Editorial Policies

of Lignocellulose Journal

The editors of Lignocellulose are committed to providing a high quality scientific journal that promotes exchange and validation of ideas, leading to progress in fields related to use of materials, chemicals, and energy derived from lignocellulosic sources. Scientific research articles and scholarly reviews are subjected to a conventional peer-review process, using an online, single-blind procedure. The journal also encourages contribution of editorial opinion pieces, which may be selected, on a limited basis, according to the Editors' discretion. The general policies of Lignocellulose are as follows:

• Submitted articles must focus on the science and technology of using materials, chemicals, or energy derived from predominantly lignocellulosic sources, such as wood, agricultural residues, paper, and related byproducts.
• Subjects that will be considered outside of the scope of Lignocellulose include, but are not limited to food technology, waste treatment, pharmaceuticals, genetics, and work involving biomaterials from sources that contain relatively little cellulose or lignin.
• Examples of subjects that are within the scope of the journal include, but are not limited to, advances in fiber and other natural product uses for papermaking, production of fuels from agricultural residues and woody biomass, natural and synthetic composites involving lignocellulosic biomaterials, modifications of such biomaterials to improve their performance in different applications, replacement of petroleum-based materials with such biomaterials, production of biofuels from such biomaterials, synthetic chemicals derived from lignocellulosic sources, and bio-based textiles in new applications such as medicine.
• Articles to be included in the journal must describe significant advances or significantly improved explanations and overviews (as in the case of review articles) of subjects within the scope of the journal. In addition to originality, the work must be understandable to a general audience of post secondary-educated people having backgrounds such as chemistry, chemical engineering, biomaterials, and materials science. However, we encourage all authors to provide fundamental explanations of non-basic concepts to respect the diverse backgrounds of people who may not be conversant in the field.
• English will be used as the standard language of articles in Lignocellulose. Prospective authors are urged to consistently adhere to a standard form of English, following U.S. English, British, or Australian conventions. All scientific measurements should also conform to SI standards, e.g ., meters, kilograms, and liters. There will be no set standard method of describing measurement suffixes outside of the SI frame, e.g ., volume may be expressed in liters, deciliters, cm 3 , cc, etc ., whatever unit is consistent with the English of the user.
• Prospective authors are required to faithfully follow the format provided in the appropriate article template selected from those provided in the Author Instructions section. In essence, the authors format their articles such that they are essentially ready to upload, with the exception of page numbers.
• Authors are asked, as far as they are able, to make clear differentiations in their writing between (a) facts learned from sources that they identify (followed by a citation), (b) facts that are presumed to be common knowledge (usually expressed in the present tense and requiring no citation), (c) observations made by the authors as part of the described work (usually express in the past tense), and (d) hypotheses and conjectures (often preceded by words such as "it is proposed that," or "possibly."
• Submission of articles advancing unconventional hypotheses or frameworks of thought is expressedly welcome, though this is not a guarantee of acceptance for publication. The fact that experimental evidence or theoretical work remains incomplete, inconclusive, or conflicted will not necessarily count against the publication of a submitted article. On the other hand, it is required in such cases that there be significant new evidence or new thinking that helps to support the unconventional views advanced in the article. Articles submitted as rebuttals will be treated independently by the editors, not necessarily on the basis of a presumed "equal time" criterion.
• Commercialism will not be permitted in items submitted to Lignocellulose. For instance, brand names of materials used in an investigation are to appear only once in an article, in the section titled "Experimental." The research materials or equipment must be described in chemical and physical terms. Work that merely shows one product working better than another product will not be considered for publication.
• Authors have the responsibility to make sure that artwork, figures, and the like reproduced from other sources are either free of copyright issues or that the authors have obtained specific, written permission to re-use these items in the submitted work.
• Authors retain rights to their material, which, upon acceptance by the journal, is uploaded and made public on the Internet. The journal retains no copyright. Readers have a right to produce copies of abstracts (html format) and whole articles (PDF files) and to use these unmodified items with proper attribution, and in the spirit of fair use.
• By submitting an article to Lignocellulose, an author grants the journal the right to publish the contents as a PDF file on the Internet, dependent on the results of the review process and subsequent judgment of an editor. The right to publish the article is an exclusive right held by Lignocellulose until the article is either rejected or published and the article cannot be submitted to another journal during our review process.  In cases where the journal declines to publish and so informs the author(s), this right of publication is ceded back to the author(s).
• The peer-review process for research articles and scholarly reviews is carried out in an automated fashion. Each article is sent to be judged by three reviewers working independently, without knowledge of each others' identity. The reviewers are selected by the co-editors or by their subject-editor designees.
• The editors reserve the right to make a final judgement on whether or not to approve an article for inclusion in Lignocellulose. This decision wil