gms | German Medical Science

GMS Current Topics in Otorhinolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery

German Society of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Head and Neck Surgery (DGHNOKHC)

ISSN 1865-1011

Information for authors

Authors' Guidelines, Status: 20/10/2016

1. General Information
GMS Current Topics in Otorhinolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery (CTO) is an open access e-journal, which publishes invited review articles in English language on the main topic of the Annual Meeting of the German Society of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Head and Neck Surgery. All articles go through a (peer or editorial) review procedure before publication. The authors' guidelines principally follow the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors: Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals.
CTO does not charge any article processing charges (APCs) nor submission charges to its authors.
2. Publication Requirements
The articles are translations of the papers published in a supplementary volume of the journal "Laryngo-Rhino-Otologie" (Thieme Verlag), which are authorised by the authors and adapted for GMS.
2.1 Authorship and Copyright
All authors insure that they have furnished a substantial contribution to the article and that they are in agreement with form and contents of the manuscript. The corresponding author confirms in the Author's Contract that he or she holds the copyrights on the works as well as on the text and illustrations attached therein. There is an agreement with the Thieme-Verlag that the contents of the so-called "Referateband" (annually published as a supplement to the journal Laryngo-Rhino-Otologie) may be published in English with German Medical Science. This permission also refers to the use of the corresponding illustrations. If material (e.g. illustrations or tables) is used from other sources, a statement from the holder of the copyrights indicating agreement with publication in CTO is required. The author grants to GMS the right to store the work in databases for an unlimited period of time, to distribute and to reproduce the article in electronic form, as well as to provide individualized print-outs for users by means of a print-on-demand service. All remaining exploitation rights of the author are not restricted. However, all further publications should make reference to the original publication.
2.2 Conflict of Interests, Funding
Financial or other support by institutes or companies, as well as promotion funds, is to be stated in the acknowledgments. All financial or other connections, which the author has to a company, whose products or competition products play an important role in represented facts of the matter, should be described and enclosed in the manuscript.
An important aspect of scientific publication is the indication of funding support. You must ensure that the full, correct details of your funder(s) and any relevant grant numbers are included. A funding statement may be worded as follows: 'This work was supported by [name of funder] grant number [xxx]'.
2.3 Protection of Patients' Rights to Privacy
When using records of patients it must be guaranteed that the person is not identifiable on the basis of the portrayal. Otherwise, the author must seek explicit consent from the person concerned (or their representative) that he or she agrees with the publication in the present form. The existence of such a consent is to be confirmed by the author in writing.
2.4 Informed Consent
All manuscripts on clinical research performed in humans or with materials obtained from humans must include a section declaring that the research project has been approved by an institutional review board or ethics committee and that patients or probands have granted informed consent prior to inclusion.
2.5 Ethical Treatment of Animals
All manuscripts on animal research must report procedures by which ethical treatment of animals has been guaranteed.
3 Manuscript Preparation
3.1 In General
The manuscripts are submitted in English language. The manuscripts may include tables, diagrams and pictures, as well as sound or video sequences.
3.1.1 Title Page
On the first page of the manuscript the English title of the article is stated, followed by the surnames and first names of all authors, their email addresses and the facilities where they are active. Then give separately the name, mail and email address of the author conducting the correspondence.
3.1.2 Abstract and Key Words
All the articles are to be preceded by an English abstract, which represents a condensed extract of the work.  The author should indicate adequate keywords.
3.1.3 Literature References
The literature cited in the text should be listed at the end of the article according to the Vancouver Style of References also used in PubMed. References should be numbered in the order in which they are listed in the reference list. The reference list may be sorted in the order in which references are first mentioned in the text or, alternatively, in alphabetical order by first authors' names. In both cases, references in the reference list should be preceded by consecutive numbers. Identify references in text, tables, and legends by Arabic numerals in square brackets. Please do not use footnotes!
Some Examples:
Standard journal article:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347(4):284-7.
Monograph:
Murray PR, Rosenthal KS, Kobayashi GS, Pfaller MA. Medical microbiology. 4th ed. St. Louis: Mosby; 2002.
Chapter/Contribution in a monograph:
Meltzer PS, Kallioniemi A, Trent JM. Chromosome alterations in human solid tumors. In: Vogelstein B, Kinzler KW, editors. The genetic basis of human cancer. New York: McGraw-Hill; 2002. p. 93-113.
CD-ROM:
Anderson SC, Poulsen KB. Anderson's electronic atlas of hematology [CD-ROM]. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; 2002.
Journal article on the Internet:
Eysenbach G. SARS and population health technology. J Med Internet Res. 2003;5(2):e14. Available from: http://www.jmir.org/2003/2/e14/
Homepage/Web site:
Cancer-Pain.org [homepage on the Internet]. New York: Association of Cancer Online Resources, Inc.; c2000-01 [updated 2002 May 16; cited 2002 Jul 9]. Available from: http://www.cancer-pain.org/
Further detailed sample references
under http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/uniform_requirements.html.
3.2 Article Types
Review articles
are to show the state of research in detail, summarize and clarify open research questions. Review articles should include abstract and introduction, furthermore, they may be subdivided sectionwise according to the requirements of the topic.
3.3 Technical Requirements
3.3.1 Typography and Technical Terms
Do not use block style or hyphenation when drawing up your manuscripts. Line breaks are only to be inserted in paragraphs.
Literature references are to be numbered in the text as described in 3.1.3 and and listed at the end of the document as text, under no circumstances by means of the automatic footnote function. All illustrations and tables are to be provided with legends and numbered consecutively.
The publication system of GMS does not allow for annotations in the form of footnotes or endnotes. Textual explications must be integrated in the plain text (e.g. in brackets, italic).
The basic units of the International System for Measures and Weights (SI) and the units derived from them are to be used for all units of measurement. For the indication of blood pressure values the unit "mmHg" is permissible, for the indication of temperatures the unit °C. When using other units in illustrations and tables the conversion factors are to be indicated in the legend.
The nomenclature of the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) resp. the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB) is to be used for the designation of chemical substances. The additional indication of the register number of the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) is recommended.
Generally, the generic name is to be used when mentioning drugs. If certain commercial products were used in the research, then these trade names and the names of the producer should be quoted in the method part.The spelling in the "Red List" applies. Abbreviations without solutions should be only used, if they are generally common (DNA, WHO). All remaining abbreviations are to be identified when first used. If necessary, an abbreviation list should be added.
3.3.2 Text Formats
Acceptable text formats are MS-Word (*.doc) and Rich Text Format (*.rtf). The manuscripts are submitted to the administrative office of the German Society of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Head and Neck Surgery.
3.3.3 Graphic Formats
The following graphic formats may be used: the formats TIFF and BMP (loss-free bitmap-formats); GIF and PNG (bitmap-formats compressed) for charts, JPG (compressable bitmap-format) for photos. The graphics should be integrated in the text, if possible, and additionally be provided as separate files with clear file names. 

Author's Contract

§ 1 Subject Matter of the Contract
  1. The subject of this contract is the submitted work of the author.
  2. The author insures that he alone is authorized to dispose over the rights of use on his work promoted by copyright and that hitherto he made no legal concessions that oppose to the provisions of this contract. This also applies to the standard texts or master illustrations supplied by the author and whose rights of use he holds.
    There is an agreement with the Thieme-Verlag that the contents of the so-called "Referateband" (annually published as a supplement to the journal Laryngo-Rhino-Otologie) may be published in English with German Medical Science. This permission also refers to the use of the corresponding illustrations.
    If the author offers German Medical Science standard texts or master illustrations for which this does not apply, or where it is uncertain if this applies, then he has to inform German Medical Science about it and about all recognizable legally relevant facts known to him. As soon as German Medical Science assigns the author with the procurement of other standard texts or master illustrations, it requires a special agreement.
  3. The author is obligated to point out to German Medical Science in writing if the work includes interpretations from persons or incidents with which the risk of an infringement of personal rights is connected. He ensures immediate notification of the service provider in case of doubt or of alleged or actual legal hindrances.
  4. The rights holder exempts the service provider of any third-party claims.
§ 2 Rights
  1. The author transfers to German Medical Science the basic right of duplication and circulation of machine readable data media and their safeguard media.
  2. The author transfers to German Medical Science the right to electronic storage in databases and web pages, to make available to the public for individual requests and display on the monitor. This also comprises the right to notify and transfer the document to third parties e. g. within the framework of national collection mandates, especially for the purpose of long-term archiving.
  3. The author transfers to German Medical Science the right for the translation into the English language.
  4. The author transfers to German Medical Science the right to Print-on-Demand-Production.
  5. The author transfers to German Medical Science the right to copy and to convert the document for archiving purposes into additional, different electronic or physical formats. When doing so, impairments which are suitable to endanger the content’s integrity or the intellectual and personal rights of the author on the work are to be omitted.
  6. German Medical Science grants an online-access-right to the author pertaining to his work that is stored in the database.
§ 3 Contractual Obligation
  1. The work will first appear exclusively in electronic form, subsequent changes of the form of the first edition require the author's agreement.
  2. German Medical Science is obligated to duplicate, circulate and adequately campaign for the work in the form specified in section 1.
§ 4 Fee
  1. The author does not receive a fee for his work.
§ 5 Author Designation, Copyright-Note
  1. German Medical Science is obligated to appropriately identify the author as originator of the work.
  2. German Medical Science is obligated to attach the copyright note with the publication of the work in the sense of the Universal Copyright Convention.
  3. The author agrees that German Medical Science publishes his work under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). That means that anyone can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, provided the original work is appropriately credited. See license information at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. German Medical Science is obligated to attach a note about this license upon publication of the work.
§ 6 Final Clause
If not regulated by this contract, the general legal provisions of law of the Federal Republic of Germany apply. The invalidity or inefficacy of individual regulations of this contract does not affect the validity of the remaining regulations. The parties are then obligated to replace the deficient regulation by such a regulation whose economic and legal sense comes closest to that of the regulation to be replaced.