Instructions to authors

Please use our templates when preparing your manuscript for submission: Manuscript Tables

Journal information

Brain has published landmark papers in clinical neurology and translational neuroscience since 1878. The Editorial Board reflects the journal’s broad coverage and international readership.

See below for Open Access charges.

Manuscript categories

Brain publishes the following manuscript types:

* excluding the abstract, title page, tables, figure legends and references.

Author Toll Free Link and Discounts

All corresponding authors will be provided with a free access link to their article upon publication.  The link will be sent via email to the article’s corresponding author who is free to share the link with any co-authors.  Please see OUP’s Author Self-Archiving policy for more information regarding how this link may be publicly shared depending on the type of license under which the article has published.  

All authors have the option to purchase up to 10 print copies of the issue in which they publish at a 50% discount. Orders should be placed through this order form. Orders must be made within 12 months of the online publication date.

Processing times

We aim to process manuscripts as quickly as possible. Please note that the Editor and Associate Editors of Brain are research-active translational neuroscientists, making Brain uniquely connected to advances in the mechanisms and treatment of neurological disease. This, together with occasional difficulty in obtaining advice from experts, means that turnaround times during the manuscript review process can vary, 

All accepted manuscripts undergo in-house copy-editing for style, prior to production. Proofs are emailed to the author for final checking. The current approximate turnaround times are: 

Rejection without peer review: usually 4–10 days 
Submission to first decision: 4–12 weeks
Acceptance to receipt of proofs: 4 weeks
Acceptance to online publication: 8.5 weeks 

Peer review

All papers submitted to Brain are seen by one or more members of the Editorial Board. At this stage, some are rejected without peer review owing to lack of novelty, involvement of normal subjects, serious scientific flaws or work lying outside the scope of the journal. Suitable articles are sent to at least two experts for review, whose reports are returned to the assigned member of the Editorial Board and the Editor. Following peer review, we recommend about 16% of articles for revision or publication. Revised articles are usually sent for re-review. Revision of an article gives no guarantee of acceptance and in some cases revised articles are rejected if the improvements are not sufficient or new issues arise. About 13% of submissions are ultimately recommended for publication. Material submitted to Brain remains confidential while under review and peer reviewers’ identities are protected, unless they elect to lose anonymity.

Manuscript preparation

When preparing your manuscript, the following are required:

• Manuscript. A single word processing file, including title, authors and affiliations, abstract, main text, data availability statement, funding information, competing interests, references and figure legends.
• Display item(s). Optional. These include Figures, Tables and Boxes.
• Declaration of authorship. Required.
• Supplementary material. Optional.
• Thumbnail. Required.
• Reporting Guidelines checklist. Per article type, the corresponding Reporting Guidelines checklist (and flow diagram if applicable).

Download a copy of our Word template here.

Formatting

Brain has specific style criteria and using these in preparing your manuscript will speed up the production process should your article be accepted for publication.

Title

Manuscripts must be submitted with both a full title (maximum of 100 characters including spaces) and a short running title (maximum of 40 characters including spaces). We do not allow any abbreviations in titles, except for current accepted gene symbols

Authors and affiliations

All author names should be listed on the title page, in the form: First name, middle initial, last name (e.g. John E. Smith). If authors have a registered ORCID iD, this should be entered into the relevant field during the submission process. Each author should list an associated affiliation and its location. On submission, one author should be designated as the corresponding author, and their full postal address and e-mail address should be provided. This information will be published with the article if accepted.​ A second author can formally be assigned corresponding author, on request, once a manuscript has been accepted, but we discourage more than two corresponding authors.​

Authorship

All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship. The order in which names appear should be a joint decision by the co-authors. Each author must have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content. Authorship credit should be based on substantial contribution to conception and design, execution, or analysis and interpretation of data. All authors should be involved in drafting the article or revising it critically for intellectual content and must have read and approved the final version of the manuscript. Assurance that all authors of the paper have fulfilled these criteria for authorship should be given in the covering letter. Authors must list their names at the top of the paper and should comply with the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) criteria for authorship.

A Declaration of Authorship must be signed by all authors to confirm that they consent to take public responsibility for the content of the paper and that consent from patients has been obtained. This form is required to conform to good editorial practice and to avoid disputes. If authors are not at the same venue, separate forms may be used. The signed forms are not necessary for submission, but are required prior to publication. Once signed, you can return your form to us in one of the following ways: (i) upload with your manuscript; or (ii) e-mail to the Editorial Office (brain@ucl.ac.uk). Please note that the Declaration of Authorship differs from the License to Publish, which is sent by our publishers after a paper has been accepted. Both forms must be completed prior to publication.

Consortia or working group authors will be listed in PubMed as collaborators. In order to be indexed as collaborators, the names of the consortium or working group members should be listed in an Appendix in the main text document, before the Reference list. The consortium or working group should also be included in the main author list. Collaborator names are searchable on PubMed in the same way as authors. Please follow this link for a list of PubMed rules.

Brain supports the World Association of Medical Editors’ recommendations on chatbots and scholarly manuscripts. If an artificial intelligence (AI) such as a chatbot or similar program is used in the development of a paper for Brain, the following is required:

• A Large Language Model (LLM), chatbot, or other AI cannot be credited as an author, as authorship requires that the author be accountable for the submitted/published work, and artificial intelligence cannot fulfil this requirement of authorship;
• Authors listed on the paper must review the content generated by the LLM and take full responsibility for it, as they would for any other content within the submitted/published work;
• The use of LLM tools must be documented in the Methods, Acknowledgments, or another appropriate section of the paper.

Abstract

For Original articles and Reviews, please include an abstract containing up to 400 words. For Updates and Reports the abstract should be no longer than 200 words. The abstract must summarize the paper in full, including background, methods, results and conclusion; each of these sections should start on a new line, however subtitles should not be included. Details such as the number of subjects, number of controls, the age range of patients and their gender should be included if appropriate. Statistical evidence to support your main conclusions should also be included here if space permits. No abbreviations should appear in the abstract, except for current accepted gene symbols and accepted abbreviations (see below). Essays and Letters to the Editor do not have an abstract.

Keywords and abbreviations

Please list keywords of your choice, up to a maximum of six, directly below the abstract.
Please note that words/terms used in the title and abstract do not need to be listed as keywords, as search algorithms scan the title and abstract text and automatically include these words.

Aim to make your paper reader-friendly to those outside your field by minimising the use of abbreviations where possible. Any abbreviations used in the paper must be defined in the text at first use. Accepted gene symbols do not need to be defined. Common chemical abbreviations do not need to be defined (e.g. EDTA). The Scientific Editor reserves the right to replace abbreviations with their full meaning, if necessary. 

The following abbreviations do not need to be defined: AIDS; ANOVA; ATP; A,T,C,G; CNS; CSF; CT; DNA; ECG; EEG; EMG; GABA; HIV; MRI; PET; PCR; RNA. 

Abbreviations for scientific units should conform to the Système Internationale (SI units). The statistical guidelines advocated by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (Ann Intern Med 1988; 108: 266-73) should be followed.

Numbers

Numbers one to nine should be written in full, unless followed by a unit, e.g. five mice, 6 days, seven patients with Parkinson’s disease, 8 ml.

Main text

Sections should include, in order: Introduction, Materials and methods, Results, Discussion, Data availability, Acknowledgements, Funding, Competing interests, Supplementary material, References. Review, Update and Essay articles can contain subheadings of your choice.

Headings and subheadings should be no more than 100 characters in length. A guide to in-text citations is given below.

The main text should be saved as a Word file. PDF and LaTeX files are not accepted. Legends for figures should be listed at the end of the main body of the manuscript.

Patient consent

Papers reporting experiments on patients or healthy volunteers must record the fact that the subjects’ consent was obtained according to the Declaration of Helsinki and that it has been approved by the ethical committee of the institution in which the work was performed. Consent must be recorded when photographs of patients are shown or other details are given that could lead to identification of these individuals. The Editorial Team may request to view evidence that the patient has provided consent.

Gene nomenclature

Authors should use approved gene nomenclature where available. Authors proposing a new gene nomenclature should contact the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee.

For human genes, please use symbols approved by the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC). HGNC nomenclature can be queried. The species listed below all have gene nomenclature committees. Please use the nomenclature they have approved by searching for gene symbols at the following links:
Mouse
Rat
Gene symbols and names in all other mammals (and usually all vertebrates) should follow the same nomenclature as the human gene.

It can be difficult for readers to determine whether authors are referring to a gene or its corresponding protein, therefore it is important to use accepted conventions for gene and protein symbols. Symbols for genes should be italicized (IGF1), whereas symbols for proteins are not italicized (IGF1). Gene names that are written out in full are not italicized (insulin-like growth factor 1).

Authors should check each gene/protein name and symbol in their paper even if it has been published previously. Genes and their corresponding proteins often have different names and symbols and sometimes you may find that the approved gene/protein name or symbol has been updated. Brain prefers that the same symbol is used for genes and proteins; however, where proteins are more widely known by an alternative name/symbol, then the encoding gene, where possible, should be referred to e.g. ‘TRAIL (encoded by TNFSF10)’. Synonyms can be referred to using ‘also known as’ or ‘previously known as’ e.g. TARDBP (previously known as TDP-43). Thereafter, use the current approved symbol and not the previous designation.

Brain allows the use of gene symbols in the abstract and headings. Accepted gene symbols do not need to be defined. For clarity, it is best to be consistent in the use of either the full gene name, or the symbol throughout the text, but use of either is acceptable.

Statistical analyses

Authors are expected to apply the most appropriate statistical tools for data analysis, and it is acceptable to present results from frequentist, information-theory, and Bayesian approaches in the same manuscript. Authors should include a section at the end of the ‘Materials and methods’ section, with the heading ‘Statistical analysis’ and describe procedures used to evaluate fit of the model to the data, such as goodness-of-fit tests, inspection of residuals, or tests of model assumptions. For results of statistical tests, authors should report the statistical test that was applied (e.g. two-sample t-test, analysis of covariance), the test statistic (e.g. t, U, F, r), degrees of freedom (Lazic¹), and the exact probability value (P). Please indicate whether statistical tests were one- or two-tailed, and the alpha-level that was used to determine significance (e.g. P < 0.05). A 95% confidence interval for the size of each effect is encouraged (Halsey et al.²). Post hoc power tests are discouraged. 

Authors should specify how blinding and randomization were achieved. If either blinding or randomization was not performed, justification should be given. Details of a priori sample size calculations should be presented (including power to be achieved, alpha, the source of means and standard deviations involved in the calculation, and effect size). This is important because a statistical result is more likely to be a false positive or false negative result when the study has low power (Button et al.³). Pseudo-replication should be minimized at the design stage (Lazic¹).

1. Lazic SE. The problem of pseudoreplication in neuroscientific studies: is it affecting your analysis? BMC Neurosci. 2010;11:5.

2. Halsey LG, Curran-Everett D, Vowler SL, Drummond GB. The fickle P value generates irreproducible results. Nat Methods. 2015;12(3):179-85.

3. Button KS, Ioannidis JP, Mokrysz C, et al. Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2013;14(5):365-76.

Data availability

To promote data transparency, Brain requires a data availability statement. This should be included at the end of the article before the reference list under a separate 'Data availability' subheading. New software and/or algorithms essential to the conclusions of the submitted manuscript should be included in this data availability statement.

The data policy was implemented on 1 June 2018. Any paper submitted before that date will not have a data availability statement. However, for all manuscripts submitted or published before this date, data must be available upon reasonable request.

Preprint policy

Authors retain the right to make an Author’s Original Version (preprint) available through various channels, and this does not prevent submission to the journal. For further information see our Online Licensing, Copyright and Permissions policies. If accepted, the authors are required to update the status of any preprint, including your published paper’s DOI, as described on our Author Self-Archiving policy page.

Acknowledgements

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the ‘Acknowledgements’ section.

Funding

All sources of funding must be disclosed at the end of the main text under a separate heading ‘Funding’. In order to meet funding requirements, authors are required to name their funding sources, or state if there are none, during the submission process. Please follow this link for further information on this process or to find out more about the CHORUS initiative.

Competing interests

In the interests of transparency, Brain requires authors to declare any competing financial and/or non-financial interests in relation to the work described. The corresponding author is responsible for submitting a competing interests statement on behalf of all authors of the paper. This should be included in the relevant section during submission, and in the main text document, before the references, under a separate ‘Competing interests’ heading. If there are no competing interests to disclose, the author should state that ‘The authors report no competing interests’. Please follow this link for further information on competing interests.

Appendix

The names of any Consortium or Working Group members should be listed in an Appendix.

References

In-text citations

Brain uses numerical in-text citations in-text, based on the AMA Reference Style (11^th Edition). Numbered references should be superscripted and placed after the period, quotation mark, comma, or parentheses. They should, however, be placed inside semicolons and colons.

Do not leave a space between the last letter or punctuation mark and the superscripted number.

Citations should be numbered sequentially. Once you have given a source a number, it will keep that number throughout the paper. Use commas to show that more than one work is being cited, and use hyphens for several works that would be numbered sequentially:

                    These side effects can have implications for the patient's mental health, as
                    numerous studies have shown.^1,3,6-9

If including an author in the text of a sentence, use the author surname(s) followed by the citation number.

                    Smith¹ reported on the survey.
                    Smith and Watson² reported on the survey.
                    Smith et al.³ reported on the survey.

Reference list

Bibliographic references should be limited to essential literature. References should be listed at the end of the paper in numerical order. Author names are listed to a maximum of six. For papers with more than six authors, the first three should be listed, followed by ‘et al.’.

For helpful examples of reference formatting please see common examples in the table below. Any manuscript with an incorrectly formatted reference list will be returned to the author.

References to papers ‘in preparation’ or ‘submitted’ are not acceptable; if ‘in press’, the name of the journal or book must be given. Reference citations should not include ‘personal communications’ or other inaccessible information; information derived from personal communications or from unpublished work by the authors should be referred to in the text.

In the online version of Brain there are automatic links from the reference section of each article to cited articles in Medline. This is a useful feature for readers, but is only possible if the references are accurate. It is the responsibility of the author to ensure the accuracy of the references in the submitted article. Downloading references directly from Medline is highly recommended.

Display items

Tables

Each table should be self-explanatory and include a brief descriptive title. Tables must be supplied in Word format to enable editing. Please avoid abbreviating words in tables unless already defined in the text. Abbreviations must be listed below the table if used.

Download a copy of our Table template and formatting guidelines here.

Boxes

Boxes are encouraged in Reviews and Updates. Boxes are used to provide context, clarify or explain points from the main text. Each box should include a brief descriptive title and must be supplied in Word format to enable editing. Bullet points may be used. The word count for boxes is 500. Any abbreviations used should be defined within the box text upon first use.

Figures

For the review process, figures can be embedded in the main text if they are of sufficient quality, but separate files are preferred. For review, the high resolution images you upload will automatically be converted to PDF and HTML for reviewers to download. Please label and number your figures and figure legends clearly. In the text, refer to figures as Fig. 1, Fig. 2A, Fig. 2B, Supplementary Fig. 1 etc. Each figure should be given a short heading, which will be published in bold font.

For publication, you will be required to supply separate high resolution files: 300 dpi for colour and half-tone (grey-shaded) artwork or 600 dpi for black and white line drawings. TIFF files are preferred. We advise that you create your high resolution images first as these can be easily converted into low resolution images by our online submission system for peer review. Please follow this link for useful information on preparing your figures for publication. Figures should be prepared to fit into a single column (90 mm width) or two columns (185 mm). The journal reserves the right to reduce the size of illustrative material. Brain does not charge for printing colour figures.

Requirements:

• All micrographs must carry a magnification bar
• Each figure must have a short title.
• Legends for figures should be listed at the end of the main text document.
• Abbreviations and symbols used in a figure must be defined in the figure legend unless they have been used and defined in the main text
• Submit files at a resolution of 300 dpi or higher, and at a size that allows the reader to see detail.
• In laying out figure panels, avoid unnecessary empty space or clutter. Identify figure panels with capital letters (A, B, etc) in 9 pt at the final figure size. Panels should be ordered from left to right and then from top to bottom
• Keys to symbols should be as simple as possible.
• Note that the use of red and green figures is particularly problematic for approximately 5% of the male population and should be avoided. Please follow this link for advice on the preparation of colour-friendly figures.
• Axes should not extend beyond the range of the data. Use leading zeros on decimals (e.g. 0.1).
• Solid symbols are preferable to open symbols except to indicate data overlap. Circles, squares, diamonds and triangles are preferable to crosses. Symbols and lines should be distinguishable when the figure is reduced, and no smaller than 5 and 0.5 pt, respectively at the final size.
• Continuously distributed data should be displayed either by showing all data points or by using box-and-whisker plots, with all elements (e.g. median, interquartile interval, minimum, maximum) defined in the legend.
• Bar charts with a single bar or with a bar indicating 100% should be avoided. Keep bar width to the minimum required for legibility.
• Avoid using different shades of grey or colours that are close in hue to identify different symbols or columns in a bar chart. Colour should be used sparingly to identify different categories of data, and red and green should not be used together in graphs. Avoid shadows and unnecessary 3D effects.
• Tables are not allowed in figures. Please provide tables as separate display items.

Image manipulation

Image manipulation beyond minimal processing (for instance, to add arrows to a micrograph) is strictly forbidden. Unprocessed data and metadata files must be archived by the author(s) in case they are requested by the editorial team or reviewers during manuscript evaluation. This requirement for archiving data and metadata for images is particularly important because readers occasionally highlight issues with images after publication, and authors may be required to respond to such queries via the Editor. All digitized images submitted with the final version of the manuscript must be of high quality.

All images must accurately represent the original data in line with the latest standards now expected by the research community. Please list in the ‘Materials and methods’ section all tools and software used to acquire images, including image gathering settings and any required processing manipulations.

Single images created from separately acquired (e.g. different times or from different locations) are not permitted unless it is clearly stated in the legend that the combined image is, for example, time-averaged data or a time-lapse sequence. If comparative images are required in one figure then separate images must be demarcated in the whole figure and described in the legend.

Changing contrast or brightness may be acceptable when it is applied evenly over the whole image including over the controls. Reducing or increasing contrast to hide data is forbidden. Processing to emphasize a region in an image to the detriment of other regions is inappropriate, particularly where an attempt is made to reinforce significance of experimental data relative to the control.

Use of cloning and healing tools, such as those available in Photoshop, or any feature that deliberately obscures manipulations, is considered inappropriate. Where such tools are used by necessity, for example to remove identifying data about patients from an image, then this should be explicitly mentioned in the figure legend.

Electrophoretic gels and blots

Brain allows cropped gels and blots in the main paper only if they improve understanding of the data reported. Cropping must be indicated in the image and mentioned in the figure legend. Full-length gels and/or blots are to be made available as Supplementary material, which will be published online if the manuscript is accepted.

All gels must include positive and negative controls, as well as molecular size markers; where these are not visible in the cropped figure then such controls must show clearly in the expanded Supplementary material.

Please provide a citation for characterized antibodies. Where a citation is not yet available, then a detailed characterization demonstrating the specificity of the antibody and the range of reactivity of the reagent in the assay, should be supplied as Supplementary material. Brain recommends submission of data and linking with an antibody profile database (e.g. Antibodypedia, 1DegreeBio).

While Brain discourages quantitative comparisons between samples on different gels/blots, if this is part of the experiment reported, then the legend must state that the samples derive from the same experiment and that gels/blots were processed in parallel. Sliced images that compare lanes that were non-adjacent in the original gel must have a dark line delineating the boundary between the gels. Loading controls (e.g. GAPDH, actin) must be run on the same blot. Sample processing controls run on different gels must be identified as such, and distinctly from loading controls.

Cropped gels/blots in the paper must retain important bands, and Brain recommends at least six band widths above and below the band under investigation.

Over exposure may mask additional bands and high-contrast gels and blots are therefore discouraged. Grey backgrounds are expected as the norm. If high contrast is unavoidable then multiple exposures should be presented in the Supplementary material. For quantitative comparisons, appropriate reagents, controls and imaging methods with linear signal ranges should be used.

Supplementary material

Supporting material that is not essential for inclusion in the full text of the manuscript, but would nevertheless benefit the reader, can be made available by the publisher as online-only content, linked to the online manuscript. The material should not be essential to understanding the conclusions of the paper, but should contain data that are additional or complementary and directly relevant to the article content. Such information might include more detailed methods, extended datasets/data analysis, or additional figures (including colour).

All text and figures must be provided in suitable electronic formats. All material to be considered as supplementary material must be submitted at the same time as the main manuscript for peer review. It cannot be altered or replaced after the paper has been accepted for publication. Please indicate clearly the material intended as Supplementary material upon submission. Also ensure that the Supplementary material is referred to in the main manuscript where necessary (Supplementary Fig. 1; Supplementary Table 1).

Please note that Supplementary material will not be edited, so ensure that it is clearly and succinctly presented, that the style of terms conforms with the rest of the paper, and that there are no tracked changes. Also ensure that the presentation will work on any internet browser.

A maximum of 10 files is acceptable to make up the Supplementary material unit for the article. The maximum size per file should not exceed 15 MB. If possible, please combine all supplementary data files in a single PDF file.

• Provide all files in PDF. Files supplied in other formats will be converted to PDF.
• Images should be a maximum size of 640 × 480 pixels (9 × 6.8 inches at 72 dpi).
• Provide sound clips in .mp3 format
• Provide video clips in .mpg or .mp4 format.
• If video files are too large to be uploaded onto the submission site, please send them by Dropbox to the Editorial Office (brain@ucl.ac.uk).

We do not send out proofs of the supplementary material, and authors need to ensure that these files are correct before submitting their paper.

Thumbnail

At submission, please provide a thumbnail figure (can be a cartoon or schematic) in JPEG format. This will be used on our website and electronic table of contents.

Reporting guidelines

Authors should prepare their manuscripts in accordance with the appropriate guideline(s) and/or checklist(s) for each type of article. The appropriate checklist (and flow diagram, if applicable) must be included with each submission.

For further information regarding reporting guidelines, authors should consult the EQUATOR Network website, which maintains a useful, up-to-date list of guidelines as they are published, with links to articles and checklists.

Clinical/randomised trials

Reports of randomised trials must conform to the revised CONSORT guidelines and should be submitted with their protocols, registration details and completed CONSORT checklist.

Observational studies

The STROBE statement should be used when reporting observational research.

Animal studies

The ARRIVE guidelines must be followed for animal studies. Experiments with animals should be performed in accordance with the legal requirements of the relevant local or national authority and the name of the authorizing body should be stated in the paper. Procedures should be such that experimental animals do not suffer unnecessarily. The text of the paper should include experimental details of the procedure and of anaesthetics used. The journal reserves the right to reject papers where the ethical aspects are, in the Editor’s opinion, open to doubt.

Plagiarism and scientific misconduct

Plagiarism is the use of others published and unpublished ideas or words (or other intellectual property) without due reference or permission and/or their presentation as new and original points. Plagiarism is serious scientific misconduct and will be dealt with accordingly. Text may be checked for passages plagiarized from other publications at the Editor’s discretion. The Editor reserves the right to inspect raw data.

Duplicate publication

Authors must explain in the submission cover letter any prior publication of the same or a substantially similar paper, and should explain any circumstances that might lead the Editor or reviewers to believe that the paper may have been published elsewhere.

If work that makes up more than 10% of the manuscript submitted to Brain has been published elsewhere, please provide a copy of the published article so that we can make a judgement on the amount of overlap without delay.

If a member of the Editorial Board learns that work under consideration has previously been published in whole or in part, the Editor may return the paper without review, reject the paper, announce the duplication publicly in an editorial and/or contact the authors’ employers. Authors may not send the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently. If this occurs, the Editor may return the paper without review, reject the paper, contact the Editor of the other journal(s) in question and/or contact the authors’ employers.

Online submission

All manuscripts must be submitted online via the submission site.

If you are not already registered, you can register by clicking on the ‘Create account’ button on the login screen and following the on-screen instructions. If you cannot remember your login details, click on the ‘Forgot your password’ button and following the on-screen instructions.

Please consult the ScholarOne Online User Guide, which provides detailed submission instructions, screen shots and video tutorials explaining how to submit your paper. Alternatively, please contact the Editorial Office (brain@ucl.ac.uk), who will be pleased to assist you.

Submitting a new manuscript

A single PDF file containing your main text and reduced-resolution versions of any figures you have submitted will be created automatically. This document will be used when your manuscript undergoes peer review. Your submitted files will appear in this PDF sequentially, as specified by you on the submission page, and you will have an opportunity to enter figure captions and to check the PDF file prior to final submission.

A cover letter must accompany the submission, and should contain an abbreviated summary of no more than 323 characters (including spaces) that should be accessible to the non-specialist. In the event of acceptance, an edited version of this summary may be used to draw attention to the paper in the online table of contents. It should therefore capture the main purpose and conclusions of the work.

Submitting a revised manuscript

In the ‘Author Centre’ of Manuscript Central, click on ‘Manuscripts with decisions’. A list of manuscripts will appear at the bottom of the page, with an option to ‘create a revision’ next to the appropriate one. This will assign your revision to the original manuscript ID with the suffix R1, R2, R3 etc. You should upload your revised manuscript using the same manuscript ID as your original submission to avoid your revision being dealt with as new manuscript. If the ‘create a revision’ option has expired, please contact the Editorial Office (brain@ucl.ac.uk). In the ‘create a revision’ process, there is a field in which to cut and paste responses to the referees. This enables the referees to view your answers to their comments. On a later page you are given the option of including a cover letter to the Editor. If you submit your comments to the referees by appending a letter, there may be a delay in the referees seeing your comments because attached letters are not automatically sent to the reviewers.

When you reach the ‘My Files’ screen, delete the files from the first submission that do not need to be seen again. These will already have been saved elsewhere. Upload your revised manuscript, figures and supplementary material. To facilitate the production process, it is essential that you upload your main text and tables as Word (.doc, .docx) files, and not in PDF format.

As detailed above, your images are required as high resolution TIFF files. For useful information on preparing your figures for publication, go to the OUP manuscript preparation page. Please note that publication of your manuscript will not proceed until figures suitable for reproduction are received.

Accepted manuscripts

Publication of Accepted manuscripts 

Following acceptance, the Production team at OUP will email the corresponding author with a link to the License to Publish. Please ensure that the License to Publish is signed and returned as soon as possible as the article cannot be published until this form is signed. Not signing this will delay the publication of your article. Once received, the accepted manuscript will be published online, on Advance Access (see below). Note that this is not the final version of the paper. The manuscript will then be copyedited, typeset, proofed out, and corrected. Once the manuscript is finalized, the uncorrected manuscript is taken off the Advance Access page and the final corrected article is published.

High resolution figures

Should you need to send us any large files such as figures or videos after you have received an acceptance email from us, please use Dropbox and send the link to the Editorial Office (brain@ucl.ac.uk). After a manuscript has been accepted, the submission site is no longer accessible to authors.

Proof correction

The Production team at Oxford University Press (OUP) will email the corresponding author with a link to the License to Publish and the online site for ordering issue copies. They will also send the corresponding author a separate message with a link to your article for corrections. ONLY ESSENTIAL CHANGES SHOULD BE MADE AT PROOF STAGE. Alterations in style or phrasing are not permitted at proof stage. Corrections considered non-essential by the editorial team will not be accepted as they lead to delays in the publication of manuscripts and issues. Proofs are to be returned within 3 working days of their arrival, with the changes clearly marked, by uploading these to the online site. If you are unlikely to be available when your proof arrives, please inform our Author Support Team (jnls.author.support@oup.com) that you wish the proofs to be sent to another assigned person. No changes to manuscripts will be accepted after proofs have been corrected and the final paper approved for publication. Any essential changes after this point will be published as a correction.

Free link to online article

On publication of your article, you will receive a URL, giving you access to the published article on the Brain website, and information on use of this link.

License to publish

It is a condition of publication in the Journal that authors grant an exclusive licence to the Journal, published by OUP on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. This ensures that requests from third parties to reproduce articles are handled efficiently and consistently and will also allow the article to be as widely disseminated as possible. The corresponding author will be sent a link to the online License to Publish. Please ensure that the License to Publish is signed as quickly as possible. The article cannot be published until this form is signed. Please note that this form must be signed in addition to the Declaration of Authorship required by the Editorial Office. Please follow this link for full details of OUP’s publication rights policies, including author rights.

Publicity

Articles that are considered newsworthy may be selected for press release. If your institution intends to issue a press release about your article, please contact the Author Support Team (jnls.author.support@oup.com) as soon as possible to arrange an embargo date for the publication of your article.

Video abstracts

Following acceptance, we encourage authors to create a short video abstract to promote their manuscript. The video should be a maximum of 5 minutes long and should explain the science and clinical context or implications of the work, with the help of animations. Creating a video abstract is not compulsory but it does help to promote your published manuscript. The videos are posted on both the Brain website and Brain Journals YouTube channel. For examples and inspiration, please look at existing videos on our website and YouTube channel.

Use of the original and accepted manuscripts

Following acceptance of your article you are entitled to mount the author’s original (defined as an ‘un-refereed manuscript’ version of the article, as submitted for review by a journal) manuscript version of the article on your own personal website and/or that of your employer and/or post it on free public servers of author’s original manuscripts and/or articles in your subject area, as long as you acknowledge that the article has been accepted for publication by Brain. On publication of your article in the journal you are not required to remove the author’s original manuscript version from your own personal website or that of your employer or free public servers of author’s original manuscript and/or articles in your subject area, provided (i) you include a link (URL) to the published version of the article on the journal’s website; and (ii) the journal is attributed as the original place of publication with the correct citation details given.

You may post the accepted (definition, the final draft author manuscript, as accepted for publication by a journal, including modifications based on referees’ suggestions but before it has undergone copyediting and proof correction) version of the article (but not the final published version itself) onto your own website, your institution’s website and in institutional or subject-based repositories, provided that it is not made publicly available until 12 months after the online date of publication, and that criteria (i) and (ii) above are fulfilled. If the article is published in Open Access, provided you have paid the appropriate open access charge, you may deposit the accepted manuscript and/or the version of record of the article into an institutional or centrally organized repository, immediately upon publication provided that criteria (i) and (ii) above are fulfilled.

You may use the article within your employer’s institution or company for educational or research purposes only, including use in course packs, as long as: (i) you do not use it for commercial purposes or redistribution outside of the institution/company; and (ii) you acknowledge Brain as the original place of publication with the correct citation details given.

No article will be published unless a License to Publish has been signed. As the author(s), copyright of the article remains yours (or your employer’s if your employer claims copyright of your work). Please follow this link for full details of Oxford Journals’ Publications Rights Policies, including self-archiving rights for authors.

Permissions

For queries regarding rights and permissions to use Brain material please see Oxford Journals Permissions. Authors may use their own figures in other publications provided that the original paper in Brain is cited.

Advance access

Advance access enables us to publish accepted papers online soon after they have been accepted. Manuscripts are then copyedited, typeset, proofed out, and corrected. Once the manuscripts are finalized, the uncorrected manuscripts are taken off the Advance Access page and the final corrected article is published.

Manuscripts are removed from the Advance Access page once they have been paginated, at which point the issue into which they are incorporated will be posted online. Abstracts and titles are searchable and accessible within the journal’s web pages, the archive and PubMed. Appearance in advance access constitutes publication. The official publication date appears beneath the title of each manuscript article just before its digital object identifier (DOI).

Papers published in advance access are citeable using the DOI and publication date.

What is a DOI?

A digital object identifier (DOI) is an automatically generated unique identifier for intellectual property in the digital environment, e.g. 10.1093/brain/aws116. It appears on the proof and in the final print and online versions of the manuscript.

Appeals

We wish to provide our authors with fair and well informed decisions. If you have significant reason to believe that the editorial process has not achieved this, please write to the Editorial Office (brain@ucl.ac.uk) to request an appeal form. All appeals will be dealt with through the Editorial Office by email only. Under no circumstances should authors telephone our Editorial Board members regarding manuscripts, nor approach an Associate Editor who has handled the paper in question. The Editor will respond to all appeals.

Open access

Brain offers the option of publishing under either a standard licence or an open access licence. Please note that some funders require open access publication as a condition of funding. If you are unsure whether you are required to publish open access, please do clarify any such requirements with your funder or institution.

Should you wish to publish your article open access, you should select your choice of open access licence in our online system after your article has been accepted for publication. You will need to pay an open access charge to publish under an open access licence.

Details of the open access licences and open access charges.

OUP has a growing number of Read and Publish agreements with institutions and consortia which provide funding for open access publishing. This means authors from participating institutions can publish open access, and the institution may pay the charge. Find out if your institution is participating.

Please note that some article types may have different rates for open access.

Standard charge: £4,024

Scientific Commentary, Letter to the Editor, Editorial: £1,983

Disclaimer

Statements of fact and opinion in published articles are those of the respective authors and contributors and not of Brain or OUP. Neither OUP nor Brain make any representations, express or implied, in respect of the accuracy of the material in this journal and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made. The reader should make his/her own evaluation as to the appropriateness or otherwise of any experimental technique described.

Contacts

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