Submissions

Author Guidelines

Scope

SOIL ORGANISMS presents high-level research results, review papers, and a number of other formats in English covering the complete field of soil biology, including taxonomy and systematics, soil ecology (including interactions), biogeography, morphology, conservation, evolution and ecosystem functions. Unique among soil-biological journals, Soil Organisms especially considers the organismic aspects of soil biology. Three issues per volume are published as one volume per year (issued in April, August and December). Soil Organisms is committed to fair open-access publishing, which is why we offer online open access publishing of all papers without any publication fees.

Ethics statement

Soil Organisms follows the rules of good scientific practice according to COPE (https://publicationethics.org/) and “Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice – Code of Conduct” of German Research Foundation (www.dfg.de). By submitting their manuscripts, the author(s) confirm(s) that the content of the submitted article complies with these rules, does not contain any plagiarism, all data were collected and analysed legally (including CITES, Access & Benefit Sharing), and investigations were conducted in compliance with all legal requirements and regulations. If any ethical regulations apply (e.g. vertebrate species were included in the study), an ethical statement explaining how the authors considered those must be included in the text. The authors must clearly disclose absence of any financial or private conflict of interests in the cover letter. In presence of such conflicts, this information must be included in the article text before Acknowledgements.

Authorship requires a significant contribution to the research ideas generation and refinement, study design, data collection, data analysis, and/or writing. Technical or administrative support (e.g. documentation or language editing) of the study should be mentioned in the Acknowledgements. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to make sure that all appropriate co-authors are included and all inappropriate co-authors are excluded from the author list and that all co-authors approved submission of the manuscript. Authors take collective responsibility for the work. Cases of scientific misconduct will be considered by the journal editors on one-by-one basis. In cases of plagiarism, data manipulations, publishing malpractices, or other misconduct, an article may be retracted. If authors noticed mistakes in the text, data, presented numbers, statistical analyses, or illustrations that have significant effect on conclusions or potential impact of the article, they should contact the journal and will be invited to submit a correction.

Authors may use AI-based technologies in the writing process to improve readability and language of the work (i.e. for editing existing text) and/or to generate images to improve visual attractiveness of their work. The use of AI-assisted technologies for generation of research content is not permitted. Authors should carefully review and edit all AI-generated outcomes and specifically disclose the use of AI-based technologies in a statement before the Acknowledgements. The authors are still responsible for all contents of the work.

Copyright

The author(s) transfer their copyrights of the manuscript to the publisher to allow for open access. A copyright transfer declaration is mailed to the authors with the confirmation of receipt of the manuscript. If such a declaration is not received, the authors should contact the publisher. The government may own the copyright in exceptional cases (i.e. Crown copyright). The author(s) must arrange any further authorisation necessary for reproduction of figures and other third-party owned materials prior to submission of the manuscript. The cover letter must explicitly confirm that all named authors have agreed to publication of the work, and that the manuscript does not infringe any other person’s copyright or property rights.

Types of articles

Research articles is the common format where the authors report novel findings from observational, experimental, or modelling studies in the field of soil biology. Please, refer to the Manuscript formatting section below for further details.

Other formats have more flexible paper structure and size. We publish Reviews, Opinions, and Perspectives that aim at providing high-quality overview of a research field including knowledge gaps and perspectives, or introduce novel bold ideas that highlight currently underexplored research areas and approaches. In our unique format Call for collaboration, we publish articles that describe a project idea and invite other researchers to join the project by contributing to data collection, data mobilization, establishment of new networks of experiments, or other activities. Please, refer to the published examples (e.g. https://soil-organisms.org/index.php/SO/article/view/362). We also publish Workshop reports, Book reviews, Invited reviews and comments, Obituaries, and Editorial notes. Please, contact the editors-in-chief in case you plan submission of some of these special formats. A novel, highly prestigious format of review is the Wall Review, which acknowledges Diana Wall's important role in soil biodiversity research as well as an editor of Soil Organisms. Wall Reviews are invited contributions only.

We also publish Data papers, describing large or unique datasets on soil organisms that are of potential use for other researchers. The recommended structure includes Abstract, Introduction (including context and summary of the data), Methods (describing how the data was collected, processed, and put together), Data description (describing data structure and demonstrating its representativeness and limitations), and Use potential. The dataset must be clearly described and made openly available before publication of the article on a relevant data repository (e.g. Figshare), and specific data formats must be uploaded to the corresponding databases (e.g. sequence data to GenBank). We are currently working on the integration of observational data publishing to Edaphobase.

As important part of our portfolio, we accept various formats in the field of taxonomy and systematics including Species descriptions, Taxonomic reviews, and Identification keys.

Publishing process

All manuscripts, including invited contributions, are submitted via our electronic submission system (Make a submission). Corresponding authors must register before submitting their manuscript. After submission, the manuscripts are checked by the editors and, if fitting the scope and general language and scientific quality, are reviewed by two referees in a double-blind review process. We ask authors to submit the names and email addresses of four or more potential independent reviewers that are specialists in the field the article is submitted. After receiving the reviewer’s recommendations, an editorial decision is made mainly based on these recommendations (accept, revise, reject), and the corresponding author will be informed accordingly. If a manuscript requires revision, final acceptance may only be decided after a revised version of the manuscript has been received and checked by the editors and/or the referees. Authors of accepted manuscripts will receive a proof copy of their paper as a PDF. Proof corrections should be communicated as soon as possible, normally per e-mail, along with the release to print. First editorial decisions are typically made within a few days to a couple of weeks. Reviewers are asked to provide their evaluations within four weeks. We offer the ‘online first’ option for accepted articles. The printed article versions are published three times per year (April, August, December). Authors will be supplied a PDF copy (300 dpi) for free use. The PDFs will also be freely accessible at www.soil-organisms.org. Hardcopy reprints are available for purchase.

We require raw data and custom statistical code used to produce the study results to be clearly described/annotated and openly shared for review and upon publication of the article.

Manuscript formatting

The initial manuscript can be submitted as a single file with figures embedded in the text to facilitate the review process. The author(s) must not follow all guidelines below when initially submitting their manuscript. However, we require authors to format their text, figures, and other materials according to our guidelines if we invite revisions or accept the article for publication. Since we do not charge any fees from the authors, we partly rely on cooperation with the authors for technical editing.

The article should deliver research ideas and outcomes in a concise and clear way. The recommended size of a research article is 5000-8000 words with 4-6 elements (figures, tables), but these numbers can strongly differ depending on the article type and specific content. The print space of the journal is 165 x 231 mm or 81 mm width for one column. The basic font is Times New Roman. Use page and line numbering to ease the review process.

Figures and photographs: Are to be submitted in high-resolution digital form (with a minimum resolution of 300 dpi). The prefered file formats are PSD (Photoshop) and TIFF. Please do not merge the image layers. Costs incurred by printing colour photographs or figures in the printed version of the journal must be covered by the author(s).

Diagrams and line illustrations: Should be supplied as high-resolution digital files. The print space of the journal, should be kept in mind in the preparation of tables and graphs. If you scan line drawings, select a resolution of 1200 dpi for the final figure size. Text in illustrations should be as short as possible in sans-serif type (Arial) and regular style. The prefered file formats are PDF, JPG or TIFF.

Title page: English title, short title (55 characters max), full name(s) of the author(s) and affiliations with full address. In case of several authors, a corresponding author should be indicated.

Reference list: References are to be listed alphabetically by author(s), and within these in chronological sequence.

Multiauthor papers with the number of authors exceeding 10 should be cited by the first 10 authors followed by ‘et al.’ to save printing space.

Soil organisms uses a standard reference style (APA):

Journal articles:

Author, A.M. (1989): Title of the article. Full title of the journal (no abbreviations!), 56: 1–45.

Author, A., Author, B. & Author, C. (1989a): Title of the article. Full title of the journal (no abbreviations!), 14 (3): 1–45.

Book chapters:

Author, A. (1989): Title of the book. Publisher, Place of publication: I–VIII, 1–450.

Books/monographs:

Editor1, A. & Editor2, B. (Eds) (1989): Title of the book. Publisher, Place of publication: 250pp. [In Russian].

Internet Resources:
Author, A. & Author, B.C. van (Year): Title of the contribution. Full title of the journal or website (no abbreviations!): page range if applicable. DOI or URL.

Supplementary materials: May include figures, tables, methods, videos, and other materials. They are available online linked to the original published article, and should be cited in text as ‘S’, e.g. ‘Table S1’ and ‘Figure S1’. The maximum file size for supplementary material is 15MB each. The total size should not exceed 100 MB. Large supplements should be submitted to appropriate citable external repositories and a link should be provided in the reference list.

All related correspondence should preferably be sent by email to soil-organisms@senckenberg.de.