Instructions to authors

Acta Pharmaceutica (AP) publishes original research papers, short communications, preliminary communications and review articles in the pharmaceutical and related sciences. The journal also carries book reviews and obituaries. The last issue within each volume (No. 4) gives acknowledgements to referees and tables of contents throughout the volume as well as instructions to authors. Publishing frequency of AP is four times a year (volume). http://public.carnet.hr/acphee/ http://hrcak.srce.hr/index.php?show=casopis&id_casopis=23 http://www.versita.com/science/medicine/apharma/ AP is an international, multidisciplinary journal devoted to pharmaceutical and allied sciences and contains articles predominantly on core biomedical and health subjects. The aim of AP is to increase the impact of pharmaceutical research in academia, industry and laboratories. With strong emphasis on quality and originality, AP publishes reports from the discovery of a drug up to clinical practice. Topics covered are: analytics, biochemistry, biopharmaceutics, biotechnology, cell biology, cell cultures, clinical pharmacy, drug design, drug delivery, drug disposition, drug stability, gene technology, medicine (including diagnostics and therapy), medicinal chemistry, metabolism, molecular modeling, pharmacology (clinical and animal), peptide and protein chemistry, pharmacognosy, pharmacoepidemiology, pharmacoeconomics, pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics, protein design, radiopharmaceuticals, and toxicology. Because of the high cost of preparing and publishing articles in Acta Pharmaceutica payment of publication fee is mandatory for all articles submitted to AP office after August 1, 2012. Current charge is 350 € per manuscript (excl. VAT). For non-native English speaking authors, additional 100 € will be charged for English revision/editing costs. Authors will receive an invoice right after acceptance of their paper which will not be published before the fee has been paid. Prices are subject to change without notice. Payments should be made to the invoice of the Croatian Pharmaceutical Society, Masarykova 2, HR-10000 Zagreb, Croatia, through ZAGREBACKA BANKA ZAGREB, Savska 60, Zagreb, Croatia, Account No. 1500268102-840-3206386 SWIFT ZABA HR 2X IBAN HR8923600001101367614 (for payments in €). The invoice will be sent to the corresponding author by air mail or e-mail. The title and the manuscript code must be stated on the invoice and the bank order. The copy of the bank draft should be sent by fax (fax No.: +385 1 48 72 853), or by e-mail (hfd-fg-ap@zg.t-com.hr) as a scanned document, within 5 days of receipt of the invoice. Original research papers should contain unpublished results of original research, which must be presented in sufficient detail to ensure the reproducibility of the described experiments. Should not contain more than 30 literature citations and 8 (including all schemes, tables and figures) supplementary materials. Short communications provide reports on short, but completed, research or descriptions of original laboratory techniques. They should not be more than 2,000 words and contain no more than 4 figures and tables (in any combination) and 15 literature citations. Preliminary communications are brief scientific contributions whose character requires rapid publication without supplying the details necessary to reproduce the described experiments. The length is limited to 100 lines (including short summary) but no usual subdivisions are required. Maximum of 2 appendices (schemes, figures, tables) are allowed and up to 15 literature citations. Review articles are concise and critical surveys of novel accomplishments in the author's research field. They may also contain original theoretical considerations. The results and role of the author's research must be clearly distinguished from the results of the investigators referenced. As far as review articles are concerned Acta Pharmaceutica prefers critical reviews written by the authors already distinguished in the respective field. Otherwise, the review article should cover the topic of the utmost scientific interest. Only papers providing previously unpublished scientific information will be entered in the first three of the above categories. Authors should specify to which of the four categories the submitted material should be allocated, but the Editorial Board reserves the right to make the final decision. Authors of review articles are advised to consult the Editorial Board prior to submitting the article. SUBMITTING OF MANUSCRIPTS AND REVIEW PROCESS Manuscripts submitted to AP are only accepted on the understanding that they are subject to editorial review and review of at least two independent referees, that they have not been and will not be published whole or in a part in any other journal, and that recommendations to comply with ethical standards when performing clinical and other biological experiments have been adhered to. Reports of biological/clinical research carried out in human subjects must contain a statement indicating approval by the local ethics committee (giving its address) and compliance with the Helsinki Declaration and its revisions as well as an affirmation that written informed consent has been obtained from each patient. Manuscripts should be submitted as an e-mail attachment to the Editor-in-Chief at hfd-fg-ap@zg.t-com.hr or sluter@pharma.hr. A cover letter should be included stating the wish to publish in Acta Pharmaceutica and identifying the corresponding author, and including a statement indicating that all authors approve the submission of the manuscript to Acta Pharmaceutica. Novelty and significance of research should be shortly but clearly elaborated. The authors are encouraged to suggest three referees (providing all relevant information: full name and position, affiliation, postal and electronic mail addresses), but the Editional Board reserves the right to choose other referees, who will remain anonymous. Articles are considered for publication depending on their value and pharmaceutical relevance. Submission implies non-submission elsewhere and (if accepted) no publication elsewhere in the same form without consent. Each article accepted for publication is language edited. The editorial staff reserves the right to make editorial corrections of the manuscript and adjust it to the requirements of the journal. During the submittance phase or just before commencing the reviewing process of the manuscript authors should sign the new version of Authors' Agreement Form and return it to the Editor-in-Chief or co-Editor (by e-mail, fax or regular mail). Manuscripts will be assigned to an appropriate co-Editor by the Editor-in-Chief, for a preliminary review. After passing a preliminary review the manuscript is subject to full reviewing process. The submitting author will receive acknowledgement of receipt of the manuscript from the Editor in the phase of initiating the reviewing process. In case of contradicting reviews of 2 referees, the manuscript will be sent to a third one and/or subjected to editorial evaluation. An author receiving reviews and editorial recommendations for revision of a manuscript has three months to complete the revision and return the manuscript to the co-Editor or Editor-in-Chief. Unless authors have permission from the Editor for a brief delay, manuscript requiring more than three months for revision should be submitted as a new manuscript. CONTENT AND STRUCTURE OF THE MANUSCRIPTS The manuscripts should be submitted in grammatically and stylistically correct English and written in the concisest form possible, which still ensures clarity of presentation. The form and illustrations of the manuscripts should comply with the papers recently published in the AP. Manuscripts must be typewritten (font size 12 or 10 pt), double-spaced with wide margins. Each page must be numbered and line numbering should be used throughout the whole manuscript. Spelling out in full an abbreviation/acronym at its first use (with the abbreviation/acronym following in parentheses) should be done. Text files can be in MS Word, or most common word processing programs. Included should be also the files containing computer generated graphics, artwork, bitmaps, and/or scanned images in one of the following formats: CDR, EPS, TIF, PCX and JPG. For large image files, use one of the file compressing programs (ZIP, ARJ, RAR). Appendices should be separated from the body text. According to the methods of modern information science, the title of submitted paper should be
short and informative; double titles should be avoided. The title should be followed by the full
names of all authors, and these by the title(s) and addresses of the institution(s).
Corresponding author should be indicated in the footnote with the valid e-mail address. An
abstract (short summary) of 150 words or less and key words (up to 6) should be supplied.
The abstract should be written in the third person. Its main purpose is to aid the abstracting
journals to copy it literally. The abstract should contain solely the essential results and
conclusions of the presented work. Textual formulations from the title should not be repeated
and the findings rather than the aim of the work should be described. It must be only one
paragraph.
Manuscripts should be divided into chapters. The aim of the work should be explained in the
introductory part. The work that directly preceded the submitted information should be
described in the shortest form possible. Introduction should be written in the form of a report
and extensive literature reviews (except for review articles) will not be accepted. Since the
articles are intended for experts in their respective fields, no general information should be
given.
Experimental data should be presented logically in a straightforward and clear fashion. Well
known methods and techniques should not be described in detail. They should be designated
only by the names of their authors and/or literature references. Standard statistical methods
should be applied, where necessary, to present the results. SI units should be used
throughout.
Results and discussion should be combined in one section, and followed by short
conclusions which do not repeat what is said in R&D section but bring very shortly the most
important achievements of the current work and prospectives for the future work.
Authors bear sole responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of references. DOI
(Digital Object Identifier) should be appended to each reference possible.
The literature citations should be selective rather than extensive. An exception to this rule are the review articles. The references should be listed on a separate sheet numbered by Arabic numerals according to the sequence in which they appear (in parentheses) in the text. If a reference is cited twice or more times, the same number should be used throughout. References such as »personal communication« or »unpublished results« are not allowed; for papers already accepted for publication it should stay »in press« with the stated name of the journal and DOI. References from journals should include the initials of the first (and middle) name, last name of all authors, the international abbreviation of the journal (according to the Chemical Abstracts), volume, year of publication (in parentheses), and full pages. References from books should contain the initials of the first (and middle) name, last name of the author(s), the title of the book, the publisher city, year of publishing and full pages. The punctuation in the references should comply with the examples given below. S. K. Mishra and K. Pathak, Formulation and evaluation of oil entrapped gastroretentive
floating gel beads of loratadine, Acta Pharm. 58 (2008) 187−197; DOI 10.2478/v10007-008-
0001-8.
E. Mutschler and H. Derendorf, Drug Actions, Basic Principles and Therapeutic Aspects, Medpharm Scientific Publishers, Stuttgart 1995, pp. 16–26., or J. Feely, T. Pringle and D. MacLean, Calcium Channel Blockers, in New Drugs (Ed. J. Feely), 3rd ed., BMJ Publishing Group, London 1994, pp. 82–93. H. P. Wang, O. Lee and C. T. Fan, Preparation of Gemfibrozil Analogs as Anticholenergenic
Compounds, U.S. Pat. 5,530,145, 25 Jun 1996; ref. Chem. Abstr. 125 (1996) 142277u.
Example for citing material on the Internet: International Conference on Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use, ICH Harmonised Tripartite Guideline, Validation of Analytical Procedures: Text and Methodology Q2(R1), Current Step 4 version, November 2005; http://www.ich.org/fileadmin/Public_Web_Site/ICH_Products/Guidelines/Quality/Q2_R1/Step4/Q2_R1__Guideline.pdf; access date June 22, 2012 Tables and figures should be designed in a fashion that enables understanding without
referring to the text. Presentation of the same results in figures and tables will not be accepted.
Submitting artwork in appropriate formats helps to ensure that the highest possible quality of reproduction can be achieved in both the online and print versions of your article. The checklist below also gives a quick guide to submitting publication-quality electronic artwork: Save line art such as charts, graphs and illustrations in EPS or PDF format. Most programs have a ‘Save as.’ or ‘Export.’ feature to allow you to do this. Save photographic images in TIFF format. These should be at a resolution of at least 300 dpi at final size. Save figures containing a combination of photographic images and text (e.g., annotated photographic images with text labels) as EPS or PDF. Any photographic images embedded within these should be at least 300 dpi. If the file size of the generated images is very large then try saving them in a .ZIP archive (or other compressed format such as .RAR) to reduce the file size. Use standard fonts that are legible and of an appropriate size. We recommend the following fonts: Times, Times New Roman, Arial and Helvetica. Make sure that any labelling is legible against the background, and that lines are of a suitable thickness. Image resolution must be at least 300 dpi at final printed image size. If the final printed image size is unknown, size the image at a larger than final print size, maintaining at least 300 dpi resolution, and we will downsample the image to fit the final print dimensions. Spaces for illustrations are to be marked in the text while the pertaining legends should be added on a separate sheet. The illustrations should be appended separately. All illustrations, except for formulas and schemes, should be referred to as figures (e.g., Fig. 1). No color graphics are provided. The tables should be clear, descriptive, on separate sheets, and should be numbered using Roman numerals. They should be provided with overhead titles. Manuscripts that do not comply with the above submission guidelines will be returned to the author for required changes; the editors also reserve the right to reject incomplete submissions. Manuscripts returned to the authors for changes and not re-submitted within a period of one month will be considered as new articles as per the date of the last receipt. Only after compliance is established, the submission will be processed for reviewing. Submitting manuscripts in the correct format will expedite the review process and prevent undue delay in publication. Authors can facilitate review and processing of their manuscripts by reading this guide carefully before submitting their papers. Non-adherence to the guidelines slows down or jeopardizes the publishing process.

Source: http://hrcak.srce.hr/upute/guide_authors_Acta_pharmaceutica.pdf