Journal of Exercise & Organ Cross Talk

To facilitate rapid publication, manuscripts should be prepared carefully in accordance with the following requirements.

JEOCT_format 

Publication ethics

The Journal of Exercise & Organ Cross Talk (JEOCT) adheres to the ethical principles and best practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to ensure the integrity, quality, and credibility of scholarly publishing. All authors submitting manuscripts to JEOCT are required to comply fully with these ethical standards throughout the submission, peer review, and publication process.

Authors are responsible for ensuring that their work meets the journal’s ethical requirements and for cooperating with any ethical review or inquiry conducted by the editorial office.

Detailed information regarding the journal’s policies on publication ethics, research integrity, and ethical responsibilities is available on the journal’s website: https://www.jeoct.com/journal/process?ethics 

Style

All materials should be double-spaced and pages should be numbered. Abbreviations should be standard and used just in necessary cases, after complete explanations in the first usage. The editorial office reserves the right to edit the submitted manuscripts in order to comply with the Journal’s style. In any case, the authors are responsible for the published material.

Language (usage and editing services)

Please write your text in good English (American or British usage is accepted, but not a mixture of these). Authors who feel their English language manuscript may require editing to eliminate possible grammatical or spelling errors and to conform to correct scientific English may wish to use the English Language Editing service. For this purpose, please send your manuscript file to mortezafathi@ut.ac.ir

Copyright and Licensing

If a submitted manuscript includes any text, figures, tables, or other materials that have been previously published, it is the responsibility of the author(s) to obtain the necessary permission from the original copyright holder(s). Valid written permission for the reuse of all copyrighted material must be secured before submission and provided to the journal upon request.

Copyright of all articles published in the Journal of Exercise & Organ Cross Talk (JEOCT) remains with the author(s). Articles are published under the journal’s Open Access policy and distributed in accordance with the applicable Creative Commons license (Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0)), which defines the terms of use, sharing, and reuse of the published content.

Authors are required to upload the following documents at the time of manuscript submission:

• Authors’ Declaration Form
• Disclosure of Interest Form

Failure to provide the required permissions or documentation may result in delays in the review process or rejection of the manuscript.

Publication Fee

The Journal of Exercise & Organ Cross Talk (JEOCT) is an Open Access journal. To support the costs associated with editorial processing, peer review management, online hosting, and long-term preservation, an Article Processing Charge (APC) is applied to accepted manuscripts.

The APC is payable only after final acceptance of the manuscript and will be invoiced to the corresponding author. The journal does not charge submission fees, page charges, or color figure fees.

The applicable APCs are as follows:

• Original Articles: 40,000,000 IRR (200 USD)
• Review Articles: 50,000,000 IRR (250 USD)
• Brief Reports: 25,000,000 IRR (200 USD)
• Other article types: 20,000,000 IRR (100 USD)

Payment of the APC has no influence on the editorial decision-making process, peer review outcomes, or acceptance of manuscripts. All submissions are evaluated solely on the basis of scientific quality, originality, and relevance to the journal’s scope.

Human and Animal Rights

All research must have been carried out within an appropriate ethical framework. If there is suspicion that work has not taken place within an appropriate ethical framework, Editors will follow may reject the manuscript, and/or contact the author(s)’ ethics committee. On rare occasions, if the Editor has serious concerns about the ethics of a study, the manuscript may be rejected on ethical grounds, even if approval from an ethics committee has been obtained.

Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee.

The submitted study has to be supported by the ethics/bioethics committee approval. Authors reporting the use of a new procedure or tool in a clinical setting, for example as a technical advance or case report, must give a clear justification in the manuscript for why the new procedure or tool was deemed more appropriate than usual clinical practice to meet the patient’s clinical need. Such justification is not required if the new procedure is already approved for clinical use at the authors’ institution. Authors will be expected to have obtained ethics committee approval and informed patient consent for any experimental use of a novel procedure or tool where a clear clinical advantage based on clinical need was not apparent before treatment.

Plagiarism

Authors are not allowed to utilize verbatim text of previously published papers or manuscripts submitted elsewhere. All submissions undergo initial screening with iThenticate plagiarism detection software. Manuscripts containing plagiarism, duplicate publication, or inappropriate text recycling are rejected before peer review. Serious cases may lead to institutional notification in line with COPE guidelines.

Paper Preparations

Original articles and Reviews should be composed as follows.:

• Title page (numbered as page 1)

• Abstract (max 250 words)

• Keywords

• Abbreviations

• Introduction

• Materials and Methods (with separate sections including Subject, Exercise protocol)

• Results

• Discussion (comments and comparison with other published results)

• Conclusions

• What is already known on this subject?

• What this study adds?

• Acknowledgements (if any)

• Funding
• Data Availability

• Compliance with ethical standards
• Conflict of interest

• Ethical approval

• Informed consent

• Author contributions: Conceptualization: ..; Methodology: ..; Software: ...; Validation: ..; Formal analysis: ..; Investigation: ..; Resources: ..; Data curation: ..; Writing - original draft: ..; Writing - review & editing: ..; Visualization: ...; Supervision: ..; Project administration: ...; Funding acquisition: ..

•         References (APA, insert doi at the end of each reference)

Types of Papers

Review Articles

• Reviews in JEOCT are peer-reviewed and predominantly commissioned articles that aim to provide a timely, insightful and accessible overview of a particular field or aspect of experimental biology research. Longer reviews of up to 7000 words [maximum of 8 display items (figures/tables/boxes)] provide a broad overview of a subject by bringing together data from different fields and organisms, while shorter reviews of ~3500–4500 words [maximum of 5 display items (figures/tables/boxes)] can be more focused on a particular topic. Although authors are free to express their opinions in a Review, they are asked to provide counterbalancing viewpoints where appropriate and to ensure that opinion and fact are clearly distinguishable.

Original Articles

• Research Articles should be fully documented reports of original research and are always peer reviewed. They should be written in as concise a style as possible but should still be accessible to the broad readership of JEOCT.

  The total length of the article should not exceed 7000 words (including the main text and figure legends, but not the title page, abstract, materials and methods section or reference list), with a 250-word abstract and a maximum of 10 display items (figures/tables). Supplementary information (figures, tables, movies, datasets, methods) may be published online at the discretion of the editor and reviewers (a strict limit of 50 Mb of supplementary information exists per article).

Short Communication

• Short Communications are short, peer-reviewed articles focusing on a high-quality, hypothesis-driven, self-contained piece of original research and/or the proposal of a new theory or concept based on existing research. They should not be preliminary reports or contain purely incremental data and should be of significance and broad interest to the field of comparative physiology.

  The total length of the article (including the main text and figure legends, but not the title page, abstract, materials and methods section or reference list) should not exceed 2500 words, with a 150-word abstract and a maximum of 3 display items (figures/tables). Supplementary information (figures, tables, movies, datasets, methods) may be published online at the discretion of the editor and reviewers (a strict limit of 50 Mb of supplementary material exists per article). 

Letter to the Editor

• Letters to the editors must not exceed 1000 words, 3 references and 3 authors. They should not have an abstract. They should be addressed to the Editor-in-Chief. Submitted letters will be subject to shortening and editorial revision.

Editorial

• The journal publishes also Editorials. Authors who wish to submit an editorial should first consult the journal’s Editor-in-Chief.

Hypothesis

•  Hypotheses should present an untested original hypothesis backed up solely by a survey of previously published results. The article should not present any new data. Hypotheses should be short articles (ideally 500 - 1500 words) outlining significant progress in thinking that is testable, though not so easily testable that readers will wonder why the testing has not already been done.

Manuscript Submission

Submission of a manuscript implies: that the work described has not been published before; that it is not under consideration for publication anywhere else; that its publication has been approved by all co-authors, if any, as well as by the responsible authorities – tacitly or explicitly – at the institute where the work has been carried out. The publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

Permissions

Authors wishing to include figures, tables, or text passages that have already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright owner(s) for both the print and online format and to include evidence that such permission has been granted when submitting their papers. Any material received without such evidence will be assumed to originate from the authors.

If you include figures that have already been published elsewhere, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner(s) for both the print and online format. Please be aware that some publishers do not grant electronic rights for free and that JEOCT will not be able to refund any costs that may have occurred to receive these permissions. In such cases, material from other sources should be used.

Online Submission

Please follow the hyperlink “Submit manuscript” on the right and upload all of your manuscript files following the instructions given on the screen.

Please ensure you provide all relevant editable source files. Failing to submit these source files might cause unnecessary delays in the review and production process.

Title Page

Please make sure your title page contains the following information.

Title 

The title should be concise and informative.

Author information 

• The name(s) of the author(s)
• The affiliation(s) of the author(s), i.e. institution, (department), city, (state), country
• A clear indication and an active e-mail address of the corresponding author
• The 16-digit ORCID of the author(s)

If address information is provided with the affiliation(s) it will also be published.

For authors that are (temporarily) unaffiliated we will only capture their city and country of residence, not their e-mail address unless specifically requested.

References

References should be in APA style (APA, insert doi at the end of each reference)

Download EndNote style (APA 7th): 

https://endnote.com/style_download/apa-7th-american-psychological-association-7th-edition/

Text Formatting

Manuscripts should be submitted in Word.

• Use a normal, plain font (e.g., 12-point Utssah) for text.
• Use italics for emphasis.
• Use the automatic page numbering function to number the pages.
• Do not use field functions.
• Use tab stops or other commands for indents, not the space bar.
• Use the table function, not spreadsheets, to make tables.
• Use the equation editor or MathType for equations.
• Save your file in docx format (Word 2007 or higher) or doc format (older Word versions).

Headings (Utssah 16)

Please use no more than three levels of displayed headings.

Footnotes

Footnotes can be used to give additional information, which may include the citation of a reference included in the reference list. They should not consist solely of a reference citation, and they should never include the bibliographic details of a reference. They should also not contain any figures or tables.

Footnotes to the text are numbered consecutively; those to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data). Footnotes to the title or the authors of the article are not given reference symbols.

Always use footnotes instead of endnotes.

Tables

• All tables are to be numbered using Arabic numerals.
• Tables should always be cited in text in consecutive numerical order.
• For each table, please supply a table caption (title) explaining the components of the table.
• Identify any previously published material by giving the original source in the form of a reference at the end of the table caption.
• Footnotes to tables should be indicated by superscript lower-case letters (or asterisks for significance values and other statistical data) and included beneath the table body.

Figure Lettering

• To add lettering, it is best to use Helvetica or Arial (sans serif fonts).
• Keep lettering consistently sized throughout your final-sized artwork, usually about 2–3 mm (8–12 pt).
• Variance of type size within an illustration should be minimal, e.g., do not use 8-pt type on an axis and 20-pt type for the axis label.
• Avoid effects such as shading, outline letters, etc.
• Do not include titles or captions within your illustrations.

Figure Numbering

• All figures are to be numbered using Arabic numerals.
• Figures should always be cited in text in consecutive numerical order.
• Figure parts should be denoted by lowercase letters (a, b, c, etc.).
• If an appendix appears in your article and it contains one or more figures, continue the consecutive numbering of the main text. Do not number the appendix figures,"A1, A2, A3, etc." Figures in online appendices [Supplementary Information (SI)] should, however, be numbered separately.

Figure Captions

• Each figure should have a concise caption describing accurately what the figure depicts. Include the captions in the text file of the manuscript, not in the figure file.
• Figure captions begin with the term Fig. in bold type, followed by the figure number, also in bold type.
• No punctuation is to be included after the number, nor is any punctuation to be placed at the end of the caption.
• Identify all elements found in the figure in the figure caption, and use boxes, circles, etc., as coordinate points in graphs.
• Identify previously published material by giving the source in the form of a reference citation at the end of the figure caption.

Figure Placement and Size

• Figures should be submitted separately from the text, if possible.
• When preparing your figures, size figures to fit in the column width.
• For large-sized journals, the figures should be 84 mm (for double-column text areas), or 174 mm (for single-column text areas) wide and not higher than 234 mm.
• For small-sized journals, the figures should be 119 mm wide and not higher than 195 mm.

Accessibility

In order to give people of all abilities and disabilities access to the content of your figures, please make sure that

• All figures have descriptive captions (blind users could then use a text-to-speech software or a text-to-Braille hardware)
• Patterns are used instead of or in addition to colors for conveying information (colorblind users would then be able to distinguish the visual elements)
• Any figure lettering has a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1