General Policies of the Journal
Authors' Responsibilities
Authorship
Conflicts of Interest
Ethical Conduct
Choosing Referees
Prior Publication and Preprint Policy
Availability of Materials and Data Policy
Confidential Human Data
Computational Resources
Copyright Licence
Post-publication Corrections
Authors' responsibilities
Submission of a manuscript implies that it reports unpublished work and that it is not under consideration elsewhere. All files, including figures, must be original. The submission process must be carried out by the corresponding author. The corresponding author checks the relevant boxes during online submission on behalf of all authors to indicate that they are in complete agreement with the contents of the manuscript and are prepared to abide by the general policies of NAR as listed below. If the corresponding author is not the senior author, then full contact details of the latter must be included in the submission. Under certain circumstances the journal may need to communicate with the senior author of the manuscript. The email addresses of all co-authors must also be provided.
During submission, authors are requested to upload a cover letter containing additional information which will aid the processing of the manuscript. This must include details of any previous submission of the work to NAR, either partial or in entirety, which has been rejected, regardless of any changes in authorship. The manuscript number of the earlier submission must be provided, together with a file containing the responses to any editorial or referee reports and a summary of the changes that have been made, including changes in authorship. The cover letter should also contain details of any data obtained from other groups which is cited in the manuscript as a personal communication(s). The corresponding author must confirm that permission has been obtained for each inclusion.
Authors must also advise the journal of any related manuscripts currently under consideration by NAR or any other journal, especially where the related manuscript describes work that may impinge significantly on the results or interpretation of the current NAR submission. A file of the related manuscript should be uploaded into the online submission system.
Authorship
Read the full Authorship Guidelines.
The journal supports the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors definitions of authorship. Authorship should be based on (i) substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; (ii) drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; (iii) final approval of the version to be published; and (iv) 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. Persons designated as authors should meet all four of these criteria for authorship. The order of authorship should be a joint decision of the co-authors and should be agreed upon before submission to the journal.
The journal permits but does not require inclusion of a statement detailing each author's contribution. If included, this should be provided as a separate section, preceding the Acknowledgements, headed “Author Contributions.”
All authors must be from a recognised institution. Personal postal addresses are not acceptable.
Errors in author names cannot be corrected after publication and will affect the author's record in indexing services including PubMed.
AI-powered Language Processing Models
Based on the above definitions of authorship, symbolic figures such as Camille Noûs or natural language processing tools driven by artificial intelligence (AI) such as ChatGPT do not qualify as authors, and OUP will screen for them in author lists. The use of AI (for example, to help generate content, write code, or analyze data) must be disclosed both in cover letters to editors and in the Methods or Acknowledgements section of manuscripts.
Acknowledgements
Contributors who do not meet the authorship criteria should be acknowledged. Because acknowledgment may imply endorsement of the study, the corresponding author should obtain permission from all acknowledged individuals and be prepared to provide this to the journal upon request.
Equal Contribution
It is sometimes necessary to indicate that two or more authors have contributed equally to the manuscript. The joint authors should be identified by a dagger symbol and a footnote containing the statement '† These authors contributed equally to this work' should be added.
The relative contributions of ALL authors can appear under Acknowledgements if needed.
Joint Corresponding Authors
Corresponding authors take responsibility for the published work on behalf of all authors. The names of joint corresponding authors can appear at any place in the list of authors and will be identified by an asterisk.
Groups and Consortia
Groups and Consortia can be included in the list of Authors. The full list of members does not have to be provided but if it is, the points below apply:
- If the group only has a few members, the members should be listed in a footnote on the manuscript's title page.
- If the group has many members, the members should be listed in the Acknowledgements section or in an Appendix at the end of the article.
All submissions to NAR must include at least one named author, who will serve as the corresponding author. If a paper was authored by a collaborator group, one author must be chosen as the corresponding author and will be listed as the author "on behalf of" the collaborator group. Acronyms in the list of Authors are acceptable as long as they are unambiguous.
Conflicts of Interest
NAR policy requires that each author reveal any financial interests or connections, direct or indirect, or other situations that might raise the question of bias in the work reported or the conclusions, implications, or opinions stated – including pertinent commercial or other sources of funding for the individual author(s) or for the associated department(s) or organization(s), personal relationships, or direct academic competition. When considering whether you should declare a conflicting interest or connection please consider this test: Is there any arrangement that would compromise the perception of your impartiality or that of your co-authors if it was to emerge after publication and you had not declared it?
Read more on Conflicts of Interest, including how to make a declaration. If you are in any doubt as to what constitutes a conflict, please contact the Editorial Office ([email protected]).
Ethical Conduct
Please read the OUP statement on Publication Ethics.
Authors should observe high standards with respect to publication ethics as set out by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Falsification or fabrication of data, plagiarism, including duplicate publication of the authors' own work without proper citation, and misappropriation of the work are all unacceptable. Any cases of ethical misconduct will be treated seriously and will be dealt with in accordance with the COPE guidelines.
NAR regularly uses plagiarism detection software on submitted manuscripts. Plagiarism includes:
- The re-use of previously published text, data, figures, or images without appropriate acknowledgment (e.g. “The method used in this study was previously described (CITATION) with minor modifications, namely: xxxx’) or permission.
- ‘text recycling’ or ‘self-plagiarism’: the re-use of an author’s own published text (usually without appropriate acknowledgment).
The journal will investigate cases of suspected plagiarism and reserves the right to seek clarification from the authors in the first instance. If significant overlap is observed between two or more articles then the journal may consider taking further action, with the involvement of the authors’ institution(s). Authors are encouraged to run their manuscript through a plagiarism detection software such as iThenticate before submission. Read more on Plagiarism.
In addition to proper ethical conduct regarding authorship practices, the journal also requires that all research, especially those that utilize animal experiments or samples derived from individual human subjects and patients, adhere to the OUP Ethical Research Guidelines and to all institutional review and national legal requirements.
Choosing Referees
You must provide the names, affiliations and institutional email addresses of at least six recommended Referees.
Dos
- Recommended Referees should be scientists working independently in areas similar to your own who have relevant expertise, such as those included in your reference list.
- The joint expertise of the recommended Referees should be sufficiently wide to cover all aspects of your manuscript.
- Recommended Referees should preferably be from diverse geographical locations.
- Try to provide a balanced list of experts in the field and younger researchers.
Don'ts
- You should not recommend Referees with a conflict of interest:
- Scientists from any of the co-authors' institutions.
- Referees with whom you or your co-authors have collaborated or co-authored a paper in the past 3 years.
- Referees who might have a vested interest in the acceptance of the manuscript.
You may also enter no more than three opposed Referees. You must have a legitimate reason to oppose a Referee such as conflict of interest, direct competition, opposite views and opinions not just disagreement.
During submission, we will ask you to explain briefly your reasons for selecting or excluding a Referee but you may provide additional information in your confidential cover letter to the Editor if needed.
Please note that the journal is under no obligation to invite any of the recommended Referees and reserves the right to invite excluded Referees.
If you have any queries please contact the Editorial Office ([email protected]).
Prior Publication and Preprint Policy
NAR allows authors to deposit preprints in community preprint servers such as arXiv.org and BioRxiv.org, provided that entries are updated to acknowledge that the article has been accepted/published by NAR. Authors are encouraged to contact the Editorial Office ([email protected]) if they are in any doubt about prior submission. Please read our full self-archiving policy.
Rights and Permissions
Work submitted for publication must be original, previously unpublished, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere. If previously published figures, tables, or parts of text are to be included, the copyright-holder's permission must have been obtained prior to submission. For more information on how to obtain permissions, please consult Rights and Permissions.
Availability of Materials and Data Policy
- Data Deposition: Authors must provide access to the data underlying the results presented in their article. Access details must be provided in a 'Data Availability' statement at the end of the manuscript which will be published upon acceptance. Deposition in a public repository is the journal's preferred option. Details of data availability and deposition requirements.
- Research materials: including strains, clones, cell lines, hybridomas, and genetically modified organisms that are described in publications in the Journal should be made available to any qualified investigator promptly upon request. Materials must be available freely or at reasonable cost to members of academic institutes for a minimum of 5 years from publication.
- Synthetic oligomers: manuscripts that describe the application of synthetic nucleic acids or nucleic acid mimics to modulate gene expression must include a complete description of the base sequence and chemical modification pattern of the oligomers.
The Editors are prepared to deny further publication rights in the Journal to authors unwilling to abide by these principles.
Confidential Human Data
- All investigators should ensure that the planning, conduct and reporting of human research are in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration.
- All studies involving human patients or samples must have been approved by an ethics committee. A statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments, including any relevant details, must be provided in the manuscript, including a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from all subjects.
- When depositing data involving human participants, authors must ensure that all datasets have been de-identified and anonymised in accordance with the Safe Harbor method before submission. If needed, a trusted third party can be used to convert personal data into anonymised data. Authors should follow established guidance and local laws in ensuring they do not compromise participant privacy. Resources which researchers may consult for guidance include:
- The following databases have restricted access and are appropriate for the deposition of confidential human data:
Computational Resources
NAR has strong policies regarding the accessibility and longevity of the computational resources that it publishes. The journal requires that any published database, webserver, webservice, stand-alone program, or dataset be
- freely available over the internet, without login or registration, and
- updated or at least maintained in a fully functional form, ideally at at the same URL
for at least 5 years.
Additional rules pertain to
- Databases
- If any part of the database (e.g. the one that deals with the user-submitted data) needs to be password-protected, only the freely available part will be considered by the reviewers.
- Authors are encouraged, but not required, to make the contents of their databases freely available as flat or relational files upon request.
- Webservers
- Any third party software employed by the website that has more restrictive usage terms must be listed.
- Software
- Software must be freely available to users at the time of submission, either as executable versions for multiple, common platforms (Linux, Windows and MacOS) or as source code or as a web server.
- Authors must ensure that the software is available for a full 5 years following publication, preferably through a download link on a stable URL or in a public code repository such as GitHub or SourceForge.
- Authors are encouraged, but not required, to make their source code available through an open source license (see OpenSource for examples)
Copyright Licence
Upon receipt of accepted manuscripts at Oxford Journals authors will be invited to complete an online copyright licence to publish form. If the form has not been received by the time we receive author corrections, publication of your manuscript may be delayed.
As part of the licence agreement, authors may use their own material in other publications provided that the Journal is acknowledged as the original place of publication and Oxford University Press as the Publisher. Information about the New Creative Commons licence.
Please note that by submitting an article for publication you confirm that you are the corresponding/submitting author and that Oxford University Press ("OUP") may retain your email address for the purpose of communicating with you about the article. You agree to notify OUP immediately if your details change. If your article is accepted for publication OUP will contact you using the email address you have used in the registration process. Please note that OUP does not retain copies of rejected articles.
Post-publication Corrections
NAR will investigate all cases, regardless of when an article was published, where the integrity of the scientific record is appears to be affected by the accuracy of published information. Depending on the severity of the case, NAR will consider the publication of a Corrigendum, Expression of Concern or Retraction notice. Where possible, a new version of the affected article will be published along with the Corrigendum. Errors in the author names, affiliations, Funding, Acknowledgements or any other information which does not materially affect the data or conclusions of an article will not be considered.
Corresponding authors who wish to publish a correction for their published paper should contact the editorial office in the first instance.
