A summary of the editorial process is given in the flowchart below. The following provides notes on each step.

Submission

Submission to Microbiome Research Reports (MRR) is implemented online only using our editorial system, MESAs. You will be guided through the process step by step, and you will be able to track the progress of your manuscript through the system. MESAs automatically converts the article's source file into a single PDF, which is used in the peer review process. Please note that we will still need the source files for further processing after acceptance.

Reviewers

You are welcome to exclude a limited number of researchers as potential Editors or reviewers of your manuscript. To ensure a fair and rigorous peer review process, we ask that you keep your exclusions to a maximum of three people. If you wish to exclude additional referees, please explain or justify your concerns—this information will be helpful for Editors when deciding whether to honor your request.

New submissions are initially checked by the Editorial Office from the perspectives of originality, suitability, structure and formatting, conflicts of interest, etc. Poorly prepared manuscripts may be rejected at this stage. If your manuscript does not meet one or more of these requirements, we will return it for further revisions.

Once your manuscript has passed the initial check, it will be assigned to the (Co-)Editor-in-Chief, Executive or Senior Editor who has no conflict of interest on this manuscript to review. Regarding the Special Issue paper, after passing the initial check, the manuscript will be successively assigned to an Assistant Editor, Guest Editor, and then to the (Co-)Editor-in-Chief, Executive or Senior Editor in the case of conflict of interest for the Guest Editor to review. The Editors from Editorial Board may reject manuscripts that they deem highly unlikely to pass peer review without further consultation. Once your manuscript has passed the editorial assessment, the Assistant Editor will start to organize peer-review.

Publishing ethics

All manuscripts submitted to Microbiome Research Reports are screened using CrossCheck powered by iThenticate to identify any plagiarized content. Your study must also meet all ethical requirements as outlined in our Editorial Policies. If the manuscript does not pass any of these checks, we may return it to you for further revisions or decline to consider your study for publication.

Peer review

Microbiome Research Reports operates a single-blind review process, which means that reviewers know the names of authors, but the names of the reviewers are hidden from the authors. The scientific quality of the research described in the manuscript is assessed by a minimum of three independent expert reviewers. The (Co-)Editor-in-Chief, Executive or Senior Editor is responsible for the final decision regarding acceptance or rejection of the manuscript. The Editor-in-Chief exercises final authority over controversial manuscripts.

Confidentiality

All information contained in your manuscript and acquired during the review process will be held in the strictest confidence.

Decisions

Your research will be judged on technical soundness only, not on its perceived impact as judged by Editors or referees. There are three possible decisions: Accept (your study satisfies all publication criteria), Invitation to Revise (more work is required to satisfy all criteria), and Reject (your study fails to satisfy key criteria and it is highly unlikely that further work can address its shortcomings). All of the following publication criteria must be fulfilled to enable your manuscript to be accepted for publication:

• Originality
  The study reports original research and conclusions.
• Data availability
  All data to support the conclusions either have been provided or are otherwise publicly available.
• Statistics
  All data have been analyzed through appropriate statistical tests and these are clearly defined.
• Methods
  The methods are described in sufficient detail to be replicated.
• Citations
  Previous work has been appropriately acknowledged.
• Interpretation
  The conclusions are a reasonable extension of the results.
• Ethics
  The study design, data presentation, and writing style comply with our Editorial Policies.

Revisions

Authors are required to submit the revised manuscript within one week if minor revision is recommended while two weeks if major revision recommended or one month if additional experiments are needed. If authors need more than one month to revise their manuscript, we usually require the authors to resubmit their paper. We request that a document of point-to-point response to all comments of reviewers and the (Co-)Editor-in-Chief, Executive or Senior Editor should be supplied along with the revised manuscript to allow quick assessment of your revised manuscript. This document should outline in detail how each of the comments was addressed in the revised manuscript or should provide a rebuttal to the criticism. Manuscripts may or may not be sent to reviewers after revision, dependent on whether the reviewer requested to see the revised version. Apart from in exceptional circumstances, Microbiome Research Reports only supports a round of major revisions per manuscript.

Appeals

If you believe that the editorial decision about your manuscript was based on factual errors, you can contact us at editorialoffice@mrrjournal.net. Please state the manuscript number and describe in detail why you believe the decision was erroneous. Your appeal will be seen again by the handling Editor, who will revisit the previous decision in light of your comments. Please note that we do not allow multiple appeals: a second decision will be final.

After acceptance

Once a manuscript is acceptable, a letter of the official acceptance will be sent to authors.

Each accepted manuscript is pre-released online and produced synchronously.

The work of pre-release online is completed immediately after acceptance decision received.

The production work includes language editing, copy editing, format conversion, proofreading, etc. Before publication, authors are provided with a PDF version of their manuscripts for proofreading, where major changes are not allowed.

OAE provides an English editing service for all accepted manuscripts, which comes with an extra charge. Please visit https://www.oaepublish.com/services or contact English-Editing@oaepublish.com for more details.

The corresponding author will receive an e-mail with a link to our editorial system, which lets you annotate, correct errors introduced during proofreading, and submit the final version online. You can edit text, comment on figures/tables, and answer questions that arose during the processing of your article. All instructions for proofreading corrections are provided in the e-mail. We will do everything possible to get your article published quickly and accurately, so please submit all of your corrections within 24 hours. Please check carefully before replying, as we cannot guarantee the inclusion of any subsequent corrections. Please note that we can only publish your article once we have received your revisions or notification that you are happy for us to proceed with publication as is.

After the production work mentioned above completed, the version of pre-released online will be removed from the website only with official publication kept online.

Open Access

Your article will be free for everyone to read—immediately and permanently. You retain the copyright and personal scholarly usage rights, and we will have the publishing and distribution rights. Once it is published, people will be able to download, copy, and share your article. We provide authors with a choice of publishing under the Creative Commons licenses CC-BY. The license will help maximize the impact of your article, getting the most reach and use out of it. Here are the details:

This license lets people distribute and copy your article as long as they credit you. They can create extracts, abstracts, and different versions, such as translations. Under this license, people can also include your article in a collective work, and mine the text and data—including for commercial purposes. All this is possible, as long as they do not claim that you endorse their adaptation, and do not damage your reputation.

Microbiome Research Reports is an open access journal—everyone can read the research we publish for free. When a paper is accepted for publication, the article processing charge is $1500. There are no additional charges based on color, length, figures, or other elements. For more details, please refer to Microbiome Research Reports Article Processing Charge.

Copyright

Microbiome Research Reports adopts "Attribution 4.0 International License" for publication. Authors are required to sign a License to Publish (which can be downloaded from the journal's Author Instructions), granting OAE, which identifies itself as the original publisher, exclusive rights to publish their articles, and granting any third party the right to use the articles freely as long as the integrity is maintained and the original authors, citation details, and publisher are identified.

Embargo

Submitted and accepted articles must remain privileged documents and must not be released to the press or the public, in any format including print, television, Internet, etc., until the manuscript appears online either as ahead of print or as a final publication. OAE allows authors to post their manuscripts on not-for-profit preprint servers or to discuss it at scientific conferences, but these should not be discussed with the media.

Errata and Corrigenda

We will publish a correction of your article if a significant error is discovered after publication. An Erratum will be published if we introduced the error or a Correction if the author introduced the error.

Retractions

Articles may be withdrawn, retracted, removed, or replaced after publication if they contain substantial errors that cannot be corrected by publishing an Erratum or a Correction, or if ethical violations come to light after publication. You can find more information in Microbiome Research Reports Editorial Policies.

Authorship Disputes

To manage authorship disputes, we follow COPE guidelines, particularly "How to spot authorship problems [PDF]". Typically, if all authors agree, the authorship can be updated via a Correction. If not, we require an authoritative statement from the authors' institution(s) about who qualifies for authorship.

Last updated on 10 May, 2023