Instructions to authors

Scope of the journal

Regenerative Biomaterials, the official journal of Chinese Society for Biomaterials is a fully open access, peer-reviewed journal. This journal is online only and aims to provide an international platform for researchers to share new ideas and research results in the field of biomaterials, especially the biomaterials in regenerative medicine. With its broad scope from the fundamental science of biomaterials to their potential clinical applications, the journal publishes high quality reviews, original research articles, communications, and perspectives.

The scope of Regenerative Biomaterials includes, but not limited to:

Design, synthesis, and evaluation of biomaterials for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine
Nanotechnologies and novel processing for preparing biomimetic scaffolds
Interaction of biomaterial with cells, especially with stem cells
Regenerative mechanisms of tissue by using biomaterials and/or stem cells
Drug/gene delivery materials and methods
Clinical applications of regenerative biomaterials
Scientific bases of evaluation and quality control of biomedical materials
Surface modification of biomaterials
Safety assessment of biomedical materials
Stem cells fate controlled by materials signals
Improvement of implanted medical devices
Biomechanics of biomaterials and devices
Regenerative engineering

Publication ethics

Authors should observe high standards with respect to publication ethics as set out by the Commission 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 practices. Any cases of ethical misconduct are treated very seriously and will be dealt with in accordance with the COPE guidelines.

Authorship

All authors should have been involved in the writing of the manuscript at draft and any revision stages, and have read and approved the final version. Anyone who made major contributions to the writing of the manuscript should be listed as an author (e.g. “ghost writing” is prohibited by the Journal). Any other individuals who made less substantive contributions to the study or the writing of the manuscript should be listed in the acknowledgement section. Any change in authorship (including author order) after the initial manuscript submission must be approved in writing by all authors.

Authorship and 'Umbrella' groups

Many large collaborative studies are organized under a group name which represents all the participants. All articles must have at least one named individual as author. Authors who wish to acknowledge the umbrella group from which the data originate should first list the author(s) of the article and follow this with 'on behalf of the GROUP NAME'. If necessary the names of the participants may be listed in the Acknowledgements section.

Use of AI

Natural language processing tools driven by artificial intelligence (AI) do not qualify as authors, and the Journal will screen for them in author lists. The use of AI (for example, to help generate content or images, write code, process data, or for translation) should be disclosed both in cover letters to editors and in the Methods or Acknowledgements section of manuscripts. Please see the COPE position statement on Authorship and AI for more details.

Originality

By submitting your manuscript to the journal it is understood that this it is an original manuscript and is unpublished work and is not under consideration elsewhere. Plagiarism, including duplicate publication of the author’s own work, in whole or in part without proper citation is not tolerated by the journal. Manuscripts submitted to the journal may be checked for originality using anti-plagiarism software.

Conflicts of interest

At the point of submission, each author should 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 the conflict of interest test: Is there any arrangement that would embarrass you or any of your co-authors if it was to emerge after publication and you had not declared it?

Experimental ethics

Animal experiments

When reporting animal experiments authors should indicate whether the institution’s, national research council’s, or any other law on the care and use of laboratory animals was followed.

Authors should provide the Ethical Approval number for any papers including animal studies.

Human subjects

When reporting on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Helsinki Declaration (1964, amended most recently in 2008) of the World Medical Association. Manuscripts should include a statement that the patient’s written consent was obtained and any information, including illustrations, should be as anonymized as far as possible. Authors should indicate that the design of the work has been approved by local ethical committees or that it conforms to standards currently applied in the country of origin. The name of the authorizing body should be stated in the paper.

Peer review process

All submissions to the journal are initially reviewed by one of the Editors. At this stage manuscripts may be rejected without peer review if it is felt that they are not of high enough priority or not relevant to the journal. This fast rejection process means that authors are given a quick decision and do not need to wait for the review process.

Manuscripts that are not instantly rejected are sent out for peer review, usually to two independent reviewers. Based on the feedback from these reviewers and the Editors’ judgment a decision is given on the manuscript. The average time from submission to first decision is 6 weeks.

If a paper is not acceptable in its present form, we will pass on suggestions for revisions to the author.

Material disclaimer

The opinions expressed in Regenerative Biomaterials are those of the authors and contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the editors, the editorial board, Oxford University Press or the organization to which the authors are affiliated.

Open Access charges

Regenerative Biomaterials is a fully open access journal, and all articles are published in the journal under an open access licence immediately upon publication. You will need to pay an open access charge to publish under an open access licence.

Details of the open access licences and open access charges

CC BY licence - $1,820 for manuscripts submitted after August 2024
CC BY licence – Perspective, Communication, Editorial articles – $0

Corresponding authors based in countries and regions, that are part of the developing countries initiative are eligible for a full waiver of publishing fees in our fully open access journals. For further details, please see our APC Waiver Policy.

OUP has a growing number of Read and Publish agreements with institutions and consortia which provide funding for open access publishing. This means authors from participating institutions can publish open access, and the institution may pay the charge. Find out if your institution is participating.

Please note that you may be eligible for a discount to the open access charge based on society membership. Authors may be asked to prove eligibility for the member discount. For more details about the Open Access charge discount, please contact the Editorial Office.

Self-archiving

For information about this journal's policy, please visit our Author Self-Archiving policy page.

Submission

Please read these instructions carefully and follow them closely to ensure that the review and publication of your paper is as efficient and quick as possible. The Editors reserve the right to return manuscripts that are not in accordance with these instructions.

All material to be considered for publication in Regenerative Biomaterials should be submitted in electronic form via the journal's online submission system. Once you have prepared your manuscript according to the instructions below, please follow these instructions on how to submit your manuscript online.

If you have any questions, please contact the Editorial Office.

Language editing pre-submission

Language editing, if your first language is not English, to ensure that the academic content of your paper is fully understood by journal editors and reviewers is optional. Language editing does not guarantee that your manuscript will be accepted for publication. Several specialist language editing companies offer these services and you can use any of these. Please follow this link for further information on language services. Authors are liable for all costs associated with such services.

Online search engine optimization (SEO)

You can improve the online accessibility of your paper by writing optimized copy that is highly indexable across all search engines. A large number of readers find articles online by using search engines such as Google. Most searching is done using keywords or key phrases. Including key phrases that people searching are likely to use should make your article more discoverable. By taking some simple steps to optimize your article for search engines it will help your work to be discovered and read. This may in turn lead to the work being cited in others' work and will further raise the visibility of your article. Future measures, which assess the value of journals and of individual articles based on the number of times they are downloaded, are currently being developed and tested (see the UKSG website and the PIRUS2 website).

Manuscript format and structure

Papers can be up to 10,000 words. Please prepare your typescript text using a word-processing package (save in .doc, .docx or .rtf format). Please also include the files for any other supplementary material to be submitted with your manuscript (this material is published online only). It is recommended that authors spell-check all files before submission.

The first page of the manuscript must give: title of paper, contributor names, and the full address (including email) of the author designated to receive proofs/correspondence, and total word count. An abstract of 200-300 words should be included with all submissions. The name of the author(s) should appear at the beginning immediately under the title, with an asterisked footnote giving the present position of the author(s) and an address (including email) for contact by readers, together with any desired acknowledgements.

Headings should be to journal style. Compound words should be hyphenated. Footnotes, indicated by superscript figures in the text, should be used for listing references. Footnotes should be numbered consecutively. Footnotes should be kept brief as possible and used primarily for reference purposes. Authors are responsible for checking the accuracy of all footnotes and references.

Figures should be labelled consistently as Figure 1, Figure 2 etc.

Title page

The title should be short, specific and informative. The first name, initial(s), and surname of each author should be followed by his or her department, institution, city with postcode, and country. Email addresses of the corresponding author should also be provided. A footnote stating 'The authors wish it to be known that, in their opinion, the first x authors should be regarded as joint First Authors' is permitted if requested. Any deletions or additions to the author list after acceptance of the paper must be submitted in writing, signed by all authors, to the appropriate editorial office.

It is important that authors ensure the following: (i) all names have the correct spelling and are in the correct order (first name, then family name); (ii) initials are correct. Occasionally, the distinction between surnames and forenames can be ambiguous, and this is to ensure that the authors’ full surnames and forenames are tagged correctly, for accurate indexing online.

Abstract

The second page of the manuscript should contain the Abstract in one paragraph, 200-300 words. The Abstract should be comprehensible to readers before they have read the paper, and reference citations must be avoided. It is essential that the Abstract clearly states the manuscript’s importance to Regenerative Biomaterials.

Graphical abstract

Graphical abstract (GA) is a compulsory component for manuscripts (including review and research articles) submitted to Regenerative Biomaterials. It is a single image that summarises the focus and main findings of the article or reminds the main research branch of the study. It could be the key ‘results’ image from the paper itself, or a specially designed figure that captures the key takeaway message of the paper and enables the viewers to understand what the paper is about. The latter is more encouraged. It does not have to replicate all the information in the text abstract, or be a comprehensive account of the paper. Please do not use a figure or schematic diagram already shown in the main text of the manuscript.

Please notice that the GA should be prepared and displayed at the actual size of 1.4 inches (height) × 3.3 inches (width) or 3.6 cm × 8.4 cm following the Abstract in the submitted manuscript file.

Minimum resolutions are 300 d.p.i. for colour or tone images, and 600 d.p.i. for line drawings. The preferred font type of text in the GA is Arial, no smaller than 8 pt. Please do not enlarge the GA, because the image will eventually appear on the first page of the published PDF file in the specified size above. GA examples can be found in the PDF files of the published papers since 2022.

Keywords

Authors should provide four to five keywords following the abstract.

Abbreviations

Non-standard abbreviations should be defined at the first occurrence and introduced only where multiple uses are made. Authors should not use abbreviations in headings or keywords.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements and details of non-financial support must be included at the end of the text before references and not in footnotes. Personal acknowledgements should precede those of institutions or agencies. Please note that acknowledgement of funding bodies and declarations regarding conflicts of interest should be given in separate Funding and Conflicts of interest sections, respectively.

Further guidance on Conflicts of interests.

Availability of Data and Materials

Where ethically feasible, Regenerative Biomaterials strongly encourages authors to make all data and software code on which the conclusions of the paper rely available to readers. We suggest that data be presented in the main manuscript or additional supporting files, or deposited in a public repository whenever possible. For information on general repositories for all data types, and a list of recommended repositories by subject area, please see Choosing where to archive your data.

Data and Software Citation

Regenerative Biomaterials supports the Force 11 Data Citation Principles and the recommendations of the FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Group. When data and software underlying the research article are available in an online source, authors should include a full citation in their reference list.
For details of the minimum information to be included in data and software citations see the guidance on Citing research data and software.

Preprint policy

Authors retain the right to make an Author’s Original Version (preprint) available through various channels, and this does not prevent submission to the journal. For further information see our Online Licensing, Copyright and Permissions policies. If accepted, the authors are required to update the status of any preprint, including your published paper’s DOI, as described on our Author Self-Archiving policy page.

Funding

Details of all funding sources for the work in question should be given in a separate section entitled 'Funding'. This should appear after the 'Acknowledgements' section.
The following rules should be followed:

The sentence should begin: ‘This work was supported by …’
The full official funding agency name should be given, i.e. ‘the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health’ or simply 'National Institutes of Health' not ‘NCI' (one of the 27 sub institutions) or 'NCI at NIH’ (full RIN-approved list of UK funding agencies)
Grant numbers should be complete and accurate and provided in brackets as follows: ‘[grant number ABX CDXXXXXX]’
Multiple grant numbers should be separated by a comma as follows: ‘[grant numbers ABX CDXXXXXX, EFX GHXXXXXX]’
Agencies should be separated by a semi-colon (plus ‘and’ before the last funding agency)
Where individuals need to be specified for certain sources of funding the following text should be added after the relevant agency or grant number 'to [author initials]'.

An example is given here: ‘This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [P50 CA098252 and CA118790 to R.B.S.R.] and the Alcohol & Education Research Council [HFY GR667789].

Crossref Funding Data Registry
In order to meet your funding requirements authors are required to name their funding sources, or state if there are none, during the submission process. Please follow this link for further information on this process or to find out more about the CHORUS initiative.

References

Full references should be provided in accordance with the style of Regenerative Biomaterials. If you use EndNote and Reference Manager to facilitate referencing citations of journal articles (not required for submission), this journal's style (Regenerative Biomaterials style.ens) is available for use. If an automatic referencing system has been used in the preparation of the paper, the references must not be left embedded in the final text file submitted.

These should be numbered in order of appearance in the text in square brackets, e.g. [1, 3–5], and must be listed numerically in the reference list. Journal titles and author initials should be properly abbreviated and punctuated. The citation of journals, books, multi-author books and articles published online should conform to the following examples:

References to books and book chapters are given in a reference list according to Oxford Journals style:

Books: Sox HC, Blatt MA, Higgins MC, Marton KI. Medical Decision Making. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1997.
Chapters: Manners T, Jones R, Riley M. Relationship of overweight to haitus hernia and reflux oesophagitis. In: Newman W (ed.). The Obesity Conundrum. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1997, 352–74.

References to journal articles are given in a reference list according to Regenerative Biomaterials style:

Journal articles (Regenerative Biomaterials style.ens available):

Peters JT, Wechsler ME, Peppas NA. Advanced biomedical hydrogels: molecular architecture and its impact on medical applications. Regen Biomater 2021;8:rbab060.
Bedell ML, Navara AM, Du Y, Zhang S, Mikos AG. Polymeric Systems for Bioprinting. Chem Rev 2020;120:10744-92.

Advance online journal articles:

He Y, Yu Y, Yang Y, Gu Y, Mao T, Shen Y, Liu Q, Liu R, Ding J. (11 December 2021) Design and aligner-assisted fast fabrication of a microfluidic platform for quasi-3D cell studies on an elastic polymer. Bioact Mater, 10.1016/j.bioactmat.2021.12.010.

Please notice: For references to books and book chapters, if there are four or more authors, then use the first three followed by et al; but for references to journal articles, all authors should be included.

Personal communications (Jones J, personal communication) must be authorized in writing by those involved, and unpublished data should be cited in the text as (unpublished data). References to manuscripts submitted, but not yet accepted, should be cited in the text as (Jones B and Smith L, manuscript in preparation) and should not be included in the list of references.

Tables

All tables should be on separate pages and accompanied by a title and footnotes where necessary. The tables should be numbered consecutively using Arabic numerals. Units in which results are expressed should be given in parentheses at the top of each column and not repeated in each line of the table. Ditto signs are not used. Avoid overcrowding the tables and the excessive use of words. The format of tables should be in keeping with that normally used by the journal; in particular, vertical lines, coloured text and shading should not be used. Please be certain that the data given in tables are correct.

Journal copyediting style

This journal follows our standard Oxford SciMed style. By following the mini style checklist you can ensure that your manuscript follows the major style points.

Figures and illustrations

Please be aware that the requirements for online submission and for reproduction in the journal are different: (i) for online submission and peer review, please upload your figures embedded in the main text where they are first mentioned; (ii) for reproduction in the journal, you will be required after acceptance to supply high-resolution .tif files. Minimum resolutions are 300 d.p.i. for colour or tone images, and 600 d.p.i. for line drawings. We advise that you create your high-resolution images first as these can be easily converted into low-resolution images for online submission.

Figures will not be relettered by the publisher. The journal reserves the right to reduce the size of illustrative material. Any photomicrographs, electron micrographs or radiographs must be of high quality. Wherever possible, photographs should fit within the print area or within a column width.

For useful information on preparing your figures for publication, go to the digital art website.

Figure accessibility and alt text

Incorporating alt text (alternative text) when submitting your paper helps to foster inclusivity and accessibility. Good alt text ensures that individuals with visual impairments or those using screen readers can comprehend the content and context of your figures. The aim of alt text is to provide concise and informative descriptions of your figure so that all readers have access to the same level of information and understanding, and that all can engage with and benefit from the visual elements integral to scholarly content. Including alt text demonstrates a commitment to accessibility and enhances the overall impact and reach of your work. 

Alt text is applicable to all images, figures, illustrations, and photographs.

Alt text is only accessible via e-reader and so it won’t appear as part of the typeset article.

Detailed guidance on how to draft and submit alt text.

Permission to reproduce figures and extracts

In order to reproduce any third party material, including tables, figures, or images, in an article authors must obtain permission from the copyright holder and be compliant with any requirements the copyright holder may have pertaining to this reuse. When seeking to reproduce any kind of third party material authors should request the following:

non-exclusive rights to reproduce the material in the specified article and journal;
electronic rights, preferably for use in any form or medium;
the right to use the material for the life of the work; and
world-wide English-language rights.

Third-Party Content in Open Access papers

If you will be publishing your paper under an Open Access licence but it contains material for which you do not have Open Access re-use permissions, please state this clearly by supplying the following credit line alongside the material:

Title of content
Author, Original publication, year of original publication, by permission of [rights holder]

This image/content is not covered by the terms of the Creative Commons licence of this publication. For permission to reuse, please contact the rights holder.

Further guidelines on clearing permissions.

Supplementary data

Supporting material that is not essential for inclusion in the full text of the manuscript, but would nevertheless benefit the reader, is made available online by the publisher, and linked to the online manuscript. The material should not be essential to understanding the conclusions of the paper, but should contain data that is additional or complementary and directly relevant to the article content. Such information might include more detailed methods, extended data sets/data analysis, or additional figures.

It is standard practice for appendices to be made available online-only as supplementary data. All text and figures must be provided in suitable electronic formats. All material to be considered as supplementary data must be submitted at the same time as the main manuscript for peer review. It cannot be altered or replaced after the paper has been accepted for publication, and will not be edited. Please indicate clearly all material intended as supplementary data upon submission and name the files e.g. 'Supplementary Figure 1', 'Supplementary Data', etc. Also ensure that the supplementary data is referred to in the main manuscript where necessary, for example as '(see Supplementary data)' or '(see Supplementary Figure 1)'.

Proof Correction

The Production team at Oxford University Press (OUP) will email the corresponding author with a link to the License to Publish. They will also send the corresponding author a separate message with a link to your article for corrections. ONLY ESSENTIAL CHANGES SHOULD BE MADE AT PROOF STAGE. Alterations in style or phrasing are not permitted at proof stage. Corrections considered non-essential by the editorial team will not be accepted as they lead to delays in the publication of manuscripts and issues. If you are unlikely to be available when your proof arrives, please inform our Author Support Team ([email protected]) that you wish the proofs to be sent to another assigned person. No changes to manuscripts will be accepted after proofs have been corrected and the final paper approved for publication.

Advance access

Advance Access articles are published online soon after they have been accepted for publication, in advance of their appearance in an online issue. Appearance in Advance Access constitutes official publication, and the Advance Access version can be cited by a unique DOI (Digital Object Identifier). When an article appears in an issue, it is removed from the Advance Access page.

Articles posted for Advance Access have been copyedited and typeset and any corrections included. This is before they are paginated for inclusion in a specific issue of the journal. Once an article appears in an issue, both versions of the paper continue to be accessible and citable.