Author and Editor guide

The high calibre of our material is important to us – all of our academic titles must receive a positive peer review before we take it to production, and we take pride in the quality of our copy-editing, design and marketing processes. This guide for potential authors and editors gives important information about our peer review policy, submission guidelines and publication schedule.

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Style guide

Our preference is for authors and editors to follow the house style (based on the APA referencing system), although our copyeditors are also able to work with Chicago, MLA, Harvard and MHRA. Your production manager will advise you on this. If you are using house style, please familiarize yourself and any contributors with the rules laid out in this guide. We hope that this document answers all your stylistic queries, however, you can direct any additional style questions to editor@worldbiologica.com.

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Citation Style Language

We have created a Citation Style Language (CSL) file for Intellect House Style to be used with reference management programs. This CSL is compatible with Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and many more listed on the citation styles website. 

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Indexing your book

Indexing your book is one way to strengthen its academic rigour, making it more accessible and easier for a reader to reference. World Biologica does not provide an indexing service in-house, so you will have to find funding if you choose to include one. If you are intending to create one yourself, please download our Short Guide to Indexing, which covers some of the basics of starting an index and notes our house style.

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Image guide

It is very important that images are supplied as high-quality JPEG/PNG files as low-resolution images print fuzzy, jagged and blurry. This guide has been produced to help you check that your images are big enough to be used.

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Alternative text for images

As part of World Biologica’s commitment to innovation and accessibility, we ask our authors to provide descriptive text alternatives for all images, graphs and figures in your work. 

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Tables, Charts and Graphs

Please use Microsoft Word’s table feature to create any tables, and embed them in the manuscript when you submit. Each column should be clearly labelled, and we prefer that you avoid the use of merged cells, colour or shading. Do not submit tables as images, PDF or excel files.

Graphs (line, bar, pie etc.) should be submitted as high-resolution JPEG/PNG files separately, and should follow the same standards as images. The data presented on any graph needs to be fully explained within the alternative text form. Graphs can be submitted in colour or greyscale, but do check with your production manager on how they will be printed.

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Marketing your book

Marketing is crucial to the success of any title. This guide offers advice on what we do to market your book to reach the right audience and what you can do to help us promote your book.

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Contributor Publishing Agreement (CPA)

This form can be obtained from the President of World Biologica via email (malik@worldbiologica.com) after the book proposal is accepted and carried forward to the concerned publishing editor. Editors, please ensure that all contributors to your edited collection have completed, signed and returned this form. These should be sent to your production manager with your original submission as we cannot publish without the contributors’ agreement. The form contains information about our privacy policy and GDPR, Open Access, republication and image/text copyright. It is very important that all editors and authors have read and understood this form.

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Chapter metadata

To improve the discoverability of our books, e-books and chapters, we ask for all authors to fill in a form with as much metadata per chapter as possible. Separate forms should be collected for every chapter of an edited collection. We encourage authors to provide funder information and grant numbers for any funded research, ORCID iDs, abstracts, keywords etc. This will not appear in the printed version of your book.

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Writing better metadata

What is metadata?

Metadata is any data that describes a book, which includes obvious things such as title, ISBN and publication date, as well as ‘deeper’ data such as bookshelf-categories, keywords and table of contents – basically, all the information that can be found on an Amazon book page that helps the reader decide whether they are interested in a book or not. The keys to good metadata are consistency, accuracy and specificity.

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Why do we need rich metadata?

This deeper metadata, or rich metadata, will help make a book more discoverable. It not only helps the research to be found and therefore be cited more and increases sales, it also helps the Intellect marketing team with their efforts in promoting the book with international reps and online shops such as Amazon. 

But this is not all: Rich metadata also makes a book more accessible for a number of readers, not least to communicate to them that the book is accessible whilst also giving information about the book that can be extracted by screen reader tools.

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What happens if we don’t have rich metadata?

Without rich and consistent metadata, it is easier for a book, once it is not on the booksellers’ front lists, to get ‘lost’. Readers might just not be able to identify a book as the right choice for them because of a lack of information, or because of the many other titles that have similar, generic identifiers. If accurate keywords, subject codes, descriptions and author/editor information are available, a publication will still be discoverable in years to come – something World Biologica is of course keen on, as we are proud to publish original thinking!

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Where do we get the metadata from?

As our authors and editors naturally know their books (and their readers) best, Intellect is counting on their co-operation to help reach the right audience. While it is easy for us to access the superficial metadata, items like keywords and descriptions can be much more accurate, relevant and specific when coming from the authors and editors. We therefore ask for a survey to be filled in once a book has passed peer review.

This document gives advice on writing effective titles, abstracts and keywords in order to increase the visibility of your work.

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Proof corrections template

When carrying out proofreading of the typeset PDF of your book, please clearly list any changes on a table, using the page numbers and line numbers printed on the proof. Editors should also use this table for their own proofreading. Editors of collections should send contributors a copy of this table with the proof of their chapter.

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Copyright permissions

It is the author’s responsibility to secure written permission from copyright holders for reproducing images, tables, figures or text extracts. If required, copyright permissions must be obtained before the book is submitted for production. When looking to use material from books/journals, contact the original publisher. For images from an art agency, museum, library or gallery, contact the organization. Photographers typically hold copyright over photographs. This letter can be used as a template when seeking copyright permission.

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Fair dealing

Some use of copyright material is allowed within academic publishing under ‘fair dealing’ in UK copyright law, or ‘fair use’ in US law. The UK and US interpretations of fair dealing/use do differ, and this is still a grey area in copyright. Please be aware that it is your responsibility if you choose to use content under fair dealing/use, and we do advise you to seek permission from the copyright holder wherever possible.

Visit the UK Copyright Service website for a fact sheet on using copyright works.

For Indian Copyright Service/Act, 1975, visit the official portal of government of India.

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Ethical standards

We are committed to upholding high standards of ethical behaviour amongst our staff, authors and editors and maintaining these standards throughout the publication process.