PJA Series B Instructions to Authors

Manuscripts for publication in the Proceedings of the Japan Academy (PJA), Series B should be prepared and submitted according to the following instructions.

General Information

1. Aims and scope: The Proceedings of the Japan Academy, Series B was founded in 1912 as the Proceedings of the Imperial Academy by the then Imperial Academy of Japan (now the Japan Academy). The Journal was split to the Proceedings of the Japan Academy, Series A and Series B in 1977. PJA Series B publishes reviews and original articles in broad fields of natural sciences, such as physics, chemistry, astronomy, earth sciences, biology, engineering, agricultural sciences, medicine and pharmacy.^*) Manuscripts are evaluated at least by two reviewers. Ten issues are published per year. The entire content is freely available online through J-STAGE (https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/browse/pjab).
^*) For papers in mathematics, please refer to the Notice to Authors of the PJA Series A.
2. Categories: PJA Series B publishes articles in the following categories.
a) Review: Papers which review the literature and provide summary views of particular subjects or fields. They can be objective and balanced overviews or can also be summaries of the authors’ own accomplishments in the style of personal reminiscences. In the former case, the authors of reviews are expected to have been active contributors themselves to the subjects of the reviews. In the latter case, the scientific background surrounding the authors’ work should be appropriately and fairly presented so as to place the authors’ work into proper perspective.
b) Original article: Papers that describe hitherto unpublished original works.
c) Others: From time to time the PJA Series B publishes a limited number of short commentaries or essay-style articles on subjects deemed appropriate and timely by the Editorial Board. In principle, these manuscripts will be by solicitation from the Editorial Board.
3. Procedures: Anyone can submit manuscripts for consideration for publication in the PJA Series B. Authors are free to consult any members of the Academy during preparation of their manuscripts.

All submitted manuscripts undergo the following editorial procedures:
a) Each submitted manuscript is assigned to a handling editor, who is a member of the Japan Academy, according to the area of his expertise. Assignment of the handling editor is strictly a prerogative of the Editorial Board. Manuscript is evaluated by at least two referees. Editor-in-Chief and the handling editor make the final decision regarding acceptance or rejection after taking into consideration the opinions of the referees.
b) The handling editor communicates the accepted manuscript at a monthly meeting of the Academy. When a member of the Academy is an author, he/she communicates the manuscript himself instead of the handling editor.
4. Submission of manuscripts: a) Submission of manuscripts is welcome from any parts of the world. Manuscripts must be prepared in accordance with the section, “Preparation of Manuscript” below.
b) A cover letter should accompany the manuscript attesting that the manuscript satisfies the ethical considerations for scholarly publications (see Section 6. Ethical considerations, below). The author is encouraged to provide a list of 3~5 names, affiliations and e-mail addresses of individuals who are, in the author’s judgment, knowledgeable, impartial, and fair and are thus appropriate as reviewers for the manuscript. The author can also provide a list of individuals whom the author would like to exclude from the evaluation process. In this case, the reason for the request for exclusion should be stated. It should be noted, however, that the final decision on the selection of reviewers is strictly the prerogative of the Editorial Board.
c) The manuscript and the cover letter should be submitted through the online system (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/pjab). Also, they can be submitted as electronic files attached to e-mail messages, or as hard copies through the conventional postal mail service to the address below. In these cases, they will be submitted in online system by the office in place of the authors. In principle, all copies of the manuscripts, including figures and tables, will not be returned to the author.
d) All correspondence should be sent to the following addresses:

Editorial Office of the Proceedings of the Japan Academy, Series B
c/o The Japan Academy, 7-32, Ueno Park, Taito-ku, Tokyo 110-0007, Japan
Tel: +81-3-3822-2101
Fax: +81-3-3822-2105
e-mail: proc-b @ mext.go.jp
5. Reprints: Authors can receive up to 50 copies of the reprints of each published paper free of charge. Additional reprints are available at the authors’ expense. The reprint order form will be available at the stage of proof reading. Orders are accepted only in the Japanese currency (yen).
6. Ethical considerations: Redundant publication or duplicate submission is not allowed. All authors must have read the final manuscript and have agreed on its submission to the PJA Series B. When reporting experiments on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2013 (https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki-ethical-principles-for-medical-research-involving-human-subjects/). When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate that the institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed. These points should be indicated, when applicable, in the cover letter.
7. Charges: PJA Series B does not require any processing or publishing charge except the color charge (see Section 19d) and the charge for additional reprints (see Section 5). Publication costs for the PJA Series B are covered by the annual budget of the Japan Academy.
8. Copyright and Open Access: All articles are published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-4.0 International (CC BY-NC) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) in principle. This license allows users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as an attribution is given to the author. Authors can freely use their article, for example, using figures for their future works, depositing in the repository of their institution or preprint servers. Then the source (e.g. Proc. Jpn. Acad., Ser. B 80, 1-6) should be indicated. Authors hold the copyright and grant the Japan Academy an exclusive license to publish, including depositing articles in online services such as the J-STAGE or the PubMed Central.
9. License to Publish: Authors are required to sign the License to Publish to permit the Japan Academy to publish their work in the PJA Series B under a Creative Commons license and other conditions. The License document will be sent after acceptance of the manuscript.
10. Preprint: The PJA Series B encourages authors to deposit early versions of articles in appropriate repositories or preprint servers. Preprints are not considered publications, but all other prior/redundant publications are forbidden. Please indicate any use of preprint servers in the cover letter and include the link to the preprint. When the paper is published, authors should add a link from the preprint to the published article via the Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
11. Advance online publication: Accepted manuscripts are basically published in about two months, but the first proof can be released online on J-STAGE if the author hopes.

Preparation of Manuscript

12. Length: Manuscripts should be written clearly and concisely without redundancy or excessive details. The general guideline is 20 printed pages or less for a review and 10 printed pages or less for an original article. Shorter manuscripts are also welcome.
13. Format of the manuscript: Manuscript should be typewritten on the A4 size paper in the single column format. The text should be prepared using Microsoft Word or TeX (LaTeX). Templates for the manuscript can be downloaded from the website (https://www.japan-acad.go.jp/en/publishing/pja_b/authors.html). The use of the templates is optional.
14. Title page: The title page should carry the following contents. There is no need to repeat the same information on the second page.
a) The category (i.e. Review, Original article)
b) Title
c) Full names of all authors
d) Affiliations, cities and countries of all authors (ORCID of all authors (if the authors have) are requested by the Editorial Office when the manuscript is accepted for publication.)
e) Running title (no more than 70 characters including spaces; it will be at the top of each odd-numbered printed page)
f) Corresponding author’s name and the complete address, and when available, e-mail address.
g) Abstract (no more than 160 words; It must be written in one paragraph). The author should keep it in mind that the readers of this journal are spread across a wide range of natural science branches. The abstract should be understandable by readers who are not specialists in the field covered by the manuscript.
h) Keywords (up to 6; each keyword should be divided by commas)
i) Non-standard abbreviation list (See Section 17.)
j) The total word count and the word count of the abstract should be provided if the software used to prepare the manuscript allows.
15. Manuscript organization: Sections in the manuscript should have bold face headings. The text should start on a new line after the section heading. For subsections and sub-subsections, use bold and italic fonts respectively. The text should continue on the same line after headings in subsections and sub-subsections. Refer to a recent issue of the journal. The paper should be clearly written for diverse readers in different disciplines.The manuscript should be written in the following order:
a) Introduction
b) Main Text
c) Acknowledgement(s)
d) References
e) Figure legends
f) Tables
g) Figures
16. Equations: Equations should be numbered sequentially with Arabic numerals within parentheses (e.g. [1], [2]) on the right-hand side.
17. Units and abbreviations: The International System of Units (SI units) is recommended. If the author uses non-standard abbreviations, they should be defined at their first appearance by the full words and the abbreviations in parentheses. Thereafter use the abbreviation only. If there are many abbreviations, they may be listed in a footnote. In view of the wide coverage of this journal encompassing all branches of natural science, use of abbreviations should be limited to those instances where their use is essential. Common or even standard abbreviations in one discipline may be totally unintelligible in another discipline.
18. References: Only references that have been published or accepted for publication in the final form can be cited. Results that are still under consideration for publication can be mentioned only in the text as “personal communications”, “in preparation for publication”, or “submitted for publication” but should not be listed in the Reference list. Citation of publications that are not generally available to the public in libraries or online should be avoided unless essential. When such publications are cited, the author should be prepared to provide a copy when requested by readers. In principle, the Uniform Resource Locators (URL, “web address”) should not be listed in the Reference List but should only be cited within the text, because they lack archival permanency. Citation of articles in preprint servers with URLs are allowed.; Citation in the text; a) References should be cited in the text in the order of citations in Arabic numerals in superscript, each followed by a closing parenthesis and a comma between the citation numbers. Consecutive references can be connected by a hyphen (e.g. ^{1)-3), 5)}) .; List of references; a) All references cited in the text with reference numbers should be listed under the heading, References. In principle, only one reference should be listed under a single reference number. When multiple chapters are cited from a single book, each chapter should be treated as a separate citation and should be listed under its own reference number. Except for entire book citations, the article/chapter titles and both the first and the last page numbers are required.; b) For the first submission of the manuscript, all authors should be listed in the List of References regardless of the total number of authors. This is necessary for fair editorial evaluation of the manuscript. However, for revisions or final submissions, only the first 6 authors should be listed followed by et al. when the number of authors exceeds six.; c) References in journals should be listed according to the following example.; Author name: last name first with only the first character capitalized followed by a comma and a space, initials in capital letters followed by a period, a comma and a space, subsequent authors in the same format and the last author name preceded by “and”. Publication year in parentheses. Title of the article. Abbreviated journal name followed by a space. Volume number in bold face followed by a comma and a space, first and the last page numbers. A period at the end. When the reference has been accepted for publication but not yet appeared, it should be indicated by “in press”.; d) Chapters in multi-authored books should be listed according to the following example.; Author name: same format as for journal articles. Publication year in parentheses. Title of the chapter. Title of the book preceded by In. Name(s) of the editors preceded by ed(s), all in parentheses. Name of the publisher and its location. First and last page numbers preceded by “pp.”.; e) An entire book should be listed according to the following example.; Author name: same format as for journal articles. Publication year in parentheses. Title of the book. Name of the publisher and its location.; f) For other types of references including those that are available only online, consult examples in recent issues of this journal or inquire the Editorial Office.
19. Figures: Figures should be clear enough to be used as camera-ready at the desired printed size. Individual figure must be on separate pages and follow references.

a) Letters and symbols in figures should be large enough to be clearly reproduced.

b) If submission at final size is not feasible, indicate its desired printed size (cm). Numbers, letters and symbols should be large enough so that they will be legible after reduction. If the size of the figure proposed by the author is considered unsuitable for publication, it may be adjusted appropriately at Editor’s discretion.

c) Each figure should indicate the first author’s name, title of the manuscript (abbreviated if necessary), figure number, and whether the figure should be printed in color or black and white.

d) Color figures are printed free of charge when they can be set within one printed page of the journal. Excessive color pages are printed at the expense of the author. The current charge for color figures beyond one printed page is ¥22,000 per page or a fraction thereof. (As of December 2022). There is no charge for color figures published online only. If the Editorial Committee consider appropriate, this journal may pay the additional costs. Please inquire Editorial Office for the details.

e) Figures must be numbered sequentially with Arabic numerals (e.g. Fig.1, Fig.2).

f) The first and the last printed pages should not carry any figures.

g) Don't use narrow hatch patterns because they tend to generate moiré patterns.

h) Figures must be saved with a resolution at 300 dpi or higher. Following formats can be accepted: PDF, TIFF, EPS, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel. If the authors would like to use other file formats, please contact the Editorial Office.
20. Tables: The table caption should be placed at the top of the table. Vertical lines should not be used and horizontal lines should be minimized. Tables should be numbered consecutively in the order of their appearance in Arabic numerals (e.g. Table 1, Table 2).
21. Supplementary materials: All the data necessary to support the conclusions should be included with the main body of the paper. Any additional data supporting the interpretations may be included in Supplementary materials. This material may include movies, tables, illustrations, texts, and so on. Supplementary materials will be made available free of charge on the J-STAGE. Each file should be no more than 50 MB in size. Supplementary materials cannot be added after acceptance.
22. Profile: For the review article, profiles of all authors or key author(s) are appended. They are requested by the Editorial Office when the manuscript is accepted for publication.

(Revised February, 2023)