Journal of Plant Biotechnology (JPB) is an international open access journal published four issues of a yearly volume on in realtime by The Korean Society for Plant Biotechnology (KSPB) founded in 1973. JPB publishes original, peer-reviewed articles dealing with advanced scientific aspects of plant biotechnology, which includes molecular biology, genetics, genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. JPB does not exclude studies on lower plants including algae and cyanobacteria if studies are carried out within the aspects described above.

Manuscripts should be submitted to the on-line submission system at http://www.kspbtjpb.org/ following all screen prompts. Technical difficulties can be resolved by contacting to The Korean Society for Plant Biotechnology. The Korean Society for Plant Biotechnology (Phone: +82-42-862-0986, E-mail: kspbt@kspbt.or.kr, Address: The Korean Society for Plant Biotechnology, 2017 Hongin Tower Officetel, 28 daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 305-710, Republic of KOREA.

Manuscripts are to be submitted in their final form and must be written in English or Korean. Authors are urged to aim for clarity, brevity, and accuracy of information and language. Authors whose first language is not English should have their manuscripts checked for linguistic accuracy by a fluent English speaker or by an English editing company. A properly completed "Copyright Transfer Agreement" should also be supplied before the manuscript is published. The corresponding author is asked to sign it on behalf of all authors.

Editorial policy

Manuscripts submitted for publication should contain no materials that violate any copyright. Submission of a manuscript to JPB involves the tacit assurance that no similar paper has been or will be submitted for publication in other journals.

It is the responsibility of the authors, not the JPB, to determine whether disclosure of their material requires the prior consent of other parties and to obtain that consent. Statements and opinions given in works published by JPB are the expressions of the authors. Responsibility for the contents of published papers rests upon the authors, not the JPB.

The term of the Editor-in-Chief shall be two years and can be extended. The term of office for the Editors shall be two years and renewable.

Publication type

JPB accepts the following types of manuscripts: original research articles, review articles, and short communications.

An original research article represents an original, important contribution to plant biotechnology. The manuscript should clearly state the scope and purpose of the research work. The information presented must be objective and well organized, and the conclusions should be adequately supported. Review articles should be a critical evaluation of the existing state of knowledge on a particular aspect of plant biotechnology. Simple literature surveys will not be accepted for publication. Short communications are for concise, but independent reports representing a significant contribution to plant biotechnology. Short communication is not intended to publish preliminary results. Only if these results are of exceptional interest and are particularly topical and relevant will they be considered for publication.

Page proofs

The page proof stage is not a time for extensive corrections, additions, or deletions. It is advised that editing be limited to the correction of typographical errors, incorrect data, and grammatical errors, and for updating information on references that had been in press. The corrections to page proofs should be sent immediately by e-mail or a fast mail service, preferably within 2 business days.

Page charges

Page charge of a paper(Review) that will be published in this journal will be 350,000 won up to 6 pages, 10,000 won per additional page, and Research Articles will be 350,000 won up to 6 pages, 10,000 won per additional page. The corresponding author will be provided with a PDF file of the article via e-mail.

Research ethics

If the work involves experimentation on living animals, the authors must provide evidence that it was performed in accordance with ethical guidelines. In the case of work involving human beings, the procedures should be in accordance with the ethical standards of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the author's institution and with the 2000 revision of the Helsinki Declaration of 1975. For issues on research and publication ethics not stated in this guide, the "Responsible authorship quick guide (http://ori.hhs.gov/)" or "International Standards for Authors (http://www.publicationethics.org/)" should be consulted and followed.

Process for managing research and publication misconduct

When the journal faces suspected cases of research and publication misconduct such as redundant (duplicate) publication, plagiarism, fraudulent or fabricated data, changes in authorship, an undisclosed conflict of interest, ethical problems with a submitted manuscript, a reviewer who has appropriated an author's idea or data, complaints against editors, and soon, the resolution process will follow the flowchart provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). The discussion and decision on the suspected cases are carried out by the Editorial Board.

Authorship

Manuscript authorship should be restricted to those who meet any of the following conditions: 1) substantial contribution to the conception and design of the study; 2) acquisition, interpretation, and analysis of data; 3) drafting the article or revising it critically for the important intellectual content. In addition, all listed authors must approve the final version of the manuscript to be published.

Conflict of interest

All authors are asked to inform the editor-in-chief of the any actual or potential conflict of interest possibly influencing their interpretation of the data. Such conflicts may include but are not limited to financial support or personal relationships with other people or organizations, political pressure from interest groups, or academic problems.

Copyright policy

All copyright and other intellectual property rights related to the content of the journal are licensed to JPB. Hence, a completed "Copyright Transfer Agreement" form should accompany any original material when it is first submitted to JPB. Once a manuscript is accepted, JPB asserts it's copyright and applies it to an open access policy. Articles may be reproduced and distributed only for noncommercial purposes, as detailed in the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. In other words, through the Creative Commons license, JPB allows others to reproduce and distribute the works it publishes, as long as the authors are properly attributed and the content is not plagiarized, misrepresented, or used for commercial purposes. Duplicate publications should not be represented as original publications; rather, JPB should be cited as the original site of publication. Apart from these misuses, anyone is free to read, download, copy, share, store, print, search, link, and crawl the full- text of the work.

Manuscript format

The manuscript should be typed, double spaced, on 210 mm by 280 mm (A4 size) paper. A manuscript produced by MS word is acceptable. Margins on top, bottom, and sides should be at least 2.5 cm.

Organization

The manuscript should be organized in the following sequence.

• Title and Authorship [author's name(s) and address(es)]
• Abstract and Keywords
• Introduction
• Materials and methods
• Results
• Discussion
• Acknowledgement (optional)
• References
• Tables and figures
• Appendix or Nomenclature (optional)

Title and Authorship: Title should not exceed 12 words and should never contain abbreviations or chemical formulas. Common names of crops are recommended to be used in titles. A series of articles on the same subject are prohibited. Other information, such as grant funding, may be included in the acknowledgement part. The corresponding author should be indicated by "*".
The E-mail address of the corresponding author is requested. The title page should also give a short title of up to 50 characters for heading successive pages.

Abstract: Abstract is the second manuscript page and should not exceed 250 words. It should not include bibliographic, figure, or table references. Equations, formulas, obscure abbreviations, and acronyms also are inappropriate. The abstract should be followed by key words indicating the contents of the research paper.

Introduction: Introduciton should be brief and clearly state the aim of study. The literature review should be limited to information that is pertinent to the experiment.

Materials and methods: Materials and methods should include enough detail so that a competent scientist can repeat the experiments. Methods should be cited by a reference if well known methods were used.

References: If reference is made in the text listed in References, refer to them by the author(s) family name and the year published according to the Harvard system. For those publications written by three or more authors, the name of the senior author followed by et al. should be used.
All literature cited should be listed in alphabetical order, by the author's family name. For the same author, or for the same set of authors, literature cited should be arranged chronologically. If there is more than one publication in the same year for the same author(s), the letter a, b, etc. should be added to the year. Please note the following examples, and refer details to the literature citation in the current issue of the JPB.

• Hartmann HT, Kester DE, Davies Jr. FT, Geneve RL (1997) Plant propagation: Principles and practices. 6th ed. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.
• Lee KR, Choi YJ, Kim SH, Roh KH, Kim JB, Kim HU (2011) Current biotechnology for the increase of vegetable oil yield in transgenic plants. J Plant Biotechnol 38:241–250
• Karukstis KK (1991) Chlorophyll fluorescence as a physiological probe of the photosynthetic apparatus, p. 769-795. In: H. Sheer (ed.). Chlorophylls. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL.
• Murata K, Nakamura C, Fujiwara M, Mori N, Kaneda C (1997) RFLP mapping of brown planthopper resistance gene in rice. Proc. of the 8th SABRAO Genetal Congress and the Annual Meeting of the Korean Breeding Society. Seoul, Korea. pp.193-194.

Tables and figures: Tables and figures should be selfexplanatory. Tables and figures must be set out on separate sheets in numerical order. The table should be divided between the table head (for basic information) and notes (for significance, notation and definition, or procedure). Figures must be provided separately from the text. Use the shoulder letters z), y), x), w), v), u), t), s), r).... The the shoulder letters or numbers should be cited left to right and top to bottom in the table. The *, **, and *** are always used in this order to show statistical significance at the 0.05, 0.01, and 0.001 probability levels, respectively, and cannot be used for any other footnote. Ideally, use tables and figures that can be reduced to one column (8 cm) or two columns width (17 cm).

Units of Measurement: All measurements should be in metric units.

Nomenclature: Common name, Latin binomial or trinomial (in italics), and the authority for all plants, insects, and pathogens should be given at first mention in the abstract or text. Crop cultivars must be identified by single quotation marks when first in the abstract or text unless cultivar status is already clear (e.g., identified by the word cultivar or the abbreviation cv).