The instructions below are specifically directed at authors that wish to submit a manuscript to Liquid Crystals. For general information, please visit the Publish With Us section of our website. We also have an official Authors' Charter to outline the standards that authors can expect when they publish with us.

Liquid Crystals considers all manuscripts on the strict condition that they have been submitted only to Liquid Crystals, that they have not been published already, nor are they under consideration for publication or in press elsewhere. Authors who fail to adhere to this condition will be charged with all costs which Liquid Crystals incurs and their papers will not be published.

Contributions to Liquid Crystals must report original research and will be subjected to review by referees at the discretion of the Editorial Office.

Manuscript preparation

1. General guidelines

• Papers are accepted only in English. British English spelling and punctuation is preferred.
• Manuscripts should be compiled in the following order: title page; abstract; keywords; main text; acknowledgments; appendices (as appropriate); references; table(s) with caption(s) (on individual pages); figure caption(s) (as a list).
• Abstracts of up to 200 words are required for all papers submitted.
• Section headings should be concise and numbered sequentially, using a decimal system for subsections.
• All the authors of a paper should include their full names, affiliations, postal addresses, telephone and fax numbers and email addresses on the cover page of the manuscript. One author should be identified as the Corresponding Author.
• Biographical notes on contributors are not required for this journal.
• For all manuscripts non-discriminatory language is mandatory. Sexist or racist terms should not be used.
• Authors must adhere to SI units. Units are not italicised.
• When using a word which is or is asserted to be a proprietary term or trade mark, authors must use the symbol ® or TM.
• Authors are encouraged to review articles in the area they are addressing which have been previously published in the journal, and where appropriate, to reference them. This will enhance context, coherence, and continuity for readers.
• Single 'quotes' are used for quotations rather than double "quotes", unless the 'quote is "within" another quote'.
• Punctuation should follow the British style, e.g. 'quotes precede punctuation'.
• Punctuation of common abbreviations should follow the following conventions: e.g. i.e. cf. Note that such abbreviations are not followed by a comma or a (double) point/period.
• Dashes (M-dash) should be clearly indicated in manuscripts by way of either a clear dash (-) or a triple hyphen (---) (N-dash) should be indicated by a clear dash (-) or a double hyphen (--).
• We are sparing in our use of the upper case in headings, e.g. only the first word in paper titles and all subheads is in upper case.
• Apostrophes should be used sparingly. Thus, decades should be referred to as follows: 'The 1980s [not the 1980's] saw ...'. Possessives associated with acronyms (e.g. PA), should be written as follows: 'The APU's findings that ...', but, NB, the plural is APUs.
• All acronyms for national agencies, examinations, etc., should be spelled out the first time they are introduced in text or references. Thereafter the acronym can be used if appropriate, e.g. 'The work of the Assessment of Performance Unit (APU) in the early 1980s ...'. Subsequently, 'The APU studies of achievement ...', in a reference ... (Department of Education and Science [DES] 1989a).
• Brief biographical details of significant national figures should be outlined in the text unless it is quite clear that the person concerned would be known internationally. Some suggested editorial emendations to a 'typical' text are indicated in the following with square brackets: 'From the time of H.E. Armstrong [in the 19th century] to the curriculum development work associated with the Nuffield Foundation [in the 1960s], there has been a shift from heurism to constructivism in the design of [British] science courses'.
• The preferred local (national) usage for ethnic and other minorities should be used in all papers. For the USA, 'African-American', 'Hispanic' and 'Native American' are used, e.g. 'The African American presidential candidate, Jesse Jackson...'; for the UK, 'Afro-Caribbean' (not 'West Indian'), etc.

A fully completed CIF (Crystallographic Information File) should be deposited with the CCDC (send files as attachments to deposit@ccdc.cam.ac.uk) and the returned deposition number quoted in the experimental section of the manuscript.

2. Mathematics

Special care should be taken with mathematical scripts, especially subscripts and superscripts and differentiation between the letter 'ell' and the figure one, and the letter 'oh 'and the figure zero. If your keyboard does not have the characters you need, it is preferable to use longhand, in which case it is important to differentiate between capital and small letters, K, k and x and other similar groups of letters. Special symbols should be highlighted in the text and explained in the margin. In some cases it is helpful to supply annotated lists of symbols for the guidance of the sub-editor and the typesetter, and/or a 'Nomenclature' section preceding the 'Introduction'.

For simple fractions in the text, the solidus / should be used instead of a horizontal line, care being taken to insert parentheses where necessary to avoid ambiguity, for example, I /(n-1). Exceptions are the proper fractions available as single type on a keyboard.

Full formulae or equations should be displayed, that is, written on a separate line. Horizontal lines are preferable to solidi.

The solidus is not generally used for units: ms-1 not m/s, but note electrons/s, counts/channel, etc.

Displayed equations referred to in the text should be numbered serially (1, 2, etc.) on the right hand side of the page. Short expressions not referred to by any number will usually be incorporated in the text.

Symbols should not be underlined to indicate fonts except for tensors, vectors and matrices, which are indicated with a wavy line in the manuscript (not with a straight arrow or arrow above) and rendered in heavy type in print: upright sans serif r (tensor), sloping serif r (vector) upright serif r (matrix).

Typographical requirements must be clearly indicated at their first occurrence, e.g. Greek, Roman, script, sans serif, bold, italic. Authors will be charged for corrections at proof stage resulting from a failure to do so.

Braces, brackets and parentheses are used in the order [( )], except where mathematical convention dictates otherwise (i.e. square brackets for commutators and anticommutators).

3. Notes on tables and figures
Artwork submitted for publication will not be returned and will be destroyed after publication, unless you request otherwise. Whilst every care is taken of artwork, neither the Editor nor Taylor & Francis shall bear any responsibility or liability for non-return, loss, or damage of artwork, nor for any associated costs or compensation. You are strongly advised to insure appropriately.

Tables and figures should be valuable, relevant, and visually attractive. Tables and figures must be referred to in the text and numbered in order of their appearance. Each table and figure should have a complete, descriptive title; and each table column an appropriate heading.

Tables and figures should be referred to in text as follows: Figure 1, Table 1. 'As seen in Table [or Figure] 1 ...' (not Tab., fig. or Fig).
The place at which a table or figure is to be inserted in the printed text should be indicated clearly on a manuscript:

[Insert table 2 about here]

Each table and/or figure must have a title that explains its purpose without reference to the text.

All figures and tables must be on separate pages and not embedded in the text. All figures should allow for reduction to column width (130 mm) or page width (160mm). Please avoid figures that would require landscape reproduction, i.e., reading from bottom to top of the page.

Do not type the caption to a figure on that figure; the legends to any illustrations must be typed separately following the main text and should be grouped together.

4. Acknowledgements

Any acknowledgements authors wish to make should be included in a separate section at the end of the manuscript.

5. Style guidelines

• Description of the journal's article style 
• Description of the journal's reference styles Please note that article titles should not be included in the references for this journal.
• Latex Template (Please save the LaTeX template to your hard drive and open it for use by clicking on the icon in Windows Explorer). If you have files created in LaTeX, please convert these to Postscript or PDF before uploading. 

Word templates

• It is in the author's interest to provide the highest quality figure format possible. Please be sure that all imported scanned material is scanned at the appropriate resolution: 1200 dpi for line art, 600 dpi for grayscale and 300 dpi for colour.
• Figures must be saved separate to text. Please do not embed figures in the paper file.
• Files should be saved as one of the following formats: TIFF (tagged image file format), PostScript or EPS (encapsulated PostScript), and should contain all the necessary font information and the source file of the application (e.g. CorelDraw/Mac, CorelDraw/PC).
• All figures must be numbered in the order in which they appear in the paper (e.g. figure 1, figure 2). In multi-part figures, each part should be labelled (e.g. figure 1(a), figure 1(b)).
• Figure captions must be saved separately, as part of the file containing the complete text of the paper, and numbered correspondingly.
• The filename for a graphic should be descriptive of the graphic, e.g. Figure1, Figure2a.

7. Colour

There are a limited number of colour pages within the annual page allowance. Authors should restrict their use of colour to situations where it is necessary on scientific, and not merely cosmetic, grounds. Authors of accepted papers who propose publishing figures in colour in the print version should consult Taylor & Francis at proof stage to agree on an appropriate number of colour pages. If the colour page budget is exceeded, authors will be given the option to provide a financial contribution to additional colour reproduction costs. Figures that appear in black-and-white in the print edition of the Journal will appear in colour in the online edition, assuming colour originals are supplied.

8. Reproduction of copyright material

Contributors are required to secure permission for the reproduction of any figure, table or extensive extract (more than fifty words) from the text of a source that is copyrighted or owned by a party other than Taylor & Francis or the contributor. This applies to direct reproduction as well as ‘derivative reproduction', where the contributor has created a new figure or table that derives substantially from a copyrighted source. Authors are themselves responsible for the payment of any permission fees required by the copyright owner. Copies of permission letters should be sent with the manuscript upon submission to the Editor(s).

• Copyright permission letter template

9. Supplementary online material

Authors are welcome to submit animations, movie files, sound files or any additional information for online publication.

• Information about supplementary online material

Manuscript submission

All submissions should be made online at the Liquid Crystals Manuscript Central site. New users should first create an account. Once logged on to the site, submissions should be made via the Author Centre. Online user guides and access to a helpdesk are available on this website.

Manuscripts may be submitted in any standard format, including Word, PostScript and PDF. These files will be automatically converted into a PDF file for the review process. LaTeX files should be converted to PDF prior to submission because Manuscript Central is not able to convert LaTeX files into PDFs directly, however, LaTex source files of the final version will be required by the production department once an article has been accepted. This journal does not accept Microsoft Word 2007 documents. Please use Word's "Save As" option to save your document as an older (.doc) file type.

The Journal Editor can be contacted at the address below:

Professor Corrie T. Imrie
Department of Chemistry
University of Aberdeen
Meston Walk
Aberdeen
AB24 3UE
UK
c.t.imrie@abdn.ac.uk

Copyright and authors' rights

It is a condition of publication that authors assign copyright or license the publication rights in their articles, including abstracts, to Taylor & Francis. This enables us to ensure full copyright protection and to disseminate the article, and of course the Journal, to the widest possible readership in print and electronic formats as appropriate. Authors retain many rights under the Taylor & Francis rights policies, which can be found at www.informaworld.com/authors_journals_copyright_position. Authors are themselves responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce copyright material from other sources.

Exceptions are made for authors of Crown or US Government employees whose policies require that copyright cannot be transferred to other parties. We ask that a signed statement to this effect is submitted when returning proofs for accepted papers.

• Further details and FAQs on Taylor & Francis's policy on copyright and authors' rights

Reprints

Corresponding authors will receive free online access to their article through our website (www.informaworld.com). Reprints of articles published in the Journal can be purchased through Rightslink® when proofs are received. If you have any queries, please contact our reprints department at reprints@tandf.co.uk.

Page charges

There are no page charges to individuals or institutions.

iOpenAccess

Authors whose manuscripts have been accepted for publication have the option to pay a one-off fee of US$3250 to make their article free to read online via the Liquid Crystals website. Choosing this option also allows authors to post their article in an institutional or subject repository immediately upon publication.

• Further details on iOpenAccess