Instructions for Authors

Protist publishes papers that report substantial and novel findings in any area of research on protists. Suitable subject areas include: molecular, cell and develop mental biology, biochemistry, systematics and phylogeny, and ecology of autotrophic and heterotrophic protists. The journal will not, in general, publish fl oristic/faunistic accounts, descriptions or redescriptions of taxa which are not based on new original data, taxonomic work which lacks reproducibility or papers that are preliminary or merely confirmatory. The criteria for acceptance of manuscripts are scientific excellence, significance, and interest for a broad readership.

Copyright
Submission of a manuscript implies that the submitted work has not been published before (except as part of a thesis or lecture note or report, or in the form of an abstract); that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere and that its publication has been approved by all co-authors as well as by the authorities at the institute where the work has been carried out. Please refer to the copyright notice in this issue.

Funding Body Agreements and Policies
Elsevier has established agreements and developed policies to allow authors who publish in Elsevier journals to comply with potential manuscript archiving requirements as specified as conditions of their grant awards. To learn more about existing agreements and policies please visit http://www.elsevier.com/fundingbodies.

Open Access
This journal offers you the option of making your article freely available to all via the ScienceDirect platform. To prevent any confl ict of interest, you can only make this choice after receiving notification that your article has been accepted for publication. The fee of $3,000 excludes taxes and other potential author fees such as color charges. In some cases, institutions and funding bodies have entered into agreement with Elsevier to meet these fees on behalf of their authors. Details of these agreements are available at http://www.elsevier.com/fundingbodies. Authors of accepted articles, who wish to take advantage of this option, should complete and submit the order form (available at http://www.elsevier.com/locate/openaccessform.pdf). Whatever access option you choose, you retain many rights as an author, including the right to post a revised personal version of your article on your own website. More information can be found here: http://www.elsevier.com/authorsrights.

Organization of Manuscripts
Manuscripts should be written in concise, logical, and grammatically correct English, and all pages and all lines of a page should be numbered. Poorly written papers will be returned to the authors without further review. The manuscript should be organized in the following order: Title Page, Abstract, Keywords, Introduction, Results, Discussion, Methods, Acknowledgements, References, Tables and Figure Legends. The Title Page should include the authors’ full names and affiliations, a running title of less than 40 characters (including spaces), the FAX number and e-mail address of the corresponding author. Any change of address may be given in numbered footnotes. The Abstract should be a single paragraph not exceeding 200 words. It must stand on its own with no reference to the text, and abbreviations and reference citations should be avoided. Up to six Keywords should be given in alphabetical order, following the Abstract. Results and Discussion can be subdivided further if subheadings give the manuscripts more clarity. Methods should reference all standard procedures but must be complete enough to enable the experiments to be reproduced. Scientific names of organisms used (including authorities), and their sources should be provided in this section. Trade names should be capitalized and the manufacturers’ names and addresses given. Only SI (Système International d’Unités) units should be used throughout the manuscript. It is recommended that authors consult a current issue of Protist for guidance on format, organization, and preparation of figures, legends, tables, and references.

Conventions
In general, this journal follows the conventions of the CBE Style Manual (Council of Biology Editors, Inc., 9650 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20-841, 1983, 5th edn). For chemical nomenclature, the Subject Index of Chemical Abstracts should be followed. Genetic loci as well as scientific names of organisms should be italicized (underlined in typed copy); protein products of the loci are not italicized, nor are journal names or foreign phrases. Nonstandard abbreviations should be spelled out on first mention, followed by the abbreviated form in brackets. A footnote of nonstandard abbreviations used in the paper, in alphabetical order, followed by its spelled-out version should be supplied.

Figures and Legends
The submitted manuscript should be provided with a set of figure files of sufficient quality for reviewers to judge the data. Manuscripts submitted with substandard figures will be returned to the authors without further review. Figures should be cited in numerical order in the text. Arabic numerals should be used for figures and upper case letters for multiple parts of a single figure. All figures should be submitted in the size that they will appear in the journal; in general, they will be printed to fit one column (8.3 cm) or two columns (17.1 cm) in width and no more than 18 cm in length so that the legend will fit on the same page as the illustration. Multiple halftones should be mounted with spaces separating the prints. Illustrations must be labeled to a professional standard. Magnification bars should be given on electron and light micrographs.
Figure legends should contain sufficient information to be understood without reference to the text and without repeating information presented in the text and should not contain methods. All symbols and abbreviations used in the figures should be explained. Each figure should be provided with a short title.

Digital Images
The primary criteria for usable files are: the file should be submitted in Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) or Tag Image File Format (TIFF) form that can be brought into Adobe Photoshop and should be at least 600 dpi at final size for halftones and color, 600 dpi for combinations, and 1000 dpi for line shots. High-quality Portable Document File (PDF) for figures may also be acceptable. The hardcopy output should be the same size as the digital file. For color, the file must be in the CMYK format.
For further information on the preparation of electronic artwork, please see www.elsevier.com/locate/artworkinstructions

Colour figures
If, together with your accepted article, you submit usable colour figures then Elsevier will ensure, at no additional charge, that these figures will appear in colour on the web (e.g., ScienceDirect and other sites) regardless of whether or not these illustrations are reproduced on colour in the printed version.
Colour figures can be printed only if the costs are covered by the author (€250.00 for first colour figure, €200.00 for every following colour figure).

Tables
Tables should have a brief descriptive title and be self-explanatory. Tables should be numbered consecutively in Arabic numerals as they are mentioned in the text. No vertical rules should be used. Explanatory material and footnotes should be inserted below the table and designated with lowercase
letters in the order in which they are referenced in the table.

References
References should be cited in the text by name and date of publication and not by number (e.g. Cohen and Beisson 1988). Joint authors should be referred to by et al. if there are more than two, e.g. Wilson et al. (1996). More than one paper from the same author(s) in the same year must be identified by the letters a, b, c, etc., placed after the year of publication. Listing of several references in the text should be alphabetical (Falkowski 1995; Simpson and Maslov 1994). References should be in alphabetical order and should contain complete titles and inclusive page numbers. The names of journals should be abbreviated as in the Serial Sources for the Biosis Data Base (published annually by Bio-Sciences Information Service of Biological Abstracts, Philadelphia, PA 19103). Unpublished results, including personal communications and submitted manuscripts should be cited in the text only, not in the reference list. Personal communications must be accompanied by permission letters unless they are from the authors’ laboratories. Unpublished work must not be cited in the Methods section. Citation of abstracts in the reference list is not permitted. In press’ citations must have been accepted for publication and the name of the journal or publisher included. In the reference list the following style should be used:

Wilson RJM, Denny PW, Preiser PR, Rangachari K, Roberts K, Roy A, Whyte A, Strath M, Moore DJ, Moore PW, Williamson DH (1996) Complete gene map of the plastid-like DNA of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. J Mol Biol 261: 155–172

Cohen J, Beisson J (1988) The Cytoskeleton. In Görtz HD (ed) Paramecium. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, pp 363–392

Margulis L, Corliss JO, Melkonian M, Chapman DJ, eds (1990) Handbook of Protoctista. Jones and Bartlett Publ, Boston

Submission of Papers
Manuscripts should be submitted electronically through the Elsevier Editorial System (EES), which can be accessed at htpp://ees.elsevier.com/protis. No charge is made for publication, but authors will be required to pay for extensive charges introduced after the manuscript has been set in type.
Manuscripts should be submitted as a single file. Graphics should be prepared at publication quality resolution in TIFF or EPS form (see Digital Images).
For detailed information please see www.authors.elsevier.com

Review Process
Papers submitted to Protist will be reviewed by members of the editorial board and expert ad-hoc reviewers. Decisions will be made as rapidly as possible (in general within six weeks after submission). When a manuscript is returned to authors for revision, the revised version must be submitted within three months of the authors’ receipt of the referee reports. A manuscript received later will be treated as a new submission.

Proofs
A PDF for correction will be sent to the corresponding author. An Adobe Acrobat Reader is needed to view and print your article. Together with the PDF you will get a link for downloading the program for free. With the exception of typographical or printer’s errors, no changes will be made in the paper at the proof stage.

Offprints
The corresponding author, at no cost, will be provided with a PDF file of the article via e-mail. The PDF file is a watermarked version of the published article and includes a cover sheet with the journal cover image and a disclaimer outlining the terms and conditions of use. Additional paper offprints can be ordered by the authors. An order form with prices will be sent to the corresponding author. Until publication of the print edition, corrected proofs will be available online (www.sciencedirect.com).

No Page Charges
There will be no page charges.

Registration of Sequences
Papers published in Protist that deal with nucleotide or amino acid sequences must carry a statement that the data have been deposited with an appropriate data bank (e.g. EMBL, GenBank, DDBJ). The data base accession number must be given in the Methods section of the manuscript. Any accepted manuscript that does not have such numbers by the page proof stage will be held until the numbers are provided.

Distribution of Material
Publication of a paper in Protist implies that authors will distribute freely to researchers, for non-commercial purposes, all propagative materials such as protist cultures, cell lines, recombinant plasmids, vectors, viruses and monoclonal antibodies that were used to obtain results presented in the article and that are not available from commercial suppliers. Protist requires authors to state in the Methods section that these materials will be available on request.