Instructions to authors

Manuscript submission

Manuscripts and requests concerning publishing in Karstenia should be submitted to editors editor[at]karstenia.fi.

All manuscripts are reviewed by at least two anonymous expert referees. The final decision on publication is made by the Editor-in-Chief.

Karstenia strongly supports good practice policies, and requires herbarium voucher specimens to be deposited in a herbarium, living cultures and/or DNA in long-term genetic resource collections, sequences in GenBank (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/), EMBL (https://www.embl.org/) or other publicly-accessible databases, and taxonomic novelties in MycoBank (https://www.mycobank.org/).

Alignments of phylogenies must be submitted for review purposes as supplementary materials for publication or by citing TreeBASE (https://www.treebase.org/) codes allowing reviewer’s access.

Submission of a manuscript implies: that the work described has not been published before (except in the form of an abstract, or as part of a published lecture, or thesis); that it is not under consideration for publication anywhere else and that its publication has been approved by all co-authors.

The size of the manuscript should usually not exceed the word count of
– 9 000 words research articles
– 12 000 words review articles and large systematic revisions including the abstract, figure and table legends.

The editorial staff may exceptionally accept manuscripts with special importance even though they would substantially exceed the word limit.

Authors are encouraged to suggest up to 5 potential referees for the article. The suggested referees should not be working in close contact with any of the authors. The suggested referees and other notices to the editor should be provided in a separate cover letter submitted beside the manuscript. The manuscript and a possible cover letter should be in proper format for a Microsoft Windows operating system computer, preferably Microsoft Word files (.doc). Files written on an Apple MacIntosh must be converted to Windows format. All figures must be readable by Word.

Manuscript preparation

Manuscripts must be written in English.

Please arrange your manuscript preferably as follows:

Title page including the title, the names of the authors, the contact information of the corresponding author and the key words (up to 8).

Abstract with maximum length of 400 words.

Introduction

Materials and methods

Results

Discussion

Acknowledgements

References

Tables and table legends

Figures and figure legends

The arrangement need not be followed in the case of a short manuscript for example presenting a new method or some preliminary results of larger projects. It may also be substituted in a case of a full-long manuscript if necessary. When ever using an alternative arrangement, authors should present a justification of it in the cover letter.

Submitting electronic supplementary material to Karstenia is not possible at the moment, but will be possible in the near future.

Manuscripts should be typed in double-line spacing throughout with at least 2.5 cm (1 inch) margins. Use a normal, plain font (e.g., Times New Roman) for text. Use also the page and line numbering functions to number the lines and the pages.

Genus and species names should be in italics. Authority names of species and of all lower levels (except of forma) have to be mentioned when used the first time. Abbreviations of authority names should follow KIRK & ANSELL (1992).

Citations and References

Literature citations in the text should indicate the author’s surname and the year of publication in parentheses, e.g. (Niemelä 2005); (Berglund & Ryvarden 2000). If there are more than two authors, only the first should be named, followed by “et al.”

References at the end of the paper should be listed in alphabetical order by the first author’s name. If there is more than one reference by the same author or team of authors in the same year, a, b, etc. is added to the year both in the text and in the list of references.

Journal papers are referred as follows (see an example below): names and initials of all authors; year of publication; full title; journal title in full length; volume number; first and last page numbers.

Taylor, J.W., Jacobson, D.J., Kroke, S., Kasuga, T., Geiser, D.M., Hibbett, D.S. & Fisher, M.C. 2000: Phylogenetic species recognition and species concepts in fungi. Fungal Genetics and Biology 31: 21-32.

Single contributions in a book are referred as follows (see an example below): names and initials of all authors; year; title of article; editors; title of book; edition; volume number; page numbers; publisher; place of publication.

White, T.J., Bruns, T., Lee, S. & Taylor, J. 1990: Amplification and direct sequencing of fungal ribosomal RNA genes for phylogenetics. In: Michael, A.J., Gelfand, D.H., Sninsky, J.J. & White, T.J. (eds). PCR protocols: a guide to the methods and applications, 315-322. Academic Press, New York.

A whole book is referred as follows (see an example below): names and initials of all authors; year; title; publisher; place of publication.

Kornerup, A. & Wanscher, J. H. 1981: Taschenlexicon der Farben. Muster-Schmidt Verlag: Zürich & Göttingen.

Tables and Figures

All figures and tables should be cited in the text, and each numbered consecutively throughout. Figure parts should be identified by roman letters (a, b, etc.). Figure and table legends must be brief, self-sufficient explanations of the particular objects. All the variables presented in the table should be presented in the table legends.

Possible illustrations should be submitted in digital form (e.g. JPG, TIFF) as a separate attached file. The figures should be submitted in some of the following formats:

EPS Vector drawings. Embed the font or save the text as graphics.
TIFF Color or grayscale photographs (halftones): always use a minimum of 400 dpi.
TIFF Bitmapped line drawings: use a minimum of 1000 dpi.
TIFF Combinations bitmapped line/half-tone (color or grayscale): a minimum of 500 dpi is required.
Do not supply: (1) Embedded graphics in a word processor (spreadsheet, presentation) document; (2) files that are optimized for screen use (like GIF, BMP, PICT, WPG) as the resolution is too low.

One color photograph is presented free of charge for every novel species presented in the article. In other occasions, the editorial staff judges the relevancy of a photograph considering the focus of the manuscript. If the photo is regarded as essential, it is published with no extra cost. The editor may also suggest that the photo is suitable but not essential. In these occasions, the authors are given an opportunity to include photo(s) into the article by paying a fee of 300 euros for one photo.

Copyright, Licensing, Publishing Rights

Mycology should be for everyone. Karstenia is an open access journal, which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access.

Karstenia offers full open access without Article Processing Charges. All content is published without delay (i.e. no embargo). Full-text PDF files are available from 1950 on. Archives are multilingual with English, Finnish and Swedish being the common languages. Metadata for all articles are available in English.

All content in this website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Ethical guidelines

Karstenia is committed to ensuring ethics in publication and quality of articles. The journal follows the TENK (The Finnish Advisory Board on ResearchIntegrity (TENK) guidelines “Responsible conduct of research and procedures for handling allegations of misconduct in Finland” (2012). This also applies to editors following rules relating to readers, authors, and reviewers, as well as procedures for handling complaints.

1. Research misconduct

The editorial board will deal with any allegation of research misconduct in the following categories defined by theTENK:

“Research misconduct refers to misleading the research community and often also to misleading decision makers. This includes presenting false data or results to the research community or spreading false data or results in a publication, in a presentation given in a scientific or scholarly meeting, in a manuscript that is intended to be published, in study materials or in applications for funding. Furthermore, misconduct refers to misappropriating other researchers’ work and to representing other researchers’ work as one’s own.

Research misconduct is further divided into the following four subcategories:

Fabrication refers to reporting invented observations to the research community. In other words, the fabricated observations have not been made by using the methods as claimed in the research report. Fabrication also means presenting invented results in a research report.

Falsification (misrepresentation) refers to modifying and presenting original observations deliberately so that the results based on those observations are distorted. The falsification of results refers to the unfounded modification or selection of research results. Falsification also refers to the omission of results or information that are essential for the conclusions.

Plagiarism, or unacknowledged borrowing, refers to representing another person’s material as one’s own without appropriate references. This includes research plans, manuscripts, articles, other texts or parts of them, visual materials, or translations. Plagiarism includes direct copying as well as adapted copying.

Misappropriation refers to the unlawful presentation of another person’s result, idea, plan, observation or data as one’s own research.

2. Policy of screening for plagiarism

All articles submitted in Karstenia will be checked for plagiarism with similarity check or detection software tool before passing them to the reviewers. The journal will immediately reject the paper, if plagiarism of a complete article or exceptionally large portions of an article is detected.

All authors are encouraged to use plagiarism detection software to do the similarity checking before submitting their manuscript to the journal.

3. Conflicts of interest

Authors must declare any competing financial and/or non-financial interests in relation to the work described.