PLoS Medicine Editorial Policies

Contents:

1. Publication Charges
2. Copyright and License Policies
3. Human and Animal Research
4. Author Status
5. Competing Interests
6. Prior Publication
7. Reviewer and Editor Exclusions
8. Confidentiality
9. Embargoes and the Media
10. Scientific and Editorial Misconduct
11. Corrections and Additions
12. Materials and Methods
13. Nomenclature
14. Submission of Data to Databases
15. Microarray Experiments
16. Software/algorithm sharing

1. Publication Charges
Authors are asked to pay $1500 upon acceptance of their article, to help defray the costs of publication (read the FAQs on publication fees). However, if you have insufficient funds to cover this payment, we will allow payment of whatever amount you can afford or will waive the charge entirely. Inability to pay will never influence the decision whether to publish a paper. Editors and reviewers are blind to the information about whether authors can pay.

2. 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 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 will deposit all articles in the electronic repository known as PubMed Central. Please read about the Creative Commons Attribution License before submitting your paper.

3. Human and Animal Research
All research involving humans and animals must have been approved by the authors' institutional review board or equivalent committee and that board named by the authors. In the case of human participants, informed consent must have been obtained and all clinical investigation must have been conducted according to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki.

4. Author Status
All authors will be contacted via e-mail at submission to indicate that they are aware of and approve the submission to PLoS Medicine of the manuscript, its content, authorship, and order of authorship. No decision can be made on an article until all authors have provided their assent to publication.

5. Competing Interests
All authors will be contacted via e-mail at submission and asked to declare whether they have any financial, personal, or professional interests that could be construed to have influenced the reporting of the experimental data or conclusions in their paper (see our separate document on competing interests). Reviewers are also asked to declare any interests that might interfere with their objective assessment of a manuscript. Any competing interests of authors will remain confidential during peer review, but will be stated in published articles.

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

7. Reviewer and Editor Exclusions
Upon submission of a manuscript, authors will be asked if they wish to exclude any specific academic editors or reviewers from the peer review of their article. The PLoS Medicine editorial team will respect these requests so long as this does not interfere with the objective and thorough assessment of the article.

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

9. Embargoes and the Media
Authors are of course at liberty to present their findings at medical or scientific conferences ahead of publication. 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. If a journalist has covered a piece of work ahead of publication, this will not affect consideration of the work for publication in PLoS Medicine.

10. 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 to PLoS Medicine, 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 Medicine will abide by the principles and rulings of the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE).

11. Corrections and Additions
Corrections to articles will be considered for publication if the correction is judged by the editors to affect seriously the interpretation of the work and if all authors of the original publication have approved the correction. In cases of a dispute, authors should contact the editors. Authors should send corrections directly to medicine_editors@plos.org.

12. Materials and Methods
Publication is conditional upon the agreement of authors to make freely available any materials and information associated with their publication that are reasonably requested by others for the purpose of academic, non-commercial research. Any supporting datasets for which there is no public repository must be made available from the authors directly to any interested reader on and after the publication.

13. Nomenclature
The use of standardized nomenclature in all fields of medicine is an essential step toward the integration and linking of results reported in published literature. We will enforce the use of correct and established nomenclature wherever possible.

14. Submission of Data to Databases
Publication is conditional upon the deposition of all relevant experimental datasets in the appropriate public repositories. Such datasets include, but are not limited to, DNA and protein sequence, and microarray data.

15. Microarray Experiments
Microarray experiments should be described according to the MIAME guidelines (see www.mged.org).

16. Software/algorithm sharing
If new software or a new algorithm is central to a paper, the authors must provide sufficient information to allow interested users to reproduce and build on the authors' work. In cases where the software/algorithm is not central to the paper, we nevertheless encourage authors to make all relevant materials freely available. Software can be provided under license where necessary, but any restrictions on the availability or on the use of materials might be judged to diminish the significance of a paper, and therefore influence the decision about whether a paper should be published subject to those conditions. These policies have been developed in accordance with the principles established in "Sharing Publication-Related Data and Materials" (National Academies Press, 2003).