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PLoS ONE Editorial and Publishing Policies

Contents:

  1. Relationship to Other PLoS Journals
  2. Publication Charges
  3. Copyright and License Policies
  4. Reviewer and Editor Exclusions
  5. Sharing of Materials, Methods, and Data
  6. Reporting Guidelines for Specific Study Designs
  7. Human and Animal Research
  8. Nomenclature
  9. Author Status
  10. Submission of Related Manuscripts
  11. Competing Interests
  12. Scientific and Editorial Misconduct
  13. Confidentiality
  14. Blogs, Wikis, Embargoes and the Media
  15. Studies Funded by Tobacco Industry

Relationship to Other PLoS Journals

All journals published by PLoS are autonomous publications. PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine each has a team of professional and academic editors that evaluate papers for publication. The Public Library of Science's community journals (PLoS Computational Biology; PLoS Genetics; PLoS Pathogens; PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases) are run solely and independently by their own Editors-in-Chief and editorial boards. PLoS ONE is likewise run by a community-based editorial board. Authors may request that papers (with reviews, if relevant) rejected from one PLoS journal be transferred to PLoS ONE, for further consideration there. We expect that reviewers for any PLoS journal are willing to have their reviews considered by the editors of another PLoS journal. Also, if an academic editor on another PLoS journal sponsors a paper, rejected from that journal, for publication in PLoS ONE, we will respect that sponsorship.

Publication Charges

To provide open access, PLoS journals use a business model in which our expenses—including those of peer review, journal production, and online hosting and archiving—are recovered in part by charging a publication fee to the authors or research sponsors for each article they publish. For PLoS ONE the publication fee is US$1350. Authors who are affiliated with one of our Institutional Members are eligible for a discount on this fee.

We offer a complete or partial fee waiver for authors who do not have funds to cover publication fees. Editors and reviewers have no access to payment information, and hence inability to pay will not influence the decision to publish a paper.

Copyright and License Policies

Upon submission of an article, authors are asked to indicate their agreement to abide by an open-access license. The license permits any user to download, print out, extract, archive, and distribute the article, so long as appropriate credit is given to the authors and source of the work. The license ensures that your article will be as widely available as possible and that your article can be included in any scientific archive.

Upon publication, PLoS also deposits all articles in PubMed Central. This complies with the policies of funding agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health in the United States, the Wellcome Trust and the Research Councils in the United Kingdom, and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in Germany, which request or require deposition of the published articles that they fund into publicly available databases.

Please read about the Creative Commons Attribution License before submitting your paper.

Reviewer and Editor Exclusions

All articles are peer reviewed, although upon submission of a manuscript, authors are asked if they wish to exclude any specific academic editors or reviewers from the peer review of their article. The editorial team will respect any reasonable requests so long as this does not interfere with the objective and thorough assessment of the article. See the relevant guidelines for reviewers and more information on the policy of PLoS regarding competing interests.

Sharing of Materials, Methods, and Data

Publication is conditional upon the agreement of authors to make freely available any materials and information described in their publication that are reasonably requested by others for the purpose of academic, non-commercial research.

Data Availability

Open access applies to both the scientific literature and the data used to establish that literature. Publication in any PLoS journal is contingent on making data integral to a manuscript freely available without restriction, provided that appropriate attribution is given and that suitable mechanisms exist for sharing the data used in a manuscript.

  1. Data for which public repositories have been established and are in general use should be deposited before publication, and the appropriate accession numbers or digital object identifiers published with the paper.
  2. If an appropriate repository does not exist, data should be deposited as supporting information with the published paper. If this is not practical, data should be made freely available upon reasonable request.
  3. The conclusions of a study must not be dependent solely on the analysis of proprietary data. If proprietary data were used to reach a conclusion, and the authors are unwilling or unable to make these data public, then the paper must include an analysis of public data that validates the conclusions so that others can reproduce the analysis and build on the findings.

Note that any restrictions on the availability or on the use of datasets might be judged to diminish the significance of a paper and will therefore influence the decision about whether a paper should be published. These policies have been developed in accordance with the principles established in "Sharing Publication-Related Data and Materials" (National Academies Press, 2003).

Software/Algorithm Sharing

PLoS ONE supports the development of Open Source software and believes that for submissions in which software is the central part of the paper, then adherence to appropriate Open Source standards will ensure that the submission will conform to our requirements which state that "methods must be described in sufficient detail so that another researcher is able to reproduce the experiments described" as well as our "aim to promote openness in research and intention that all work published in PLoS ONE can be built on by future researchers." Therefore, if new software or a new algorithm is central to a paper, authors must confirm that the software conforms to the definition of Open Source as defined by the ten rules of the Open Source initiative and have deposited the following in an open software archive as well as included as supplemental information with the article:

  1. The associated source code of the software described by the paper: This should, as far as possible, follow accepted community standards and be licensed under a suitable license such as BSD, LGPL or MIT (see http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical for a full list). Dependency on commercial software such as Mathmatica and Matlab does not preclude a paper from consideration, although complete Open Source solutions are preferred.
  2. Documentation for running and installing the software: For end user applications instructions for installation and using the software are prerequisite; for software libraries instructions for using the API are prerequisite.
  3. A test dataset with associated control parameter settings: Where feasible, results from standard test sets should be included. Where possible test data should not have any dependencies; for example, a database dump.

Acceptable archives are: SourceForge, Bioinformatics.Org, Open Bioinformatics Foundation (O|B|F), Google Code, BerliOS Developer, Savannah, and the Codehaus. Authors should provide a direct link to the deposited software from within the paper.

Deposition with the journal as well as an Open Source archive ensures that the original source associated with the paper is available as well as any enhancements made after the paper is published. If the article covers a well established project that has been providing an open source code repository for an extended amount of time, it can also be considered.

A condition of acceptance is that the software can be run by reviewers accessing the public software and that results presented in the paper are reproducible. The software only need run on one hardware/software platform in common use by the readership (including Matlab), although it must run without dependencies on proprietary or otherwise unobtainable ancillary software. Articles describing software that requires access to databases and other resources whose persistence is not guaranteed (e.g., individual laboratory databases without funding support) will not be considered.

In addition, the results described in the paper must be reproducible when peer reviewers, editors, or readers run the software on the deposited dataset and with the provided control parameters.

In cases where the software/algorithm is not central to the paper, we nevertheless encourage authors to make all relevant materials freely available.

Reporting Guidelines for Specific Study Designs

You must check the EQUATOR Network site for any reporting guidelines that apply to your particular study design and ensure you include any required supporting information recommended by the relevant guidelines.

Clinical Trials

We follow the WHO definition of a clinical trial. "A clinical trial is any research study that prospectively assigns human participants or groups of humans to one or more health-related interventions to evaluate the effects on health outcomes. Interventions include but are not restricted to drugs, cells and other biological products, surgical procedures, radiologic procedures, devices, behavioural treatments, process-of-care changes, preventive care, etc"

PLoS supports the position of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) on trial registration. All trials initiated after 1 July 2005 must be registered prospectively in a publicly accessible registry (i.e., before patient recruitment has begun), or they will not be considered for publication. For trials initiated before 1 July 2005, all trials must be registered before submission to our journals. See the ICMJE faq on trial registration on trial registration for further details. The WHO's list of approved registries is listed here http://www.who.int/ictrp/network/primary/en/index.html. The editors reserve the right to inform authors’ institutions or ethics committees about unregistered trials that have been carried out.:

Authors of randomized controlled trials must adhere to the CONSORT reporting guidelines appropriate to their trial design. Please check the CONSORT statement Web site for information on the appropriate guidelines for specific trial types. Before the paper can enter peer review authors must: 1) name in the paper trial registry, trial registration number, and IRB and 2) provide a copy of the trial protocol and a completed CONSORT checklist as supporting files. The CONSORT flow diagram must be included as Figure 1. Any deviation from the trial protocol must be explained in the paper. Authors must explicitly discuss informed consent in their paper, and PLoS reserves the right to ask for a copy of the patient consent form. Information on statistical methods or participants beyond what is indicated in the CONSORT statement should be reported in the Methods section.

PLoS supports the public disclosure of all clinical trial results, as mandated for example by the FDA Amendments Act, 2007. Prior disclosure of results on a public Web site such as clinicaltrials.gov will not affect the decision to peer review or accept papers at PLoS journals.

Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses of Randomized Controlled Trials

Reports of systematic reviews and meta-analyses should use the PRISMA statement as a guide, and include a completed PRISMA checklist and flow diagram to accompany the main text. Blank templates of the checklist and flow diagram can be downloaded from the PRISMA Web site.

Diagnostic Studies

Reports of studies of diagnostic accuracy should conform to the STARD requirements.

Epidemiological Studies

For reports of epidemiological studies, you should consult the STROBE initiative.

Microarray Experiments

Reports of microarray experiments should conform to the MIAME guidelines and the data from the experiments must be deposited in a publicly accessible database.

Human and Animal Research

All research involving human participants must have been approved by the authors' institutional review board or equivalent committee(s) and that board must be named by the authors in the manuscript. For research involving human participants, informed consent must have been obtained (or the reason for lack of consent explained, e.g. the data were analyzed anonymously) and all clinical investigation must have been conducted according to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki. Authors should submit a statement from their ethics committee or institutional review board indicating the approval of the research. We also encourage authors to submit a sample of a patient consent form and may require submission of completed forms on particular occasions.

For studies involving humans categorized by race/ethnicity, age, disease/disabilities, religion, sex/gender, sexual orientation, or other socially constructed groupings, authors should, as much as possible,

In addition, outmoded terms and potentially stigmatizing labels should be changed to more current, acceptable terminology. Examples: "Caucasian" should be changed to "white" or "of [Western] European descent" (as appropriate); "cancer victims" should be changed to "people with cancer".

All animal work must have been conducted according to relevant national and international guidelines. In accordance with the recommendations of the Weatherall report, "The use of non-human primates in research," we specifically require authors to include details of animal welfare and steps taken to ameliorate suffering in all work involving non-human primates.

Nomenclature

The use of standardized nomenclature in all fields of science and medicine is an essential step toward the integration and linking of scientific information reported in published literature. We will enforce the use of correct and established nomenclature wherever possible, such as:

Author Status

It is the responsibility of the corresponding author on a manuscript to ensure that all authors are aware of and approve the submission to PLoS ONE of the manuscript, its content, authorship, and order of authorship.

Submission of Related Manuscripts

When submitting their article, all authors are asked to indicate that they have not submitted a related or duplicate manuscript for publication elsewhere. If related work has been submitted elsewhere, then a copy must be included with the article submitted to PLoS. Reviewers will be asked to comment on the overlap between related submissions.

Competing Interests

Authors are asked at submission to declare whether they have any financial, personal, or professional interests that could be construed to have influenced their paper. Reviewers are also asked to declare any interests that might interfere with their objective assessment of a manuscript. Any relevant competing interests of authors must be available to editors and reviewers during the review process and will be stated in published articles. Read more about the policy of PLoS regarding competing interests.

Scientific and Editorial Misconduct

Scientific misconduct is defined by the Office of Research Integrity as "fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or other practices that seriously deviate from those that are commonly accepted within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research." In cases where there is a suspicion or allegation of scientific misconduct or fraudulent research in manuscripts submitted for review, PLoS reserves the right to pass along these manuscripts to the sponsoring or funding institution or other appropriate authority for investigation. Although PLoS recognizes its responsibility to ensure that the suspicion of misconduct has been addressed, we do not ourselves make such determinations. PLoS is also represented at the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and will abide by its principles and rulings.

Confidentiality

Editors and reviewers are requested to treat all submitted manuscripts in strict confidence.

Blogs, Wikis, Embargoes and the Media

Authors are of course at liberty to present and discuss their findings ahead of publication: at medical or scientific conferences, on preprint servers, in public databases, and in blogs, wikis and other informal communication channels. We recommend, however, that authors do not contact the media or respond to such contact unless an article has been accepted for publication and an embargo date has been established. Respect for press embargoes will help to ensure that your work is reported accurately in the popular media, and that the full peer-reviewed paper is freely available to any interested reader when the news item is published. If a journalist has covered a piece of work ahead of publication, this will not affect consideration of the work for publication. See also our embargo guidelines for journalists.

Studies Funded by Tobacco Industry

PLoS Medicine, PLoS Biology and PLoS ONE do not consider for publication papers where any of the research costs or authors' salaries have been funded, in whole or in part, by a tobacco company.

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