Editorial Workflow

updated on 2021-01-22 (new: mandatory letter to the editor with reviewer suggestions and outline of experimental design and applied statistics)

1. Electronic Submission

To facilitate rapid publication and minimize administrative costs, submissions are only accepted through the online tracking system. Users from China may encounter problems when trying to register. This is due to a blocking of the Google captcha service, that protects the website from spam accounts. In this case, please contact ojs@julius-kuehn.de. We will create an account for you manually, so you can proceed to submit your work.

Submissions by anyone else but one of the authors will not be accepted. The submitting author takes responsibility for the manuscript during submission and the peer-review process. Please list the names of all authors in the same order they appear on the manuscript. A valid email address has to be entered for each author. These addresses will not be published online but need to be archived together with the manuscript. The co-authors will receive automated notifications upon submission of  the manuscript and when the editorial decision is made. Only substantial contributors to the manuscript or the science presented therein should be named as authors.
Along with their manuscript, the authors have to submit a letter to the editor, which contains a short outline of the experimental plan including the number of variants and replicates studied. Please explain the choice of replicates for different levels of variability in your experiment and their contribution to the reproducibility and validity of your work. Further on, a statement on the novelty of the work and suggestions for at least three reviewers have to be included. Full names, affiliations and email addresses of potential reviewers are to be included. Co-workers employed by the same institution as the submitting author or former co-authors should not be named as reviewers.The letter to the editor can be submitted by pasting text into the respective free text field within the submission form or by uploading a separate document.
If problems occur during the online submission, the author can contact ojs@julius-kuehn.de for technical support.

The submitting author will be asked to agree to the following terms on behalf of all co-authors:

  • I assure that all authors listed on the manuscript agreed to this submission and that I am authorized to act on their behalf. All authors have substantially contributed to the manuscript and all contributers are listed as authors.
  • The manuscript has not been published in any other peer-reviewed journal or in a book or edited collection, and is not under consideration for any such publication.
  • I accept that the manuscript will be screened for plagiarism and falsified data and I am willing to provide original data to reviewers and editors should the need arise.
  • The manuscript is original work by the authors and does not violate any third-party rights. I have read the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license and agree to them.
  • I have provided the mandatory letter to the editor including reviewer suggestions
  • I have given a brief overview of the experimental design including the number of variants and replicates and have explained the choice of replicates for different levels of variability in the experiment and their contribution to the reproducibility and validity of the work. 
  • I confirm that the manuscript complies with the author guidelines and publishing policies of the Journal of Applied Botany and Food Quality.

The author has to choose a thematic section of the journal, to which they want to submit their manuscript. Independently from the chosen section, all manuscripts are evaluated by an Editor-in-Chief first, not by a specific section editor. If the editorial team sees a better fit of a manuscript to another section than the one the author chose, this might be adjusted. Available sections are:

  • Plant physiology
  • Plant ecology
  • Plant biotechnology
  • Plant breeding and cultivation
  • Plant nutrition
  • Plant stress and tolerance
  • Plant microbiology and phytopathology
  • Plant analysis
  • Plant food chemistry

2. Processing Steps

The submitting author can track the processing stage and the date of the last changes of their manuscript online. These stages are:

Unassigned - no editor was assigned yet
In review - an editor is assigned and carries out the initial editorial review, followed by invitation of external reviewers, then waiting for reviews to arrive, decision making on the manuscript, and finally awaiting a revised version from the authors
Copyediting – the accepted manuscript is checked for adherence to the journal style (formatting of references, …), some manuscripts may be sent to an external copyediting service for correction of grammar and spelling.
In production - payment of the publication fee is underway, typesetting, proofreading, finalizing the PDF, registration of the DOI, online publication
Archived - the manuscript is either rejected or published and no longer in progress

3. Review

All submitted manuscripts are initially evaluated by an editor. This includes a short review of the topic, the experimental setup and the language. If the manuscript passes the initial evaluation, it will be sent to peer-reviewers, whose identities will remain anonymous to the authors. The final decision is made by the responsible editor-in-chief or section editor based on the reviews and his/her own opinion of the manuscript. The reviewers' comments will be provided to the author along with the editorial decision.

4. Revisions

Revisions should be completed within six weeks if the editor decides that a minor revision of a manuscript is required. After this period, the author will be reminded once before the original submission will be declined and archived. If a major revision is required and additional experiments and thus more time are needed, please inform the responsible editor ahead of time.

5. Production and publication

After copyediting, the author will receive detailed instructions where to request the official invoice and how to process the payment of the article processing charge. After the amount is credited to the journal’s account, the typesetting begins.

The author will be asked  to proofread the galley. Corrected proofs must be returned to the layout editor within 5 business days of receipt. The publisher will do everything possible to ensure prompt publication. Therefore, it is important that the manuscript and figures comply with the journal's guidelines for formatting and style.

The author will be informed when the final article is published online.