Our publication system supports a limited range of formats for text and graphics. Text files can be submitted in the following formats only:

• Microsoft Word (.doc): We cannot accept Word 2007 DOCX files. If you have created your manuscript using Word 2007, you must save the document as a Word 2003 file before submission.
• Rich Text Format (RTF) documents uploaded during Step 2 of the submission process. Users of other word processing packages should save or convert their files to RTF before uploading. Many free tools are available which will ease this process.

If you are using Word 2007 and your manuscript contains equations, you must follow the instructions below to make sure that your equations will be editable when you save the file as a Word 2003 document. AOSIS OpenJournals cannot accept articles containing equations that are not editable in Word 2003.

You can ensure that your equations remain editable in Word 2003 by enabling the 'Compatibility Mode' before you begin. To do this:

1. Open a new document.
2. Save as 'Word 97–2003 Document (*.doc)'.

Several features of Word 2007 will now be inactive, including the built-in equation editing tool. You can now insert equations in one of two ways:

1. Go to Insert > Object > Microsoft Equation 3.0 and create the equation.
2. Use MathType to create the equation. MathType is the recommended method for creating equations.

When saving your final document, you may see a message stating that 'Equations will be converted to images'. This means that your equations are no longer editable and the Koedoe will be unable to accept your file.

Note: If you have already composed your article in Word 2007 and used its built-in equation editing tool, your equations will become images when the file is saved down to Word 97–2003. You will need to edit your document and insert the equations using one of the two ways specified above.

Please be sure to use British English, that is, the Oxford English Dictionary. Avoid Americanisms (e.g. use ‘s’ and not ‘z’). Consult the Oxford English Dictionary when in doubt and remember to set your version of Microsoft Word to UK English.

• Language: Manuscripts can be written in British English.
• Font-type: Palatino, Symbols font-type: Times New Roman, General font-size: 12pt, Line-spacing: 1.5
• Headings: First headings (normal case, bold and 14pt); Second headings: (normal case, bold and 14pt); Third headings: (normal case, bold and 12pt); Fourth headings: (normal case, bold, running in-text and separated by a colon).

• Quotations: Use single quotation marks for quotations. For quotations within quotations, use double quotation marks. Quotations of more than 30 words are to be indented. Do not use quotation marks for indented quotations unless it is direct speech (e.g. interviewee responses).
• En dashes and hyphens: Use an en dash (i.e. extended hyphen which can be found in the 'Insert' box under 'Symbols' in Microsoft Word) in ranges of numbers and dates. Use hyphens only for words that are hyphenated.
• Dates: Format dates as ‘02 October 2006’, except at the beginning of sentences where numerals and dates should either be spelt out or the sentence should be rearranged.
• Percentage: The per cent symbol (%) is used in conjunction with all numbers (e.g. 12%). Numbers that have been written out will appear with ‘per cent’ (e.g. five per cent). 'Percentage' is used in a general sense.
• Numbers: Numbers from one to nine must be written out. Numbers from 10 onwards, use numerals, except at the beginning of a sentence.
• Spacing and punctuation: There should be one space (and not two) between sentences; one space before unit terms (e.g. 5 kg, 5 cm, 5 mmol, 5 days, 5 °C, etc.), but no space before the percentage symbol (%). Thousands/millions are marked with a space and not a comma (e.g. 1000,    1 000 000). Ranges are expressed with an extended hyphen (i.e. en dash), not with a short hyphen (e.g. 1990–2000).
• Units: The use of units should conform to the SI convention and be abbreviated accordingly. Metric units and their international symbols are used throughout, as in the decimal point (not the decimal comma), and the 24-hour clock.
• Foreign language: Foreign language words should be italicised, unless these words are part of normal usage. Consult the Oxford English Dictionary if in doubt.
• Acronyms: If a phrase with an established acronym or abbreviation is used and appears more than five times in your article, please include the acronym/abbreviation in brackets after first mention of the phrase, and then use the acronym/abbreviation only. Please note that you should not define acronyms or abbreviations in any of your headings. If either has been used in your abstract, you need to define them again on their first usage within the main text.

• Race and ethnicity: Try to avoid terms such as 'Blacks' and 'Whites' (please note the use of uppercase letters); use instead Black people, White people, etc. 'Caucasian', 'Mongoloid', 'Negroid', etc. are generally to be avoided except in human population studies. 'Mixed race' is preferable to 'half-caste' or 'Coloured'.
• Disabilities: Avoid using ‘the disabled’, ‘the handicapped’, etc.
  • Use instead e.g. 'people' with disabilities, not 'the disabled'; OR 'people' with learning difficulties, not 'mentally handicapped'.
• Disease
  • Avoid health-determined categorisation.
    • Use people with diabetes; not diabetics.
    • Use people with cancer; not cancer sufferers.
    • Use sexually transmitted infection (STI) and not sexually transmitted disease (STD).
  • Avoid phrasing that dehumanises a patient
    • Many authors use case (instance of a disease) when they mean patient (i.e. the person or individual who is ill with the (disease).
• AIDS
  • Ensure that AIDS is used for the disease and HIV for the  virus, e.g. do not use AIDS carrier, AIDS positive, AIDS virus or catching AIDS or HIV/AIDS (avoid using the solidus here).  
  • AIDS sufferer/victim is inappropriate; use people with AIDS.  
  • People who practise high-risk activities and not high-risk groups.
  • The expression full-blown AIDS is unnecessary if the correct distinction has been made between HIV and AIDS. 
• Male versus Female
  • ‘Male’ and ‘female’ are adjectives, so be careful to use them as such (i.e. a male patient and a female frog, but a 35-year-old man, a French woman and a group of 25 men and 35 women).  
• Sexuality: Avoid the terms homosexual activities (if achievable within the manuscript’s context, specify which activity is being referred to, especially when dealing with medical research) and homosexuals (specify homosexual men or homosexual women). 
• Gender: Use gender neutral nouns. Avoid the use of ‘man’ if not specifically referring to men; for example: 
  • for man use humans 
  • for mankind use the human race  
  • for manpower use workforce  
  • for manmade fibre use synthetic fibre 
• ‘He/she’, ‘him/her’ and ‘his/hers’: For ‘he/she’, ‘him/her’ and ‘his/hers’ rather use ‘he or she’, ‘her or him’, ‘his or hers’ (without a solidus) or change to plural ‘they’. Use inclusive pronouns: use ‘he or she’, or rephrase the sentence (rephrasing to the plural form often works): 

✗ … Any observer of changes in publishing technology will perceive that he has need of… 

✓ … Observers of… will perceive that they have…

Beware of referring to people with stereotypical pronouns (e.g. ‘the doctor treated his patient’; ‘the secretary tidied her desk’).

• Geography
  • The terms Third World, poor countries and underdeveloped countries should be avoided.
  • Developing or non-developed country/society is better, but it is best to specify countries or regions instead.
  • Western society and Western World should only be used in relation to geography; otherwise, use developed world/society or, even better, specify the countries themselves or the region.
    

In Step 4 of the online submission process, upload all tables, figures, images, and supplementary files. Tables should be saved and uploaded as separate Excel (.xls) files with no more than 10 figures and tables in total per article. Ensure that all personal identifying information is removed from the supplementary files as indicated in the provided instructions. All captions should be provided together on a separate page. Tables and figures should use numerical numbers.

• Organise your visual presentation: Once you have read through the analyses and decided how best to present each table or figure, think about how you will arrange them within the article. The analyses should tell a ‘story’ which leads the reader through the steps needed to logically answer the question(s) that you as author are posing in the Introduction. The order in which you present the results can be as important in convincing the readers as what you actually are saying in the text.
• How to refer to Tables and Figures in the text: Every Figure and Table included in the paper MUST be referred to in the body of the text. Use sentences that draw the reader's attention to the relationship or trend you wish to highlight, referring to the appropriate Figure or Table only parenthetically: e.g. Germination rates were significantly higher after 24 h in running water than in controls (Figure 4). OR e.g. DNA sequence homologies for the purple gene from the four congeners (Table 1) show high similarity, differing by at most 4 base pairs. (Avoid sentences that give no information other than directing the reader to the Figure or Table: e.g. Table 1 shows the summary results for male and female heights at Bates College.)
• Abbreviation of the word ‘Figure’:  When referring to a Figure in the text, the word ‘Figure’ is never abbreviated as ‘Fig.’; the same rul applies to the usage of ‘Table’. Both words are spelled out completely in descriptive legends. 
• How to number Tables and Figures: Figures and Tables are numbered independently, in the sequence in which you refer to them in the text, starting with Figure 1 and Table 1. If, in revision, you change the presentation sequence of the figures and tables, you must renumber them to reflect the new sequence.
• The ‘Acid Test’ for Tables and Figures: Any Table or Figure you present must be clear, well-labelled, and described by its legend to be understood by your intended audience without reading the results section, that is, it must be able to stand alone and be  interpretable. Overly complicated Figures or Tables may be difficult to understand in or out of context, so strive for simplicity whenever possible. 
• Descriptive Legends or Captions: To pass the ‘acid test’ above, a clear and complete legend (sometimes called a caption) is essential. Like the title of the article itself, each legend should convey as much information as possible about what the Table or Figure tells the reader:
  • what results are being shown in the graph(s) including the summary statistics plotted 
  • the organism studied in the experiment (if applicable)
  • a context for the results: the treatment applied or the relationship displayed, etc. 
  • location (ONLY if a field experiment)
  • specific explanatory information needed to interpret the results shown (in tables, this is frequently done as footnotes) 
  • culture parameters or conditions if applicable (temperature, media, etc.) as applicable
  • sample sizes and statistical test summaries as they apply
  • do not simply restate the axis labels with a ‘versus’ written in between. 

Example:  Figure 1: Height frequency (%) of White Pines (Pinus strobus) in the Thorncrag Bird Sanctuary, Lewiston, Maine, before and after the Ice Storm of 1998. Before, n = 137, after, n = 133. Four trees fell during the storm and were excluded from the post-storm survey. 

Note: Questions frequently arise about how much methodology to include in the legend, and how much results reporting should be done. For lab reports, specific results should be reported in the results text with a reference to the applicable Table or Figure. Other than culture conditions, methods are similarly confined to the Methods section.

Do not introduce footnotes in the body of the article.

• Copyright and permissions to reproduce are clearly stated.
• Notes about the table as a whole can be left unlinked (i.e. no linking letters or numbers or symbols) or linked to, for example, a relevant column heading. 
• Notes about specific parts of the table should be linked using superscript lower case letters (preferred), superscript numbers or symbols. 
• If lower case letters are used, it could be confused with the table data; use symbols or numbers instead. 
• Do not make use of superscript numbers in parentheses. 
• If an abbreviation is mentioned for the first time in a table (e.g. ‘CE’ in Table 1), it must be defined in a footnote to that table.  (e.g. HE, Heat event (introduced at weekly intervals).
• Asterisk footnotes are reserved for probability values in tables and usually signify the following values: *, p ≤ 0.05; **, p ≤ 0.01; ***, p ≤ 0.001. The asterisk is often used in mathematics and should therefore be avoided as a footnote symbol.
• Footnote links should be placed after punctuation. The preferred order of footnote symbols in tables (which should be superscripted) is  †, ‡, §, ¶ (these are doubled if more footnotes are needed, e.g. ††). 
• When superscript numbers or letters are used in text, beware of potential confusion with other superscripts (e.g. 2 for ‘squared’). 
• Order of footnotes:  
  • source notes 
  • other general notes 
  • notes on specific parts of the table (following the order in the table itself) 
  • notes on level of probability 

Your manuscript creatives are to be supplied in one of our three preferred formats:

• TIFF: This is an image made up of pixels and is the most universal and most widely supported format across Windows and Mac platforms. Most graphics packages can save a file as a TIFF. The higher the resolution (i.e. the number of pixels) the sharper the final image.   
  • Colour or Greyscale photographic images: 300dpi
  • Line art or combination images: 600/900dpi
  • We would recommend using this format for photographic images.
• EPS: An EPS is essentially an envelope for holding text and images. Line art can be produced as an EPS (in Illustrator for example). There are virtually no limits to scaling line art saved as an EPS. It can also contain TIFF images. However, please make sure that all fonts are embedded (saved as ‘outlines’) and that line weights are not defined as ‘hairline’.
• PDF: This format is, again, like an EPS in that it is an envelope for holding different kinds of images and line art. Great care must be taken in ensuring that fonts are embedded and that original images are at the correct size and resolution before being saved as a PDF. It is possible to ‘save’ or ‘export as’ TIFF or EPS from most graphics applications, just as it is possible to save direct to a PDF from most graphics packages by using a postscript printer driver. PDF creation packages (e.g. Acrobat Distiller) are also now widely available.

Other file formats

• JPEG: A JPEG compressed TIFF is acceptable as long as the degree of compression is moderate. It is better to use a JPEG for online images as a good quality image is achievable even with a high degree of compression.
• GIF: A format suitable for images that contain few colours. Again, this should only be used for images intended for the web.
• We cannot guarantee the quality of images supplied in other formats.

Colour:

• Greyscale, CMYK, RGB.
• Greyscale art should be saved in greyscale mode.
• CyanMagentaYellowBlack are the base colours used during the printing process.
• Any colour that is to appear in print must be in CMYK mode.
• RedGreenBlue are the colours used by monitors and default scanner settings. Any colour that is to appear online must be in RGB mode.

Please supply images as the size intended for final publication. Re-sizing of images takes time and can result in loss of quality.

Fonts: Please use standard (UNIcode) fonts such as Palatino, Times New Roman, Helvetica, and Symbol, etc. Fonts that have not been embedded will usually be replaced by Courier, resulting in character loss or realignment.