tables offered by Word or Excel; do not format tables by introducing spaces and/or by right-justifying.

Citations in the text should be made by giving the author’s name with the year of publication and not by a number, e.g. (Foissner and Korganova 2000). In the case of more than two authors, the name of the first author and et al. should be used, e.g. (Botes et al. 2001). Different articles by the same author(s) published in the same year must be marked by the letters a, b, c, etc. (Kpatcha et al. 1996a, b). Multiple citations presented in the text must be arranged by date, e.g. (Small 1967, Didier and Detcheva 1974, Jones 1974). If one author is cited more than once, semicolons should separate the other citations, e.g. (Lousier and Parkinson 1984; Foissner 1987, 1991, 1994; Darbyshire et al. 1989).


References
: Bibliographic references must be listed alphabetically. Use abbreviated journal names (with dots) in italics like in the examples shown below. Journal volume number should be in bold font. Unpublished material, except for PhD theses, should not be included unless the papers have already their doi numbers. Examples for bibliographic arrangement:

  • Flint J. A., Dobson P. J., Robinson B. S. (2003) Genetic analysis of forty isolates of Acanthamoeba group III by multilocus isoenzyme electrophoresis. Acta Protozool. 42: 317-324
  • Swofford D. L. (1998) PAUP* Phylogenetic Analysis Using Parsimony (*and Other Methods). Ver. 4.0b3. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, MA
  • Neto E. D., Steindel M., Passos L. K. F. (1993) The use of RAPD’s for the study of the genetic diversity of Schistosoma mansoni and Trypanosoma cruzi. In: DNA Fingerprinting: State of Science, (Eds. S. D. J. Pena, R. Chakraborty, J. T. Epplen, A. J. Jeffreys). Birkhäuser-Verlag, Basel, 339-345


Illustrations: Line drawings should have well-defined lines and a white background. Avoid fine stippling or shading. Multiple photographs should if possible be combined into plates. Figures in the final (accepted) version of a manuscript must be provided in *.TIF, *.PSD, or *.CDR graphic formats only (Greyscale and Colour - 300 DPI, Art line – preferably 600 DPI). Make sure that illustrations fit within either a single column width (86 mm) or the full-page width (177 mm); the maximum high of a figure (or a plate) is 231 mm. Do not use Microsoft Word for figure formatting.
Magnification should be indicated by a scale bar where appropriate. Figure legends must be placed, in order, at the end of the manuscript, before the figures and must contain explanations of all symbols and abbreviations used. The figures should be numbered in the text using Arabic numerals (e.g. Fig. 1).


PROOF SHEETS
After a manuscript has been accepted, Authors will receive proof sheets for correction by e-mail and will be asked to return these, by electronic mail, to the editor within a week. Authors are fully responsible for any undetected errors. Only spelling errors and small mistakes can be corrected at this stage. From the year 2018 paper version of the journal (and offprints) will not be published.

Acta Protozoologica is indexed in: Current Contents, Biosis, Elsevier Biobase, Chemical Abstracts Service, Protozoological Abstracts, Science Citation Index, Librex-Agen, Polish Scientific Journals Contents - Agric. & Biol. Sci. Data Base, and Microbes.info "Spotlight"  and many more (See: Abstracting & indexing tab)