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PLoS Medicine Editorial and Publishing Policies

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

1. Relationship to other PLoS Journals

PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology publish outstanding research articles in health and biological sciences. Each journal has a team of professional and academic editors evaluating papers for publication. Occasionally, a manuscript is submitted that falls on the border between basic and clinical research. To ensure that such papers receive the fairest possible treatment, the professional editors of both journals may consult each other on relevant manuscripts. As a result, authors who have submitted their manuscript to PLoS Medicine may be encouraged instead to submit their paper to PLoS Biology (and vice versa). However, papers will never be transferred between the journals without an author's consent.

The Public Library of Science also publishes four community journals, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, and PLoS Pathogens, and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases which are run solely and independently by their editorial boards; and PLoS ONE which publishes reports of primary research from all scientific disciplines and exploits the interactive potential of the web to maximize the utility of every paper. Authors may request or editors may suggest that papers or presubmission enquiries (with reviews, if relevant) rejected from PLoS Medicine or PLoS Biology be forwarded to an appropriate other PLoS journal, for further consideration. Editorial staff at PLoS will help with transferring papers.

2. 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 Medicine the publication fee is US$2900. 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.

For further information, see our Publication Fee FAQ.

3. 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 NIH in the USA, the Wellcome Trust and the Research Councils in the UK, 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.

4. 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 be able to submit, upon request, a statement from the research ethics committee or institutional review board indicating approval of the research. We also encourage authors to submit a sample of a patient consent form, and may require submission 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 "patients with cancer".

Reporting of Animal Studies and Ethical Treatment of Animals

For studies involving animals, all work must have been conducted according to relevant national and international guidelines. Prior approval must have been obtained for all protocols from the author's institutional or other relevant ethics committee and the institution name and permit numbers provided at submission (see example below). For research involving non-human primates, all studies must be performed in accordance with the recommendations of the Weatherall report, "The use of non-human primates in research". Where unregulated animals are used or ethics approval is not required by a specific committee, the article should include a clear statement of this and the reasons why ethical approval is not required.

We also strongly encourage all authors to comply with the "Animal Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments" (ARRIVE) guidelines, developed by NC3Rs to improve standards of reporting to ensure that the data from animal experiments can be fully scrutinised and utilised. Relevant information should be included in the appropriate section of the article (e.g. title, abstract, or method) as outlined in the guidelines. Please note that these guidelines can be applied to any area of bioscience research using laboratory animals.

Example of statement of ethical approval: This study was carried out in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. The protocol was approved by the Committee on the Ethics of Animal Experiments of the University of Minnesota (Permit Number: 27-2956). All surgery was performed under sodium pentobarbital anesthesia, and all efforts were made to minimize suffering.

Please note that where research may be confused as pertaining to clinical research, the animal model should also be noted in the title.

5. Author Status

PLoS Medicine follows the guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors on authorship, and authors should make sure they are familiar with these guidelines. All authors will be contacted via e-mail at submission by the PLoS Medicine editorial office 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. The involvement of any professional medical writer in publication must be declared. We encourage authors to consult the European Medical Writers’ Association Guidelines on the role of medical writers. For all PLoS journals, the corresponding author must submit the manuscript, related files, and all required data and information. From the point of submission through to publication, all communication related to that manuscript will be directed to and received from the corresponding author only.

6. 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. Click here for more general information on the Public Library of Science’s policy regarding competing interests.

7. Submission of Related Manuscripts

When submitting an 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.

8. Reviewer and Editor Exclusions

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 these 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 general information on PLoS’ policy regarding competing interests.

9. Confidentiality

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

10. 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 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.

11. 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.

12. Corrections and Additions

Two kinds of Corrections can be posted directly to an article: Minor Corrections and Formal Corrections. Minor Corrections indicate small errors and clarifications to the article, whereas Formal Corrections are reserved for errors that significantly affect the utility or understanding of the article. Formal Corrections are also sent to PubMed Central and PubMed. In both cases, the decision to indicate a posting as a Minor or Formal Correction is the responsibility of the PLoS staff.

See the guidelines on How to Add and View Corrections for more details. It is also possible to send Formal Corrections requests directly to the journal editorial staff.

13. 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

PLoS is committed to ensuring the availability of data and materials that underpin any articles published in PLoS journals. We believe the ideal is that all data relevant to a given article and all readily replaceable materials be made immediately available without restrictions (whilst not compromising confidentiality in the context of human-subject research).

We appreciate, however, that this ideal is not yet the norm in all fields. We are therefore currently collaborating with a number of subject-specific initiatives in order to develop relevant policies. In the meantime, authors must comply with current best practice in their discipline for the sharing of data via databases: for example, deposition of microarray data in ArrayExpress or GEO; deposition of gene sequences in GenBank or EMBL; and deposition of ecological data in DRYAD. We encourage all authors to comply with available field-specific standards for the preparation and recording of data.

Failure to comply with this policy will be taken into account when publication decisions are made. We encourage researchers to contact journal editors if they encounter difficulties in obtaining data or materials from published articles. PLoS reserves the right to post corrections on articles, to contact authors’ institutions and funders, and in extreme cases to withdraw publication, if restrictions on data/materials access come to light after publication.

  1. Data for which public repositories have been established that 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 provided 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

If new software or a new algorithm represents a significant part of a journal article, the authors must provide sufficient information to allow interested users to reproduce and build on the authors' work. This implies that wherever possible all relevant materials be freely available and preferably accessible through public archives, open source repositories and the like. Software can be provided under license where necessary, but any restrictions on the availability or on the use of materials will be judged to diminish the significance of a paper and therefore might 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).

14. 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:

15. 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.

a. Clinical Trials

We follow the WHO definition of a clinical trial. See http://www.who.int/ictrp/en/.

"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 for further details. The WHO's list of approved registries is listed here. The editors reserve the right to inform authors’ institutions or ethics committees about unregistered trials that have been carried out.

Authors of 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 (these documents will also be published alongside the paper, if accepted). 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 acceptance of papers in PLoS journals.

b. Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses

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.

c. Diagnostic Studies

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

d. Epidemiological Studies

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

e. 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.

f. Checklists for Biological and Biomedical Research Investigations

We recommend authors refer to the MIBBI Portal (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations) for prescriptive checklists for reporting biological and biomedical research where applicable.

16. Publication of Studies Sponsored by Pharmaceutical Companies.

We support the development of guidelines for the reporting of studies sponsored by pharmaceutical companies.

17. 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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