Folia Histochemica et Cytobiologica

Scientific quarterly of the Polish Histochemical et Cytochemical Society

Statement of Editorial Policy

Folia Histochemica et Cytobiologica is an international, English-language journal devoted to the rapidly developing fields of histochemistry, cytochemistry, cell biology, cell and tissue biology.

The Folia Histochemica et Cytobiologica publishes papers that meet the needs and intellectual interests of medical professionals, basic scientists, college and university teachers and students. Prospective authors should read most recent issues of FHC to determine the appropriateness of a possible contribution. However, such an examination does not provide an infallible guide because editorial policy is always under review. Technical correctness is necessary, but it is not the only condition for acceptance. Clarity of exposition and potential interest of the readers are important considerations; it is the reader, not the author, who must receive the benefit of the doubt.

Folia Histochemica et Cytobiologica publishes review articles, original articles, short communications, proceedings of scientific congresses/symposia and book reviews. Fields of particular interests include development and application of modern techniques in histochemistry and cell biology, cell biology and pathology, cell-microenvironment interactions, tissue organization and pathology.

Manuscripts announcing new theoretical or experimental results, or manuscripts questioning well-established and successful theories, are highly desirable and are a subject for evaluation by specialists. Manuscripts describing original research that clarifies past misunderstandings or allows a broader view of a subject are acceptable. Manuscripts that demonstrate new relations between apparently unrelated areas of fields of interests are appropriate. Manuscripts that show new ways of understanding, demonstrating, or deriving familiar results are also acceptable. Such manuscripts must provide some original cytobiological insight and not just a clever derivation.

Regularly, review or tutorial articles are published, often of a length greater than that of the average article. Most of these articles are a subject of a review; authors planning such articles are asked to consult with the editors at an early stage.

Most readers of a particular article will be specialists in the subject matter presented; the context within which the paper is presented should be established in the order given in Instructions to for Authors. Manuscripts must be technically correct and must take proper cognizance of previous work on the same subject regardless of where it may have appeared. Such referencing is especially important for reminders of once well known ideas, proofs, or techniques that may have again become useful to physics teachers and students. It is the responsibility of the author to provide adequate references; editors and referees will not do the literature search that should have been done by the authors. The references are a matter of review though.

Contributions considered include: Regular Articles (Papers), Short Communications, Review Articles, Conference Proceeding, Book Reviews and Technical Notes, which describe new laboratory methods or substantial improvements of the existing techniques. Regular articles should be about five journal pages or less in length. Short communications are usually confined to the discussion of a single concept and should be about two journal pages in length. Review articles are confined to a broad discussion and should contain the most recent knowledge about the subject.

Instructions concerning the preparation of manuscripts are given in the Information for Authors. Care in following those instructions will permit editors and referees to devote more time to thoughtful evaluation of contributions and will ultimately lead to a better, more interesting Journal.

Review Policies and Procedures

Authors submit their manuscripts electronically via on-line submission system. Each manuscript is reviewed by Editorial Office staff for relevancy to the FHC scope. Should a question arise, the Managing Editor will contact the Editor-in-Chief (or an appropriate editor), who then decides whether the manuscript should be rejected.  If accepted for review, the manuscript is assigned to an editor, who in turn chooses one or more editorial board members or ad hoc reviewers to review it. Author(s) of manuscripts and reviewers remain anonymous throughout the review process („double–blind review”). Each review is prepared in a written form and contains an unambiguous conclusion of the reviewer whether to accept, introduce corrections, re-review or reject the manuscript. Names of reviewers of individual manuscripts or journal issues are not revealed; the list of reviewers cooperating with the Journal is announced once a year. 

Following aspects of the manuscript are considered during review process:

• Significance to the target scientific community
• Originality
• Appropriateness of the approach or experimental design
• Appropriateness of the statistical analyses
• Adherence to correct scientific nomenclature
• Appropriate literature citations
• Adequacy of experimental techniques
• Soundness of conclusions and interpretation
• Relevance of discussion
• Organization
• Adherence to the Instructions to Authors
• Adequacy of title and abstract
• Appropriateness of figures and tables
• Appropriateness of supplemental material intended for posting (if applicable)
• Length

 Very few papers qualify for an immediate, unconditional acceptance.

There are many reasons to reject a paper.  In general, if there are serious flaws in experimental design, incorrect interpretation of data, extensive additional experiments required, or any organizational or English usage flaws that prevent critical review of the manuscript, then recommend that the manuscript be rejected. Journal uses Antyplagiat software to detect plagiarism before publication of articles.

 Ethical issues

Although the staff at the FHC Editorial Office and the journal editors may be able to note a breach of publication policy or ethical conduct after publication, we rely heavily on the reviewers to detect such problems before publication. FHC publication policies are described in the Instructions to Authors, which are published in every issue of FHC.

 Some of the items for which you should be alerted include:

• Plagiarism – Plagiarism is not limited to the Results and Discussion sections; it can involve any part of the manuscript, including figures and tables, in which material is copied from another publication without attestation, reference, or permission.  Note that wording does not have to be exact to be copyright infringement; use of very similar words in almost the same sequence can also be infringement.  Data themselves are not copyrightable, but their presentation is.
• Missing or incomplete attestation - Authors must give appropriate credit to ideas, concepts, and data that have been published previously. This is accomplished by the inclusion of references.  Missing, incomplete, or incorrect references must be brought to the editor's attention.
• Dual submission and/or publication - Be wary of attempts to submit/publish similar material more than once.  This is often difficult to detect "before the fact," but checking literature citations, as well as having a critical eye, is helpful.

Articles published on-line are open access and available under Creative Common Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) allowing to download articles and share them with others as long as they credit the authors and the publisher, but without permission to change them in any way or use them commercially.

Via Medica (Publisher) self-archiving policy establishes that authors can archive only accepted manuscripts including final PDF version and/or  'ahead of print' in any repository. In details, the author may only post their version provided acknowledgment is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Via Medica (Publisher) website. Apart from the link mentioned above, the acknowledgment should be provided with the full bibliographic record with DOI number.