Submitting your materials

Submission of manuscripts

Epidemiology and Infection only accepts electronic submission of manuscripts, allowing authors to benefit from faster review and earlier, online publication. Authors should submit their manuscripts online to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hyg.

The preferred file format for uploading your submission is as a Word document. LaTeX files (.tex) may only be submitted where a paper contains significant mathematical content. LaTeX files should be accompanied by any files referenced by the .tex file (such as image files and bibliographic files). Please do not try to upload PDF files of your text. The system will automatically convert your files to a PDF. All files should be named in a logical way (e.g. [firstauthorsurname]Fig1.tif).

Authors who are unable to submit online should contact the Editorial Office (epidemiologyandinfection@cambridge.org) for assistance. For the purposes of reviewing, high-resolution graphics for figures are not necessary; authors may submit low-resolution versions of figures, but you should ensure that they are of sufficient quality for viewing on-screen. On submission of your revised manuscript, high-resolution versions saved in the specified formats should be uploaded. Full instructions and a Help function are available on the site.

During the submission process, you may specify preferred or non-preferred reviewers. You may propose preferred reviewers who are especially qualified to referee the work, who are not close colleagues and who would not have a conflict of interest. If you suggest more than one preferred reviewer, the suggested reviewers must have an international geographical spread. If you would prefer that particular reviewers do not evaluate a paper, you may indicate them as non-preferred reviewers and this will be treated confidentially. Suggestions regarding reviewers will be considered by the Associate Editors and taken into account; it is however the decision of the Editors whether or not to use them.

Covering letter: Manuscripts must be accompanied by a covering letter. This must include (a) information on prior or duplicate publication or submission elsewhere of any part of the work; (b) a statement of financial or other relationships that might lead to a conflict of interests; (c) a statement that the manuscript has been read and approved by all authors; (d) the name and address (including email address) of the corresponding author, who is responsible for communicating with the other authors about revisions and final approval of the proofs. It is important to include a short summary of why the paper is thought to be important and original, and relevant to Epidemiology and Infection.

Data Availability Statements

Epidemiology & Infection supports the idea that research articles should contain sufficient information to allow others to understand, verify and replicate the findings. We therefore believe that apart from in exceptional cases, authors should make evidence and resources that underpin published findings, such as data, code, and other materials, available to readers without undue barriers to access.

To comply with Epidemiology & Infection's policy, you must make your data publically available (apart from in exceptional circumstances such as those listed on the following page), and include a Data Availability Statement in your manuscript, briefly describing how readers may access the resources that support your findings. If these resources are under embargo, or cannot be publicly released for legal, ethical, commercial or other reasons, the Data Availability Statement should make this clear with a brief explanation. Data Availability Statements are brief statements telling readers how they can access data and other materials that would be necessary to replicate the findings of an article, in the interests of research transparency. A Data Availability Statement could simply state that readers can contact the authors if they want access to such materials. Or it could state that the materials are available in an open public repository, with links to the repository. If the materials have been given to us to publish as Supplementary Materials, the Data Availability Statement can state that all materials needed to replicate the findings of the article are available as Supplementary Materials. Wherever an author has included a statement about access to materials necessary to replicate their findings, this should be captured and tagged as a Data Availability Statement.

More information can be found at the following links:

ORCID

We require all corresponding authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:

Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.

See our ORCID FAQs for more information.

If you don’t already have an iD, you will need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to this journal. You can register for one directly from your user account on ScholarOne, or alternatively via https://ORCID.org/register.

If you already have an iD, please use this when submitting your manuscript, either by linking it to your ScholarOne account, or by supplying it during submission using the "Associate your existing ORCID iD" button.

ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.

Copyright

The policy of Epidemiology & Infection is that authors (or in some cases their employers) retain copyright and grant [journal owner] a non-exclusive licence to publish their work. Authors must complete and return an author publishing agreement form as soon as their article has been accepted for publication; the journal is unable to publish the article without this. Please download the appropriate publishing agreement here.

The form also sets out the Creative Commons licence under which the article is made available to end users: a fundamental principle of open access is that content should not simply be accessible but should also be freely re-usable. Articles will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) by default. This means that the article is freely available to read, copy and redistribute, and can also be adapted (users can “remix, transform, and build upon” the work) for any commercial or non-commercial purpose, as long as proper attribution is given. Authors can, in the publishing agreement form, choose a different kind of Creative Commons license (including those prohibiting non-commercial and derivative use) if they prefer.

Licence to publish

Before Cambridge can publish your manuscript, we need a signed licence to publish agreement. Under the agreement, certain rights are granted to the journal owner which allow publication of the article. The original ownership of the copyright in the article remains unchanged. For full details see the publishing agreement page.

Peer Review

Cambridge University Press is committed to peer-review integrity and upholding the highest standards of review. Once your paper has been assessed for suitability by the Editor-in-Chief, it will then be single blind peer reviewed by independent, anonymous expert referees. If you’d like to learn more about reviewing papers, here are some introductory resources for peer reviewers on Cambridge Core.

Digital Preservation Policy

Cambridge University Press publications are deposited in the following digital archives to guarantee long-term digital preservation:

CLOCKSS (journals)
Portico (journals and books)

Indexing

All articles published in Epidemiology & Infection are deposited in PubMed Central automatically on publication. See this page for a full list of where articles in Epidemiology & Infection are indexed.