Editorial Policies

Review policies, process, and anonymity

For Mucosal Immunology's complete review process, policies, and concerns regarding anonymity, please see here. 

Acknowledgments 

In this section, please include the source of funding for the research, contributions that do not meet the requirements for authorship, or special thanks. Additional disclosures, separate to the Conflict of interest section, go under this heading.

Competing interests

All authors are responsible for recognizing and disclosing any competing interests that could be perceived to bias their work, making known all financial support and any other personal connections. This includes, but is not limited to: funding, such as salaries, equipment, supplies, reimbursement for attending symposia, etc, from organizations that may gain or lose financially through the publication of the paper; personal financial interests, such as stocks and shares in companies that may gain or lose financially from publication, consultation fees or forms of remuneration from organizations that may gain or lose financially, or patent and patent applications whose value may be affected; and, employment, whether recent, present or anticipated, by an organization that may gain or lose from publication of the paper. Such relationships will be reviewed, and further clarification may be requested if deemed necessary by the editors or reviewers. This information should be included in the title page and in the article under the heading "Competing nterests." This section must appear after the "Methods" section (below Acknowledgments and Author Contributions). If you have no conflict of interest to declare, please explicitly state so in the "Competing interests" section.

In terms of application to editorial board members or editors, editors and editorial board members are welcome to submit papers to their own journal. However, per ICMJE, editorial board members and external editors must declare any competing interests, including their editorship, in the manuscript they submit.

Clinical trials and informed consent

Registration in a public trials registry is required for publication in Mucosal Immunology. A clinical trial is defined as any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention or comparison groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome. Studies designed for other purposes, including exploring pharmacokinetics or safety and tolerability (e.g., phase 1 trials) are exempt.

Registration must be with a registry that meets the following criteria: (1) accessible to the public at no charge; (2) searchable by electronic methods; (3) open to all prospective registrants free of charge or at minimal cost; (4) validates registered information; (5) identifies trials with a unique number; and (6) includes information on the investigator(s), research question or hypothesis, methodology, intervention and comparisons, eligibility criteria, primary and secondary outcomes measured, date of registration, anticipated or actual start date, anticipated or actual date of last follow-up, target number of subjects, status (anticipated, ongoing or closed) and funding source(s).

Examples of registries that meet these criteria include:

1. The registry sponsored by the United States National Library of Medicine (www.clinicaltrials.gov);
2. The International Standard Randomized Controlled Trial Number Registry (www.controlled-trials.com);
3. The Cochrane Renal Group Registry (www.cochrane-renal.org/trialsubmissionform.php);
4. The National (United Kingdom) Research Register (www.update-software.com/national/); and
5. European Clinical Trials Database  (http://eudract.emea.eu.int/).

When reporting experiments on human subjects, it must be indicated whether the procedures were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional or regional) or with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975 (as revised in 1983). Include Institutional Review Board or Animal Care and Use Committee approvals.

Springer Nature endorses the toolkits and guidelines produced by the following bodies:

• Committee on Publication Ethics
• Good Publication Practice
• Medical Publishing Insights and Practices Initiative

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Research involving animals and their data or biological material

The welfare of animals (vertebrate and higher invertebrate) used for research, education and testing must be respected. Authors are required to supply detailed information on the ethical treatment of their animals in their submission (see below). For that purpose, they may use the ARRIVE checklist which is designed to be used when submitting manuscripts describing animal research. 
 
Manuscripts presenting studies that have employed anesthesia or euthanasia methods inconsistent with the commonly accepted norms of veterinary best practice (e.g. chloral hydrate, ether, and chloroform) will not be considered. Decisions to not consider manuscripts presenting such anesthesia or euthanasia methods are independent of the approving ethics committee and any previously published work. We recommend that authors consult the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) Guidelines for the Euthanasia of Animals (2020), as a comprehensive resource for guidance on veterinary best practice for the anesthesia and euthanasia of animals.”

For studies involving client-owned animals, authors must also document informed consent from the client or owner and adherence to a high standard (best practice) of veterinary care.

When reporting results, authors are required to indicate in the methods section:

• That the studies have been approved by a research ethics committee at the institution or practice at which the studies were conducted. 
• If relevant, the name of ethics committee and (if relevant) relevant permit number; and or
• Whether the legal requirements or guidelines in the country and/or state or province for the care and use of animals have been followed.

Researchers from countries without any legal requirements or guidelines voluntarily should refer to the following sites for guidance:

• The Basel Declaration describes fundamental principles of using animals in biomedical research
• The International Council for Laboratory Animal Science (ICLAS) provides ethical guidelines for researchers as well as editors and reviewers
• The Association for the study of Animal Behaviour describes ethical guidelines for the treatment of animals in research and teaching

Researchers may wish to consult the most recent (ethical) guidelines available from relevant taxon-oriented professional societies.

If a study was granted exemption or did not require ethics approval, this must also be detailed in the manuscript.

Authorship

Requirements for all categories of articles largely conform to the "Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals," developed by the ICMJE. A manuscript will be considered for publication with the understanding that:

1. all named authors have agreed to its submission
2. it is not currently being considered for publication by another journal
3. if the paper is accepted, it will not subsequently be published in the same or similar form in any language without the consent of publisher

Each author must have contributed sufficiently to the intellectual content of the submission. The corresponding author should list all authors and their contributions to the work. Any changes to the author list after submission, such as a change in the order of the authors, or the deletion or addition of authors, must be approved by a signed letter from every author. The corresponding author must confirm that he or she has had full access to the data in the study and final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication. To qualify as a contributing author, one must meet all of the following four criteria:

1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; and
2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and
3. Final approval of the version to published; and
4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Contributions by individuals who made direct contributions to the work but do not meet all of the above criteria should be noted in the Acknowledgments section.

Mucosal Immunology also requires the inclusion of an Author Contribution section. 

Medical writers and industry employees can be authors or contributors. Concurrent with their contribution to the work submitted, their roles, affiliations, and potential conflicts of interest should be included in the author list and/or noted in the Acknowledgments section. Failure to acknowledge these contributors is considered inappropriate, which conflicts with Mucosal Immunology’s editorial policy.

Mucosal Immunology also has important formatting instructions for group authors, which clarify both group and individual authorship. Authors should adhere to those guidelines wherever consortia or working groups are present.

Mucosal Immunology does not limit the number of corresponding authors; however, ScholarOne allows only one (as opposed to multiple) author to be designated as “Corresponding author” for the purposes of the technical submission. Submitters should note that, if provided, only the corresponding author designated as such in ScholarOne will have their verified ORCID ID automatically linked to the publication. On the title page of the manuscript itself, joint corresponding authors should be listed as: 
 
“Contact” followed by the authors’ names.
 
Mucosal Immunology also allows co-authors to be specified as having contributed equally to the work and one set of co-authors to be specified as having jointly supervised the work. In turn, the journal encourages recognition of "equal contributions" in references whose manuscripts authors cite. For example, we ask submissions to ensure any text in the main body of the manuscript that refers to an author by name also includes all equal contributors (eg, "Author 1, Author 2 and colleagues show…"). 

Other equal contributions are best described in author contribution statements. The style for submitting these, so they are published and indexed as intended, are by a footnote number. The associated footnotes must follow this exact wording: 
 
“These authors contributed equally:” followed by the author names. 

Author Name Change

An author who has changed their name for reasons such as gender transition or religious conversion may request for their name, pronouns and other relevant biographical information to be corrected on papers published prior to the change.  The author can choose for this correction to happen silently, in which case there will be no note flagging the change on either the pdf or the html of the paper, or alternatively they may do so by a formal public Author Correction.

Plagiarism and fabrication

Plagiarism is when an author attempts to pass off someone else's work as his or her own. Duplicate publication, sometimes called self-plagiarism, occurs when an author reuses substantial parts of his or her own published work without providing the appropriate references. Plagiarism without dishonest intent is relatively frequent, for example, when an author reuses parts of an introduction from an earlier paper.

If plagiarism is suspected, as a member journal of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), Mucosal Immunology will follow best industry practice to investigate the integrity of the research in question. Based on the outcome of this investigation, the journal may opt to publish a correction, or in serious cases of scientific misconduct, impose a retraction on the paper.

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Duplicate publication

Papers must be original and not previously published or submitted for publication elsewhere. This rule also applies to non-English language publications. Although the editors, editorial board, and referees make every effort to ensure the validity of published manuscripts, the final responsibility rests with the authors.

Springer Nature allows and encourages prior publication on recognized community preprint servers for review by other scientists before formal submission to a journal. The details of the preprint server concerned and any accession numbers should be included in the cover letter accompanying manuscript submission. This policy does not extend to preprints available to the media or that are otherwise publicized outside the scientific community before or during the submission and consideration process. For more information, please see the Preprint Policy section.

Image manipulation

Images submitted with a manuscript for review should be minimally processed. Authors should retain their unprocessed data and metafiles, as Editors may require them to aid in manuscript evaluation. If unprocessed data is available, manuscript evaluation may be stalled until the issue is resolved.

A certain degree of image processing is acceptable for publication (and for some experiments, fields and techniques is unavoidable), but the final image must correctly represent the original data and conform to community standards. The guidelines below will aid in accurate data presentation at the image processing level.

• Authors should list all image acquisition tools and image processing software packages used. Authors should document key image-gathering settings and processing manipulations in the Materials and Methods section.
• Images gathered at different times or from different locations should not be combined into a single image, unless it is stated that the resultant image is a product of time-averaged data or a time-lapse sequence. If juxtaposing images is essential, the borders should be clearly demarcated in the figure and described in the legend.
• Touch-up tools, such as cloning and healing tools in Photoshop, or any feature that deliberately obscures manipulations are to be avoided.
• Processing (such as changing brightness and contrast) is appropriate only when it is applied equally across the entire image and is applied equally to controls. Contrast should not be adjusted so that data disappears. Excessive manipulations, such as processing to emphasize one region in the image at the expense of others (for example, through the use of a biased choice of threshold settings), is inappropriate, as is emphasizing experimental data relative to the control.

Positive and negative controls, as well as molecular size markers, should be included on each gel and blot - either in the main figure or an expanded data supplementary figure. The display of cropped gels and blots in the main paper is encouraged if it improves the clarity and conciseness of the presentation. In such cases, the cropping must be mentioned in the figure legend.

• Vertically sliced gels that juxtapose lanes that were not contiguous in the experiment must have a clear separation or a black line delineating the boundary between the gels.
• Cropped gels in the paper must retain important bands.
• Cropped blots in the body of the paper should retain at least six band widths above and below the band.
• High-contrast gels and blots are discouraged, as overexposure may mask additional bands. Authors should strive for exposures with gray backgrounds. Immunoblots should be surrounded by a black line to indicate the borders of the blot, if the background is faint.
• For quantitative comparisons, appropriate reagents, controls and imaging methods with linear signal ranges should be used.

Microscopy adjustments should be applied to the entire image. Threshold manipulation, expansion or contraction of signal ranges and the altering of high signals should be avoided. If pseudo-coloring and nonlinear adjustment (for example, "gamma changes") are used, this must be disclosed. Adjustments of individual color channels are sometimes necessary on merged images, but this should be noted in the figure legend.

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Corrections and retraction policy

We recognize our responsibility to correct errors. Content published online (as Advance Online Publication) or in a print issue is final and cannot be amended without formal notice. The online and print versions are both part of the published record therefore the original version must be preserved and changes to the paper should be made as a formal correction. If an error is noticed in an AOP article, a correction should accompany the article when it publishes in print. An HTML (or full-text) version of the correction will also be created and linked to the original article. If the error is found in an article after print publication, the correction will be published online and in the next available print issue.

• Correction. Notification of an important error made by the journal or author that affects the publication record or the scientific integrity of the paper
• Retraction. Notification of invalid results. All coauthors must sign a retraction specifying the error and stating briefly how the conclusions are affected.

Decisions about corrections are made by the Editor (sometimes with advice of peer reviewers) and this sometimes involves author consultation. Requests to make corrections that do not affect the paper in a significant way or impair the reader's understanding of the contribution (a spelling mistake or grammatical error, for example) are not considered.

The journal also publishes Retractions, which are formal notifications of invalid results to content the journal already published. The journal will follow best practice guidelines laid out by COPE in investigating and correcting concerns raised in the literature.

Note: An author who has changed their name for reasons such as gender transition or religious conversion may request for their name, pronouns and other relevant biographical information to be corrected on papers published prior to the change.  The author can choose for this correction to happen silently, in which case there will be no note flagging the change on either the pdf or the html of the paper, or alternatively they may do so by a formal public Author Correction.

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Preprint Policy

Preprints are defined as an author's version of a primary research manuscript, prior to formal peer review by the journal. Springer Nature and the journal encourage authors to take advantage of their chosen preprint servers (i.e. BioRxiv) and/or authors' and institutional websites, as it encourages open communication with/among those in the field. An author may post their original manuscript at any time during the peer review process.

Preprints are not considered as prior publications and will not jeopardize their consideration at the journal.Click here for more information.

Should an author choose to upload a preprint of their manuscript, they must state the preprint DOI and licensing terms upon submission to the journal or at any other point during consideration. Additionally, it is the author's responsibility to ensure that the preprint record is updated with the appropriate official publication record (DOI and/or link) of the article should it be published by the journal.

Authors may select any license of their choice for the preprint, including Creative Commons licenses.  Click here for more information. Please note that, as with a published article, the type of license selected will affect how the preprint may be shared and reused. Additionally, should an author choose to cite a preprint, they should use the following format:

Babichev, S. A., Ries, J. & Lvovsky, A. I. Quantum scissor: teleportation of single-mode optical states by means of a nonlocal single photon. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0208066  (2002).

Springer Nature's policy on communication with the media applies to preprints as well. Researchers may respond to queries from the media regarding preprints and/or conference presentations by providing explanations, clarifications, and/or context. In these circumstances, media coverage will not jeopardize the submission. Please note, however, that such coverage may reduce or pre-empt coverage by other media at the time of publication. For authors approached by reporters about preprints, we encourage an explicit statement that the preprint has not undergone peer review and the findings are may change.”

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Research data policy

Mucosal Immunology adheres to Springer Nature’s Data Policy Type 3. This means that a submission to Mucosal Immunology implies that materials described in the manuscript, including all relevant raw data, will be freely available to any researcher wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes, without breaching participant confidentiality. It also means that a Data Availability Statement (see here for more details) is required by the journal.

Communication

Communication with the media

Material submitted must not be discussed with the media. We reserve the right to halt the consideration or publication of a paper if this condition is broken. If a paper is particularly newsworthy, Springer Nature may send a press release to our list of journalists in advance of publication with an embargo that forbids any coverage of the manuscript, or the findings of the manuscript, until the time and date clearly stated, which will coincide with when the paper is publishing online. Authors whose papers are scheduled for publication may also arrange their own publicity (for instance, through their institution's press offices), but they must strictly adhere to the online publication press embargo and are advised to coordinate their own publicity with Springer Nature's press office.