Oncotarget publishes high-impact research papers of general interest and biological or medical significance in all fields of translational, basic and clinical research including (but not limited to) cancer research.

• » Submitting an Article
• » Editorial and Publishing Policies
• » Types of Papers

I. Submitting an Article

Article submission is outlined on the submission page»

II. Editorial and Publishing Policies

1. Publication Charges

To provide open access, Oncotarget journal use a business model in which expenses — including those of peer review, journal production, and online hosting and archiving — are recovered in part by charging a journal-specific publication fee to the authors or research sponsors for each article they publish.

Publication fee of $1750 is applied to Research Papers and $950 to Reviews (rate from 08/20/12). There should be no more than 15 figures and/or tables (including supplementary figures/tables). There is a $80 charge for every additional figure/table. There is no fee for authors of invited Perspectives, Editorials and Commentaries.

2. Copyright and License Policies

Open-Access License
No Permission Required

Oncotarget applies the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) to all works we publish (read the human-readable summary or the full license legal code). Under the CCAL, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their article, but authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in Oncotarget journal, so long as the original authors and source are cited.
No permission is required from the authors or the publishers.

In most cases, appropriate attribution can be provided by simply citing the original article. If the item you plan to reuse is not part of a published article (e.g., a featured issue image), then please indicate the originator of the work, and the volume, issue, and date of the journal in which the item appeared. For any reuse or redistribution of a work, you must also make clear the license terms under which the work was published. This broad license was developed to facilitate open access to, and free use of, original works of all types. Applying this standard license to your own work will ensure your right to make your work freely and openly available.

For queries about the license, please contact us at

Please fill and e-mail COPYRIGHT and License to Publish by the time of submission to accelerate publication upon acceptance.

Authorship

The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that all appropriate contributors are listed as authors and that all authors have agreed to the manuscript’s content and its submission to Oncotarget. In a case where we become aware of an authorship dispute, authorship must be approved in writing by all of the parties.

Conflict of Interest

The authors should indicate conflicts of interests and sources of financial support. Conflict of interest exists when an author (or the authors institution), reviewer, or editor has financial or personal relationships that inappropriately influence (bias) his or her actions. The potential for conflict of interest can exist whether or not an individual believes that the relationship affects his or her scientific judgment. Financial relationships (such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony) as well as personal relationships and academic competition must be declared. The authors declare conflicts of interests and sources of financial support as acknowledgment.

Informed consent

Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. Identifying information should not be published unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. A patient who is identifiable must be shown the manuscript to be published. Identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. If identifying details are altered, editors should be informed. When informed consent has been obtained it should be indicated in the published article as: Informed consent has been obtained.

Human and animal rights. Ethical statement.

All research involving human participants must have been approved by the authors' institutional review board or equivalent committee(s) and that board must be named by the authors in the manuscript. For research involving human participants, informed consent must have been obtained (or the reason for lack of consent explained, e.g. the data were analyzed anonymously) and all clinical investigation must have been conducted according to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki. Authors should submit a statement from their ethics committee or institutional review board indicating the approval of the research. All animal work must have been conducted according to relevant national and international guidelines. In accordance with the recommendations of the Weatherall report, "The use of non-human primates in research." we specifically require authors to include details of animal welfare and steps taken to ameliorate suffering in all work involving non-human primates. At the beginning of the Methods section of your manuscript (with the subheading Ethics Statement) enter: Investigation has been conducted in accordance with the ethical standards and according to the Declaration of Helsinki and according to national and international guidelines and has been approved by the authors' institutional review board.

Distribution of Materials and Data

One of the terms of publishing in Oncotarget is that authors be willing to distribute any materials and protocols used in the published experiments to qualified researchers for their own use. If there are restrictions to the availability of any materials, data, or information, these must be disclosed in the cover letter and the Experimental Procedures section of the manuscript at the time of submission.

Nucleic acid and protein sequences, macromolecular structures determined by X-ray crystallography (along with structure factors), and microarray data must be deposited in the appropriate public database and must be accessible without restriction from the date of publication. An entry name or accession number must be included as the last paragraph of the Experimental Procedures section in the final version of the manuscript. Microarray data should be MIAME compliant (for guidelines see http://www.mged.org/Workgroups/MIAME/miame.html).

Standards of the fields

Oncotarget fully supports the established standards of the fields that it covers. Some of these are detailed below:

Nomenclature

The use of standardized nomenclature in all fields of science and medicine is an essential step toward the integration and linking of scientific information reported in published literature. We will enforce the use of correct and established nomenclature wherever possible: We strongly encourage the use of SI units. If you do not use these exclusively, please provide the SI value in parentheses after each value. Species names should be italicized (e.g., Homo sapiens) and the full genus and species must be written out in full, both in the title of the manuscript and at the first mention of an organism in a paper; after that, the first letter of the genus name, followed by the full species name may be used. Genes, mutations, genotypes, and alleles should be indicated in italics. Use the recommended name by consulting the appropriate genetic nomenclature database, e.g., HUGO. It is sometimes advisable to indicate the synonyms for the gene the first time it appears in the text. Gene prefixes such as those used for oncogenes or cellular localization should be shown in roman: v-fes, c-MYC, etc.

The Recommended International Non-Proprietary Name (rINN) of drugs should be provided.

Accession Numbers

All appropriate datasets, images, and information should be deposited in public resources. Please provide the relevant accession numbers (and version numbers, if appropriate). Accession numbers should be provided in parentheses after the entity on first use. Suggested databases include, but are not limited to:

• ArrayExpress
• BioModels Database
• Database of Interacting Proteins
• DNA Data Bank of Japan [DDBJ]
• DRYAD
• EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database
• GenBank
• Gene Expression Omnibus [GEO]
• Protein Data Bank
• UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot
• ClinicalTrials.gov

In addition, as much as possible, please provide accession numbers or identifiers for all entities such as genes, proteins, mutants, diseases, etc., for which there is an entry in a public database, for example:

• Ensembl
• Entrez Gene
• FlyBase
• InterPro
• Mouse Genome Database (MGD)
• Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM)
• PubChem

Providing accession numbers allows linking to and from established databases and integrates your article with a broader collection of scientific information.

Interaction with Members of the Press for Papers in Press

Authors are free to talk with the press starting on the day of acceptance. We also allow authors to discuss their work in press with other scientific journals for purposes of coverage in review material. If your press office wishes to issue a press release, they may do that.

III. Types of Papers

EDITORIALS

Will be generally invited but authors may suggest editorial content.

COMMENTARIES

Commentaries are generally invited. Brief discussions of recently published papers in Oncotarget and elsewhere. There is the strict word limit – 850 words and no more than 9 references. Special reference format: 3 authors et al, no titles.

RESEARCH PAPERS

Research papers generally contain the following sections in this order: Title, Authors, Affiliations, Contact Information, Keywords (4-6), Abstract, Introduction, Results, Discussion, Methods, Acknowledgements, References, Figure and Table Legends.

The list of references should be numbered consecutively according to the first time mentioned within the article. Cite only the number assigned to the reference: For example: "according to Vogelstein [1]". Use [ ] not ( ). References should include only articles that are published or in press. Unpublished data, submitted manuscripts, abstracts, and personal communications should be cited within the text only. Personal communication should be documented with a letter of permission.

Please use the following style for references in all types of papers except Editorial Comments:

Article in a periodical (strictly, no variation is allowed):

THEORY ARTICLES

The Theory format is intended for articles where the main conclusions are based on computational, theoretical, or analytical approaches and/or re-interpretation of existing published data. Theory article will explain previously unexplained phenomena, provide mechanism for observations, integrate separate facts in one model, to substitute general rules for thousands of independent facts. The conclusions must be novel compared with otherwise published paradigms. The authors may include additional experiments to support points that lack already published supporting data. Theory articles must also suggest experimentally testable predictions. They follow the same length guidelines as Research articles.

RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES

Topical discussions of recent scientific advances. May contain clarifications, new interpretations. May include both published and unpublished original data to clarify the point. Any number of figures. Must include abstract and keywords. Should be well referenced, with a minimal number of references above 70. There is no upper limit on the number of references.

REVIEWS

Authors may suggest a Review on a broad topic of general interest. Should be well referenced, with a minimal number of references above 90. Reviews should include 1-6 figures, diagrams or cartoons.

MEGA-REVIEWS AND BOOKS

Comprehensive coverage of the topic. Any number of figures. Color figures are especially welcome. Should be well referenced, with a minimal number of references above 500. There is no upper limit on the number of references.