Guidelines for Article Preparation for Submission
Preparing a Case Study
This page provides information about writing a Case Study in a science, technology and medicine (STM) discipline for Open Research Europe, including key sections that must be present in the article and details of figure and table formats.
Criteria
Open Research Europe’s scope covers all original research in an STM discipline resulting from studies that have Horizon 2020 funding, regardless of the perceived interest and the extent of novelty. The peer review focuses on the work presented in the article, not on the likely impact of the work.
All Case Studies describing actual interventions or experiences are suitable for publication in Open Research Europe. We accept case studies examining a person, place, event, phenomenon, or other type of subject of analysis in order to highlight key themes. We accept case studies examining a single subject of analysis, but also case studies designed as a comparative investigation to show relationships between two or more subjects.
Submissions to Open Research Europe must have at least one author who is involved in an ongoing or finished Horizon 2020 project and articles must be a result of that project. Please review the details of ORE’s post-publication peer review model and our policies before you submit.
Language
All articles must be written in good English. Please note that the article will not undergo editing by Open Research Europe before publication and a manuscript may be rejected during the initial checking process if it is deemed unintelligible and hence not suitable for peer review.
For authors whose first language is not English, it may be beneficial to have the manuscript read by a native English speaker with scientific expertise.
Main Sections
- Authors
- Title
- Abstract
- Keywords
- Plain Language Summary (recommended)
- Main Body
- Data and Software Availability
- Consent (if applicable)
- Author Contributions
- Competing Interests
- Grant Information
- Acknowledgments (optional)
- Supplementary Material
- References
- Figures and Tables (if applicable)
- Mathematical Scripts (if applicable)
- Images (if applicable)
Authors
Please list all authors who played a significant role in developing the points presented in the article.
Please:
Please:
- complete the submission using your ORCID iD
- provide full affiliation information (full institutional address and ZIP code, and e-mail address) for all authors, and
- indicate who is/are the corresponding author(s).
Criteria for authorship are based on the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals. Being an author implies full responsibility for the article’s content and that the work conforms to our editorial policies. For large, multi-centre collaborations, the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript must be listed as authors.
Details of each author’s contribution must be listed in the Author contributions section.
Anyone who has contributed but does not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgments section. The involvement of any writing assistance must be declared.
Title
Please provide a concise and specific title that clearly reflects the content of the article.
Abstract
Abstracts should be up to 300 words long and provide a succinct summary of the article. Although the abstract should explain why the article might be interesting, the importance of the work should not be over-emphasized. Citations should not be used in the abstract. Abbreviations, if needed, should be spelled out.
Keywords
Authors should supply up to eight relevant keywords that describe the subject of their article. These will improve the visibility of your article. Using standard classifications, in fields where they exist, will further improve the visibility of your article.
Plain Language Summary
Authors are recommended to include a plain language summary in their article. Advice for writing a plain language summary can be found here.
Main Body
The format of the main body of the article is flexible: it should be concise, making it easy to read and review, and presented in a format that is appropriate for the type of study presented.
A case study should be a qualitative description containing narrative elements, which seeks to explore a situation or sequence of events in a non-prescriptive way. Conclusions may either be drawn by the author or left open to the interpretation of the reader.
The author(s) must make a conscious effort to refrain from distorting the situation being described with his or her own beliefs, prejudices or assumptions. As far as possible, the subjects of the study should be allowed to speak for themselves and should be quoted, in context, whenever the opportunity arises. Ethical considerations such as confidentiality, anonymity and informed consent are important when planning case studies because of the impact that the publication of such material might have on the individuals who contributed to it. Information gathered specifically for the case study, and which doesn’t already exist in the public domain, must be used with care and permission to use it should be sought from its source wherever possible and appropriate.
If the article could benefit from including supporting interactive visualisations or resources that are necessary to convey an argument or point of view such as any form of multimedia, video, artistic representations etc. then please contact the editorial team to see how that may be incorporated into the body of the article.
Reproducibility: Open Research Europe is committed to serving the research community by ensuring that all articles include sufficient information to allow others to reproduce the work. With this in mind, Methods sections should provide sufficient details of the materials and methods used so that the work can be repeated by others. The section should also include a brief discussion of allowances made (if any) for controlling bias or unwanted sources of variability. Any limitations of the datasets should be discussed.
Where proprietary software is used for analysis, we require that details of an open-access alternative that can perform an equivalent function are provided. Where authors have written their own code in the course of their analysis, we require this to be written in (or compatible with) an open-source programming language.
If the study involves the use of a questionnaire that has been validated by a previous study, this should be cited and a URL link provided to the validated questionnaire. If the authors have created a novel questionnaire (or performed a translation), the article must state if the questionnaire has been validated, and provide the following information:
- Initial ace validity testing
- Preliminary pilot testing
- Reliability testing (internal consistency, test-retest, inter-rater)
- Any changes implemented resulting from preliminary testing
The novel questionnaire should be provided as extended data.
Ethics policies: All research must have been conducted within an appropriate ethical framework. For studies involving humans or animals, details of approval by the authors’ institution or an ethics committee must be provided in the Methods section. Please refer to the detailed ‘Ethics’ section in our editorial policies for more information.
Data and Software Availability
Underlying data
All articles must include a Data Availability statement, even where there is no data associated with the article - see our data guidelines and policies for more information.
All articles must include a Data Availability statement, even where there is no data associated with the article - see our data guidelines and policies for more information.
The Data Availability statement should provide full details of how, where, and under what conditions data and materials can be accessed; for practical guidance please see Add a Data Availability statement to your manuscript. See also Prepare your Data and Select a Repository for further guidance on data presentation, formatting and deposition.
If you have deposited datasets or materials or used data that are already available in a repository, please include the name of the repository, the DOI or accession number, and license. This should be done in the style of, for example:
Repository: Manually annotated miRNA-disease and miRNA-gene interaction corpora.
https://doi.org/10.5256/repository.4591.d34639.
https://doi.org/10.5256/repository.4591.d34639.
This project contains the following underlying data:
- Data file 1. (Description of data.)
- Data file 2. (Description of data.)
Data are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Zero “No rights reserved” data waiver (CC0 1.0 Public domain dedication).
Where data are held in a structured, subject-specific repository, the following example would be appropriate:
NCBI Gene: Ihe1 intestinal helminth expulsion 1 [ Mus musculus (house mouse) ]. Accession number 107537.
If you are describing new software, please make the source code available on a Version Control System (VCS) such as GitHub, BitBucket or SourceForge, and provide details of the repository and the license under which the software can be used in the article.
For other scenarios, such as where data cannot be shared, please see Add a Data Availability statement to your manuscript for details of what must be indicated in your Data Availability statement.
Extended data
There are no figure or table limits for articles in Open Research Europe. Additional materials that support the key claims in the paper but are not absolutely required to follow the study design and analysis of the results, e.g. questionnaires, chemical data supporting images or tables, can be included as extended data; descriptions of the materials and methods should be in the main article. Extended data should be in a format the supports reuse under a CC0 or CC BY license. Care should be taken to ensure that the publication of extended data in this instance does not preclude primary publication elsewhere.
There are no figure or table limits for articles in Open Research Europe. Additional materials that support the key claims in the paper but are not absolutely required to follow the study design and analysis of the results, e.g. questionnaires, chemical data supporting images or tables, can be included as extended data; descriptions of the materials and methods should be in the main article. Extended data should be in a format the supports reuse under a CC0 or CC BY license. Care should be taken to ensure that the publication of extended data in this instance does not preclude primary publication elsewhere.
If you have any extended data, please deposit these materials in an approved repository and include the title, the name of the repository, the DOI or accession number, and license in the manuscript under the subheading ‘Extended data’. Please also include citations to extended data in the main body of the article. For practical guidance please see Add a Data Availability statement to your manuscript. See also Prepare your Data and Select a Repository for further guidance on data presentation, formatting and deposition.
Please note, information which can be used to directly identify participants should not be included in underlying and extended datasets, unless they have provided explicit permission to share their details. Please see our data guidelines for further information.
Consent
For articles involving patient/participant data or information (e.g. personal genomics articles, case reports, clinical trials, questionnaires, observations), authors must ensure that they have written informed consent from all the subjects involved (or their legal guardian for a minor, or next of kin if the subject is deceased). For details see our our editorial policies.
If applicable, please include a section entitled “Consent” and state ‘Written informed consent for publication of the participants/patients’ details and/or their images was obtained from the participants/patients/parents/guardian/relative of the participant/patient.’
Any clinical photographs must be accompanied by written consent to publish from the patient(s) involved. Any distinguishing features, medical record numbers or codes that could be used to identify the patient concerned must be removed from clinical images.
Author Contributions
We are using the CRediT Taxonomy to capture author contributions as we believe that having more detail of who did what brings transparency, enables recognition for researchers, and provides greater accountability for all involved. For more information click here.
You do not need to include an Author Contributions section in your manuscript: on submission, you will be asked for the contributions made by each author, to be selected from the list below. Anyone who has contributed but does not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgments section.
| Contributor Role | Role Definition |
| Conceptualization | Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims. |
| Data Curation | Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later reuse. |
| Formal Analysis | Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data. |
| Funding Acquisition | Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication. |
| Investigation | Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection. |
| Methodology | Development or design of methodology; creation of models. |
| Project Administration | Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution. |
| Resources | Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools. |
| Software | Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components. |
| Supervision | Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team. |
| Validation | Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs. |
| Visualization | Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation. |
| Writing – Original Draft Preparation | Creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation). |
| Writing – Review & Editing | Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision – including pre- or post-publication stages. |
Competing Interests
Articles published in Open Research Europe must not contain content that could be perceived as ‘advertising’ and must include a Competing Interests section. Any financial, personal, or professional competing interests for any of the authors that could be construed to unduly influence the content of the article must be disclosed and will be displayed alongside the article. More information on what might be construed as a competing interest is available in our editorial policies.
If you do not have any competing interests, add the text ‘No competing interests were disclosed’.
Grant Information
Please provide details of the Horizon 2020 project ID and project title that supported the work presented in your article, and, if applicable, of any other funders or employers who funded the work. For each funder, please state the funder’s name, the grant number where applicable and known, and the individual to whom the grant was assigned.
Please do not list funding that you have that is not relevant to this specific piece of research.
Acknowledgments
This section should acknowledge anyone who contributed to the research or the writing of the article but who does not qualify as an author; please clearly state how they contributed. Authors should obtain permission to include the name and affiliation, from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgments section. Please note that grant funding should not be listed here.
Supplementary Material
To ensure all materials associated with a manuscript are visible, FAIR, and subject to peer review, Open Research Europe does not accept supplementary material. Additional materials that support the key claims in the paper but are not absolutely required to follow the study design and analysis of the results, e.g. questionnaires, or supporting images or tables, can be included as extended data. Extended data should be deposited in an approved repository and listed as part of the data availability statement. For more information, please see extended data.
References
References can be listed in any standard referencing and footnote style if it is consistent between references and footnotes within a given article. However, basic requirements include:
- Journal abbreviations should follow a discipline specific abbreviation approach.
- Preprints can be cited and listed in the reference list.
- Only articles, books and book chapters, datasets and abstracts that have been published or are in press, or are available through public e-print/preprint servers/data repositories, may be cited. Unpublished abstracts, papers that have been submitted to a journal but not yet accepted, and personal communications should instead be included in the text; they should be referred to as ‘personal communications’ or ‘unpublished reports’ and the researchers involved should be named. Authors are responsible for getting permission to quote any personal communications from the cited individuals.
- Web links, URLs, and links to the authors’ own websites should be included as hyperlinks within the main body of the article, and not as references.
- References to trials on a clinical trial database should be as follows: [Authors/name of group], [title of the trial], In: ClinicalTrials.gov [cited year month date], Available from [URL of the link from ClinicalTrials.gov].
Example: Kovacs Foundation, The Effect of Ozone Therapy for Lumbar Herniated Disc. In:
ClinicalTrials.gov [cited 2012 Aug 30], Available from http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00566007. - Datasets published or deposited elsewhere (for example, in Figshare, Dryad, etc.) should be listed in the "References" section and the citation to the dataset should follow one of these examples.
Figures and Tables (if applicable)
All figures and tables should be cited and discussed in the article text. Figure legends and tables should be added at the end of the manuscript. Tables should be formatted using the ‘insert table’ function in Word, or provided as an Excel file. For larger tables or spreadsheets of data, please see our data guidelines. Files for figures are usually best uploaded as separate files through the submission system (see below for information on formats).
Any photographs must be accompanied by written consent to publish from the individuals involved. Any distinguishing features, including medical record numbers or codes in the case of clinical images that could be used to identify the patient or participant concerned must be removed from the images.
Titles and legends: Each figure or table should have a concise title of no more than 15 words. A legend for each figure and table should also be provided that briefly describes the key points and explains any symbols and abbreviations used. The legend should be sufficiently detailed so that the figure or table can stand alone from the main text.
Permissions: If reusing a figure or table from a previous publication, the authors are responsible for obtaining permission from the copyright holder and for the payment of any fees (if applicable). Please include a note in the legend to state that: ‘This figure/table has been reproduced with permission from [include original publication citation]’ or the acknowledgement line specified in your permissions documentation if different.
Figure formats: For all figures, the color mode should be RGB or grayscale.
Line art: Examples of line art include graphs, diagrams, flow charts and phylogenetic trees. Please make sure that text is at least 8pt, the lines are thick enough to be clearly seen at the size the image will likely be displayed (between 75-150 mm width, which converts to one or two columns width, respectively), and that the font size and type is consistent between images. Figures should be created using a white background to ensure that they display correctly online.
If you submit a graph, please export the graph as an EPS file using the program you used to create the graph (e.g. SPSS). If this is not possible, please send us the original file in which the graph was created (e.g. if you created the graph in Excel, send us the Excel file with the embedded graph).
If you submit other forms of line art such as flow charts, diagrams or text to be displayed as an image, please export the image as an EPS file (e.g. if creating phylogenetic trees with specialized programs), or send us the original file that was used to create the image (e.g. EPS or AI files if Adobe Illustrator was used, or a DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX or equivalent file if Word or PowerPoint was used).
If none of the above options is possible then we also accept uncompressed TIFFs with a resolution of at least 600dpi at the size they are likely to be displayed at (see above).
Mathematical scripts (if applicable)
There are no strict rules on the format of mathematical scripts however, here is some useful advice:
- Special care should be taken with mathematical scripts, especially subscripts and superscripts and differentiation between the letter “ell” and the figure one, and the letter “oh” and the figure zero.
- It is important to differentiate between: K and k; X, x and x (multiplication); asterisks intended to appear when published as multiplication signs and those intended to remain as asterisks, etc.
- In both displayed equations and in text, scalar variables must be in italics, with non-variable matter in upright type.
- For simple fractions in the text, the solidus “/” should be used instead of a horizontal line, care being taken to insert parentheses where necessary to avoid ambiguity. Exceptions are the proper fractions available (e.g., ¼, ½, ¾).
- The solidus is not generally used for units: m s⁻¹ not m/s, but note electrons/s, counts/channel, etc.
- Displayed equations referred to in the text should be numbered serially ((1), (2), etc.) on the right-hand side. Short expressions not referred to by any number will usually be incorporated into the text.
- The following styles are preferred: upright bold sans serif r for tensors, bold serif italic r for vectors, upright bold serif r for matrices, and medium-face sloping serif r for scalar variables. In mathematical expressions, the use of “d” for differential should be made clear, and coded in roman, not italic.
- Braces, brackets, and parentheses are used in the order {[( )] }, except where mathematical convention dictates otherwise (e.g., square brackets for commutators and anticommutators; braces for the exponent in exponentials).
- For units and symbols, the SI system should be used. Where measurements are given in other systems, please insert conversions.
Images (if applicable)
Photographs and microscopy images: Photographs and microscopy images should be submitted as uncompressed TIFFs with a resolution of at least 300dpi at the size they are likely to be displayed (see above).
Mixed images: Images that are a mix of half-tone images and line art (e.g. annotated gels or images with scale bars) should be submitted as TIFF files at a resolution of at least 300dpi or vector files (e.g. EPS or Adobe Illustrator files). Please ensure that the text size is at least 8pt and lines are thick enough to be clearly visible at the size the image will be displayed.
Chemical structures: Chemical structures should be produced using ChemDraw or a similar program. All chemical compounds must be assigned a bold, Arabic numeral in the order in which the compounds are presented in the manuscript text. Structures should then be exported into at least a 300 dpi RGB tiff file before being submitted.
Stereo images: Stereo diagrams should be presented for divergent ‘wall-eyed’ viewing, with the two panels separated by 5.5 cm. In the final accepted version of the manuscript, the stereo images should be submitted at their final page size.
Images to be used as data: If you are submitting photographic images as part of your raw dataset, please submit them as uncompressed TIFF files.
Electronic manipulation of images: The clarity of figures may be improved using image-editing software, but this must be done transparently and without misrepresenting the data (and the original, unaltered source data must be provided with the article). Brightness, contrasts or color balance may be used to enhance electronic images, but such changes must be applied to the whole image; any non-linear adjustments must be made explicit in the figure legend. Specific features within an image must not be added or changed (e.g. amplified, removed or obscured); and if figures are composed from images that have come from different sources, such as different gels, or from different parts of the same source, this must be made clear on the figure (e.g. by adding dividing lines). Authors are required to include details of all modifications made to images published as figures or uploaded as data in the Methods section of an article, including the name of the software (with version number) used to make these modifications. Please see our Policies on Image Manipulation for more information.