VISION

Biofilm Perspectives will present summaries and critical reviews of biofilm science and engineering issues facing practitioners in the fields of healthcare, medicine, and industry.

AUDIENCE

The audience for BiofilmsOnline.com is intended to be broad. Perspectives should be written in such a way as to be understandable by someone with a basic background in science or engineering, but who is not necessarily a specialist in the field of biofilm research. Individual members of the target audience will include (but are not limited to) the following: industry, federal, and academic scientists; high school and undergraduate science educators; product development and design engineers; research and development managers; product sales and marketing professionals; and state and federal regulatory agency staff.

COPYRIGHT

Authors will be allowed to retain copyright on all material published on BiofilmsOnline.com, with the understanding that a non-exclusive and unlimited license will be granted to the Biofilm Institute/Center for Biofilm Engineering for publishing your material (i.e., we retain the shared right to publish your work in any print or electronic media format). It is extremely important the copyright of the materials to be submitted (text, figures, images, etc.) must not have been transferred or exclusively licensed to another publisher. All corresponding (primary) authors will be required to sign a statement of copyright ownership and grant of license prior to publication.

CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR GUIDELINES

We invite you to contribute a Biofilm Perspective to the electronic newsletter disseminated by BiofilmsOnline. Biofilm Perspectives is a new feature we have added as a commentary along the lines of a Nature News and Views piece, but, of course, focused on a biofilm topic.

Topic
Biofilms - fundamental or applied; anticipate variety.

Abstract
We highly recommend that you email an abstract succinctly summarizing the major points of your proposed Perspectives piece that can be reviewed and responded to by the editor.

A forum
The idea is that these brief articles would offer a forum for identifying trends, concepts, or hypotheses in a style that will be accessible to academicians and industry practitioners from diverse backgrounds. We want articles to be more than just mini-reviews that recap observations and recent results. Rather, these pieces will develop insight—information being abundant, and insight being much harder to come by. Another possibility is to review an important new paper and break it down for a wider audience. The topic does not have to be one that the author has published on. We would certainly like these articles to be written from a “big picture” perspective that goes well beyond an author’s own work. The material must be original, scientifically accurate and well written.

Requirements
- less than a thousand words
- include a single illustration or image
- digital picture of author
- one paragraph of biographical information
- no more than 10 references
- URLs will only be used to link to the author's affiliation

Submit document in either of these formats:
RTF
Microsoft Word

Photo images
- Format: .tif
- Resolution: 300 ppi, at least 5”x3” dimensions
- Credit information
- Copyright authority or permission for us to reproduce the image

Submit to:
Dr. Paul Sturman
Editor, BiofilmsOnline.com
Senior Research Engineer, Center for Biofilm Engineering
P.O. Box 173980, Bozeman, MT 59717-3980 USA
406-994-2102 (Voice/Fax), Email: paul_st@erc.montana.edu