1. ABOUT JOURNAL

1. Journal overview

The Journal of Fisheries and Coastal Management (JFCoM) is a biannual regional interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary platform that provides critical information needs of academics, practitioners and policy makers in sub-Saharan Africa on issues relating to fisheries and coastal environment. It is a peer reviewed open access journal.

2. Aims and Scope

JFCOM is a regional journal published twice a year and specifically addresses scientific research and information needs in the fisheries and coastal environmental sector of Africa. The Journal publishes papers on applied or scientific research relevant to fisheries and aquaculture (freshwater, brackish water and marine aquaculture), physical and social aspects of the coastal environment. Papers from non-traditional transdisciplinary scientific areas such as sustainability science, climate change, social-ecological systems, ethnographical studies, conservation and restoration research related to fisheries and the coastal environment are also welcome.
To meet the information needs of the broader stakeholder groups, the journal also publishes reviews and short communications on current developments in the sector.

2. GUIDELINES TO AUTHORS

3. Submission of Manuscripts

Manuscripts should be submitted with a cover letter stating the type of manuscript and declaration of any conflict of interest, etc.
Authors should only submit manuscripts that have not been published or submitted for publication elsewhere except as an abstract in proceedings of a conference or symposium.
Manuscripts prepared in accordance with the author guidelines provided below should be submitted online at www.jfcom.fishcomghana.com. For assistance on submission of manuscripts please contact: jfcom@fishcomghana.com.

4. Manuscript categories and requirements

• Original Articles – These are articles based on hypothesis-driven studies which could be descriptive or analytical and providing novel information and/or scholarly insight on a specific topic. Articles should have a minimum of 6,000 words and a maximum of 8,000 words.
• Review Articles – These should contain an up-to-date review of scientific literature or substantial scholarly interpretation of extant published works. Compilations of scientific literature without interpretation leading to new insights or recommendations for new research directions will not be accepted.
• Short Communications – These should differ from full papers on the basis of scope or completeness rather than quality of research. They may report (i) significant new data arising from problems with narrow, well defined limits, (ii) important findings that warrant rapid publication before broader studies are complete, (iii) important, personal views on hot topics, or critical, fair assessment of an article published in this journal. Manuscripts for consideration should be short, approximately 1500 words, and they should be divided only into two sections: i) abstract and ii) the issue(s), comment and recommendation.

5. Preparing the manuscript

To facilitate the review process, the JFCOM encourages authors to submit a line-numbered version of their manuscript.
Manuscripts should be written double-spaced, using British spelling. They should be presented in the following order:

1. Title Page
   1. The title – should be short, informative and must contain no abbreviations
   2. The full name(s) of the author(s)
   3. The institutional affiliation(s) and address(es) of the author(s)
   4. The e-mail address and telephone number of the corresponding author(s)
2. Abstract – The Abstract must contain adequate information on the purpose of the study and major findings. This section should contain a maximum of 250 words.
3. Keywords – Four to 6 key words should be provided after the Abstract. Key words should not be a repetition of words already in the title.
4. Main text

The text should be organised under the following headings:

1. Introduction
2. Materials and Methods
3. Results
4. Discussion
5. Acknowledgement
6. References

References should be prepared according to the publication manual of the American Psychological Association (6th edition available at http://www.apastyle.org/). In the text, the use of et al. is acceptable only when citing a reference with more than two authors for the first and subsequent time(s).
All headings should be placed on the left-hand side of the text without numbering. A maximum of three levels of headings are permitted in the text. All text formats must be Times New Roman with font size 12. Use the automatic hyphenation function and do not hyphenate manually at line breaks. All measurements should be given in SI or SI-derived units.

v. Tables and Figures

All figures and tables should be formatted as described below and submitted as separate documents. Tables should not duplicate, information contained in the text. They should be supplied as editable files, not pasted as images. Legends and footnotes must be understandable without reference to the text. All abbreviations must be defined in footnotes.
Figures including diagrams and photos should be ready for use and included in single numbered series. Photos should have a minimum resolution of 300 dpi and should be presented in tiff, psd, bmp or jpeg formats.
It is preferable that line figures (e.g. graphs and charts) are supplied in black and white so that they are legible if printed by a reader in black and white. However, figures submitted in colour may be reproduced in colour online free of charge. If an author prefers to have figures printed in colour in hard copies of the journal, a fee will be charged by the Publisher.

6. Copyright

If the manuscript includes material formerly published elsewhere, written permission must be obtained from the author or source and submitted with the manuscript.

7. Editorial policies and ethical considerations

The acceptance criteria for all papers are the quality and originality of the research and its significance to journal readership. All manuscripts are double-blind peer reviewed. Papers will only be sent for review if the Editor-in-Chief determines that the paper meets the appropriate quality and relevance requirements.
In addition, the preprint of all accepted manuscripts will be published for unrestricted access by the general public on fishcomghana.com