Submission Guidelines

About the Journal

PLOS Computational Biology publishes original research that clearly demonstrates novelty, importance to a particular field, biological significance, and conclusions that are justified by the study.

Our aim is to make the editorial process rigorous and consistent, and to offer the best possible support to our authors throughout this process. Authors are encouraged to decide how best to present their ideas, results, and conclusions. The writing style should be concise and accessible. Editors may make suggestions for how to achieve this, as well as suggestions for cuts or additions that could be made to the article to strengthen the argument.

Style and Format

Manuscript Organization

Parts of a Submission

Title

Include a full title and a short title for the manuscript.

Titles should be written in sentence case (only the first word of the text, proper nouns, and genus names are capitalized). Avoid specialist abbreviations if possible. For clinical trials, systematic reviews, or meta-analyses, the subtitle should include the study design.

Author list

Author contributions

Provide at minimum one contribution for each author in the submission system. Use the CRediT taxonomy to describe each contribution. Read the policy and the full list of roles.

Contributions will be published with the final article, and they should accurately reflect contributions to the work. The submitting author is responsible for completing this information at submission, and we expect that all authors will have reviewed, discussed, and agreed to their individual contributions ahead of this time.

PLOS Computational Biology will contact all authors by email at submission to ensure that they are aware of the submission.

Cover letter

Upload a cover letter as a separate file in the online system.

The cover letter should address the following questions:

• Why is this manuscript suitable for publication in PLOS Computational Biology?
• Why will your study inspire other members of your field, and how will it drive research forward?

You may recommend a suitable Associate Editor to handle your submission; however, the editors reserve the right to contact an alternative—either from the board or a guest editor.

The cover letter will only be available to the editor and the journal staff.

Title page

The title, authors, and affiliations should all be included on a title page as the first page of the manuscript file.  

  Download our sample title, author list, and affiliations page (PDF)

Abstract

The Abstract comes after the title page in the manuscript file. The abstract text is also entered in a separate field in the submission system.  

The Abstract should be succinct; it must not exceed 300 words. Authors should mention the techniques used without going into methodological detail and should summarize the most important results.

While the Abstract is conceptually divided into three sections (Background, Methodology/Principal Findings, and Conclusions/Significance), do not apply these distinct headings to the Abstract within the article file.

Do not include any citations. Avoid specialist abbreviations.

Author Summary

We ask that all authors of research articles include a 150-200 word non-technical summary of the work as part of the manuscript to immediately follow the abstract. This text is subject to editorial change, should be written in the first-person voice, and should be distinct from the scientific abstract.

Aim to highlight where your work fits within a broader context; present the significance or possible implications of your work simply and objectively; and avoid the use of acronyms and complex terminology wherever possible. The goal is to make your findings accessible to a wide audience that includes both scientists and non-scientists.

Authors may benefit from consulting with a science writer or press officer to ensure they effectively communicate their findings to a general audience.

Introduction

The introduction should put the focus of the manuscript into a broader context. As you compose the Introduction, think of readers who are not experts in this field. Include a brief review of the key literature. If there are relevant controversies or disagreements in the field, they should be mentioned so that a non-expert reader can delve into these issues further. The Introduction should conclude with a brief statement of the overall aim of the experiments and a comment about whether that aim was achieved.

Results

The Results section should provide details of all of the experiments that are required to support the conclusions of the paper. There is no specific word limit for this section, but details of experiments that are peripheral to the main thrust of the article and that detract from the focus of the article should not be included. The section may be divided into subsections, each with a concise subheading. The section should be written in the past tense.

PLOS journals require authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. PLOS Computational Biology also requires authors to make any author generated code underlying the findings fully available without restriction, with rare exception. When submitting a manuscript online, authors must provide a Data Availability Statement describing compliance with both policies. 

Large data sets, including raw data, may be deposited in an appropriate public repository. See our list of recommended repositories.

For smaller data sets and certain data types, authors may provide their data within supporting information files accompanying the manuscript. Authors should take care to maximize the accessibility and reusability of the data by selecting a file format from which data can be efficiently extracted (for example, spreadsheets or flat files should be provided rather than PDFs when providing tabulated data).

For more information on how best to provide data, read our policy on data availability. PLOS does not accept references to “data not shown.”

Code must be shared openly in an appropriate repository with accompanying documentation and clearly licensed to facilitate reuse by others. For more information on how best to provide code, read our policy on code availability.

Discussion

The Discussion should spell out the major conclusions of the work along with some explanation or speculation on the significance of these conclusions. How do the conclusions affect the existing assumptions and models in the field? How can future research build on these observations? What are the key experiments that must be done?

The Discussion should be concise and tightly argued.

The Results and Discussion may be combined into one section, if desired.

Materials and Methods

The Materials and Methods should provide enough detail to reproduce the findings. Submit detailed protocols for newer or less established methods. Well-established protocols may be referenced. 

Details of algorithms and protocol documents for clinical trials, observational studies, and other non-laboratory investigations may be uploaded as supporting information. These are not included in the typeset manuscript, but are downloadable and fully searchable from the HTML version of the article. Read the supporting information guidelines for formatting instructions.

We recommend and encourage you to deposit laboratory protocols in protocols.io, where protocols can be assigned their own persistent digital object identifiers (DOIs).

To include a link to a protocol in your article:

1. Describe your step-by-step protocol on protocols.io
2. Select Get DOI to issue your protocol a persistent digital object identifier (DOI) 
3. Include the DOI link in the Methods section of your manuscript using the following format provided by protocols.io: http://dx.doi.org/10.17504/protocols.io.[PROTOCOL DOI]

At this stage, your protocol is only visible to those with the link. This allows editors and reviewers to consult your protocol when evaluating the manuscript. You can make your protocols public at any time by selecting Publish on the protocols.io site. Any referenced protocol(s) will automatically be made public when your article is published.

PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io articles. Read more information on Lab Protocol articles.

Consult our reporting guidelines, and include an ethics statement in the Materials and Methods section when reporting results from human subjects research and animal research.

Acknowledgments

Those who contributed to the work but do not meet our authorship criteria should be listed in the Acknowledgments with a description of the contribution.

Authors are responsible for ensuring that anyone named in the Acknowledgments agrees to be named.

References

Any and all available works can be cited in the reference list. Acceptable sources include:

• Published or accepted manuscripts
• Manuscripts on preprint servers, providing the manuscript has a citable DOI or arXiv URL.

Do not cite the following sources in the reference list:

• Unavailable and unpublished work, including manuscripts that have been submitted but not yet accepted (e.g., “unpublished work,” “data not shown”). Instead, include those data as supplementary material or deposit the data in a publicly available database.
• Personal communications (these should be supported by a letter from the relevant authors but not included in the reference list)
• Submitted research should not rely upon retracted research. You should avoid citing retracted articles unless you need to discuss retracted work to provide historical context for your submitted research. If it is necessary to discuss retracted work, state the article’s retracted status in your article’s text and reference list.

Ensure that your reference list includes full and current bibliography details for every cited work at the time of your article’s submission (and publication, if accepted). If cited work is corrected, retracted, or marked with an expression of concern before your article is published, and if you feel it is appropriate to cite the work even in light of the post-publication notice, include in your manuscript citations and full references for both the affected article and the post-publication notice. Email the journal office if you have questions.

References are listed at the end of the manuscript and numbered in the order that they appear in the text. In the text, cite the reference number in square brackets (e.g., “We used the techniques developed by our colleagues [19] to analyze the data”). PLOS uses the numbered citation (citation-sequence) method and first six authors, et al.

Do not include citations in abstracts. 

Make sure the parts of the manuscript are in the correct order before ordering the citations.

​Formatting references

PLOS uses the reference style outlined by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), also referred to as the “Vancouver” style. Example formats are listed below. Additional examples are in the ICMJE sample references.

Journal name abbreviations should be those found in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) databases. 

Supporting information

Authors can submit essential supporting files and multimedia files along with their manuscripts. All supporting information will be subject to peer review. All file types can be submitted, but files must be smaller than 20 MB in size.

Authors may use almost any description as the item name for a supporting information file as long as it contains an “S” and number. For example, “S1 Appendix” and “S2 Appendix,” “S1 Table” and “S2 Table,” and so forth.  

Supporting information files are published exactly as provided, and are not copyedited.

Supporting information captions

List supporting information captions at the end of the manuscript file. Do not submit captions in a separate file.

The file number and name are required in a caption, and we highly recommend including a one-line title as well. You may also include a legend in your caption, but it is not required.

In-text citations

We recommend that you cite supporting information in the manuscript text, but this is not a requirement. If you cite supporting information in the text, citations do not need to be in numerical order.

Figures and Tables

Figures

You can include figures in the main manuscript file at initial submission. If the manuscript reaches the revise stage, prepare and submit each figure as an individual file.

Cite figures in ascending numeric order at first appearance in the manuscript file.

Figure captions

Insert figure captions in manuscript text, immediately following the paragraph where the figure is first cited (read order). Don’t include captions as part of the figure files themselves or submit them in a separate document.

At a minimum, include the following in your figure captions:

• A figure label with Arabic numerals, and “Figure” abbreviated to “Fig” (e.g. Fig 1, Fig 2, Fig 3, etc). Match the label of your figure with the name of the file uploaded at submission (e.g. a figure citation of “Fig 1” must refer to a figure file named “Fig1.tif”).
• A concise, descriptive title

The caption may also include a legend as needed.

Tables

Cite tables in ascending numeric order upon first appearance in the manuscript file.

Place each table in your manuscript file directly after the paragraph in which it is first cited (read order). Do not submit your tables in separate files.

Tables require a label (e.g., “Table 1”) and brief descriptive title to be placed above the table. Place legends, footnotes, and other text below the table. 

Data reporting

All data and related metadata underlying the findings reported in a submitted manuscript should be deposited in an appropriate public repository, unless already provided as part of the submitted article.

Repositories may be either subject-specific (where these exist) and accept specific types of structured data, or generalist repositories that accept multiple data types. We recommend that authors select repositories appropriate to their field. Repositories may be subject-specific (e.g., GenBank for sequences and PDB for structures), general, or institutional, as long as DOIs or accession numbers are provided and the data are at least as open as CC BY. Authors are encouraged to select repositories that meet accepted criteria as trustworthy digital repositories, such as criteria of the Centre for Research Libraries or Data Seal of Approval. Large, international databases are more likely to persist than small, local ones.

To support data sharing and author compliance of the PLOS data policy, we have integrated our submission process with a select set of data repositories. The list is neither representative nor exhaustive of the suitable repositories available to authors. Current repository integration partners include Dryad and FlowRepository. Please contact data@plos.org to make recommendations for further partnerships.

Instructions for PLOS submissions with data deposited in an integration partner repository:

• Deposit data in the integrated repository of choice.
• Once deposition is final and complete, the repository will provide you with a dataset DOI (provisional) and private URL for reviewers to gain access to the data.
• Enter the given data DOI into the full Data Availability Statement, which is requested in the Additional Information section of the PLOS submission form. Then provide the URL passcode in the Attach Files section.

If you have any questions, please email us.

Data availability statement

The data availability statement must give details of both the data and code that supports the results presented in the article. For both the code and data you must list the name of the repository or repositories as well as digital object identifiers (DOIs), accession numbers or codes, or other persistent identifiers.
 
Example statements:

All human data, statistical analysis code, stimuli, network training sets, and trained networks are available on Zenodo at link http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3534568.
 
There are no primary data in the paper; all materials are available at https://github.com/bbolker/HIV_LHS/ and we have archived our code on Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.437497).
 
All relevant data are within the paper, its Supporting Information files, and on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2640689. The REMI code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/EPFL-LCSB/remi.
 
All data and code used for running experiments, model fitting, and plotting is available on a GitHub repository at https://github.com/wtadler/confidence. We have also used Zenodo to assign a DOI to the repository: 10.5281/zenodo.1422804.
 
The source code and data used to produce the results and analyses presented in this manuscript are available from Bitbucket Git repository: https://bitbucket.org/alexeyg-com/irespredictor.
 
All code written in support of this publication is publicly available at https://bitbucket.org/pkhlab/pkh-lab-analyses. Simulation input files and generated data are available from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3711649.

If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing code, authors should provide the following information within their data availability statement upon submission and should contact the journal editorial office (ploscompbiol@plos.org):

• Explain the restrictions in detail (e.g., code could potentially identify or reveal sensitive patient information).
• Provide all necessary contact information needed for others to make access requests for the code, including a third party contact.

Any data that cannot be shared due to ethical or legal restrictions should follow the guidelines set out in the data availability guidelines.

Code reporting

All author-generated code directly related to the findings reported in a submitted manuscript must be made publicly available without access restriction unless specific legal or ethical restrictions prohibit public sharing of code. Details of the code location should be given in the data availability statement.

We strongly recommend that all code be deposited in a permanent, public repository that issues citable digital object identifiers (DOI) or other persistent identifiers, for example using Zenodo to archive GitHub packages, CodeOcean, or the Software Heritage archive. Authors are encouraged to select repositories that allow for versioning so that the version of the published record is permanently documented and assigned its own DOI.  We strongly encourage authors to license code so it conforms with the Open Source Definition.

For further guidance see our list of detailed FAQs.

Accession numbers

All appropriate data sets, images, and information should be deposited in an appropriate public repository. See our list of recommended repositories.

Accession numbers (and version numbers, if appropriate) should be provided in the Data Availability Statement. Accession numbers or a citation to the DOI should also be provided when the data set is mentioned within the manuscript.

In some cases authors may not be able to obtain accession numbers of DOIs until the manuscript is accepted; in these cases, the authors must provide these numbers at acceptance. In all other cases, these numbers must be provided at full submission.

Identifiers

As much as possible, please provide accession numbers or identifiers for all entities such as genes, proteins, mutants, diseases, etc., for which there is an entry in a public database, for example:

• Ensembl
• Entrez Gene
• FlyBase
• InterPro
• Mouse Genome Database (MGD)
• Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM)
• PubChem

Identifiers should be provided in parentheses after the entity on first use.

Molecular dynamics data

If your study involves molecular dynamics simulations and your data are too large to share easily, please refer to this guide on what should be included with your submission. Authors should specifically address the following points:

• Provide a README file with a list of included files and/or links to publicly available repositories along with their brief description. This should be included as part of the supplementary material.
• Authors should describe all software used including the specific version(s) used in the work, and how it can be obtained.
• PLOS expects researchers to share software and scripts needed for the work. If this cannot be made publicly available (e.g. due to licenses), the simulation method should be provided in sufficient detail so the results can, in principle, be reproduced using publicly available software.
• Authors should provide the complete set of input files used to initiate the calculations, including input coordinates, topologies and parameter files. These files must be provided in human-readable formats and should be included as supplementary material.
• Authors should deposit trajectories in a public repository according to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles. Examples of such databases include ModEL, Nomad, and the Dryad repository.

Please note that reviewers and editors may request more data and information where appropriate.

Small and macromolecule crystal data

Manuscripts reporting new and unpublished three-dimensional structures must include sufficient supporting data and detailed descriptions of the methodologies used to allow the reproduction and validation of the structures. All novel structures must have been deposited in a community endorsed database prior to submission (please see our list of recommended repositories).

Small molecule single crystal data

Authors reporting X-Ray crystallographic structures of small organic, metal-organic, and inorganic molecules must deposit their data with the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC), the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database (ICSD), or similar community databases providing a recognized validation functionality. Authors are also required to include the relevant structure reference numbers within the main text (e.g. the CCDC ID number), as well as the crystallographic information files (.cif format) as Supplementary Information, along with the checkCIF validation reports that can be obtained via the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr).

Macromolecular structures

Authors reporting novel macromolecular structures must have deposited their data prior to submission with the Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB), the Biological Magnetic Resonance Data Bank (BMRB), the Electron Microscopy Data Bank (EMDB), or other community databases providing a recognized validation functionality. Authors must include the structure reference numbers within the main text and submit as Supplementary Information the official validation reports from these databases.

Striking image

You can upload a visually striking image alongside your submission, which we may use to showcase your article through PLOS’ online channels. We choose the monthly issue image from the striking images submitted with articles scheduled for publication.

Submission Criteria

• Choose an image that represents the article in a striking and eye-catching way.
• It can be derived from a figure or supporting information file from the paper, and it may be a cropped portion of an image or the entire image.
• Alternatively, you can create or source an image, as long as it adheres to our CC BY license.
• High resolution: between 300-600 dpi
• Single panel
• Ideally avoid added details like text, scale bars, and arrows.

How to Submit

1. Submit your striking image to the submission system using the file type “Striking Image”.
2. Upload a separate file with the corresponding caption.

If no striking image is uploaded, a member of the journal team will choose an appropriate image, which may be a figure from the submission or a separately sourced CC BY image.

Additional Information Requested at Submission

Financial Disclosure Statement

This information should describe sources of funding that have supported the work. If your manuscript is published, your statement will appear in the Funding section of the article.

Include your statement in the Financial Disclosure section of the initial submission form.

The statement should include:

• Specific grant numbers
• Initials of authors who received each award
• URLs to sponsors’ websites

Also state whether any sponsors or funders (other than the named authors) played any role in:

• Study design
• Data collection and analysis
• Decision to publish
• Preparation of the manuscript

If they had no role in the research, include this sentence: “The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”

If the study was unfunded, include this sentence as the Financial Disclosure statement: “The author(s) received no specific funding for this work."

Competing interests

The corresponding author is asked at submission to declare, on behalf of all authors, whether there are any financial, personal, or professional interests that could be construed to have influenced the work.

Any relevant competing interests of authors must be available to editors and reviewers during the review process and will be stated in published articles.

Related manuscripts

When submitting a manuscript, all authors are asked to indicate that they do not have a related or duplicate manuscript under consideration (or accepted) for publication elsewhere. If related work has been or will be submitted elsewhere or is in press elsewhere, then a copy must be uploaded with the article submitted to PLOS. Reviewers will be asked to comment on the overlap between related submissions.

Preprints

PLOS encourages authors to post preprints to accelerate the dissemination of research and support authors who wish to share their work early and receive feedback before formal peer review. Deposition of manuscripts with preprint servers does not impact consideration of the manuscript at any PLOS journal.

Authors posting on bioRxiv may submit direclty to PLOS journals through bioRxiv’s direct transfer to journal service.

Authors submitting manuscripts in the life science to PLOS Computational Biology may opt-in to post their work on bioRxiv during the PLOS Computational Biology initial submission process.

Reviewer and editor suggestions

We ask authors to suggest suitable editors and at least four potential reviewers when submitting their manuscript. Bear in mind any potential competing interests when making these suggestions. It is not appropriate to suggest recent collaborators or other researchers at your institution. See our policy on competing interests for more information. 

Opposed reviewers

Authors may choose to request that an individual is excluded from the review process and not involved in their manuscript. When making these suggestions, please provide specific reasons why each person should not review your submission in each “Reason” box. The editorial team will respect these requests so long as this does not interfere with the objective and thorough assessment of the submission.

Selecting a Section

Selecting a section is required for submission and will be used to assign your manuscript to an appropriate Section Editor. Choose one of the following sections. If you are unsure, please select the section that most closely applies to your article.

Benchmarking

Studies that present good and comprehensive benchmarks in which the performance metrics of each tool evaluated reflect its real-world utility.

Biological Macromolecules
Studies of the structure, function, dynamics, interaction, and evolution of biological macromolecules (including proteins, RNA, and DNA).

Cell Biology and Physiology
Studies of animals, plants, and microbes at the cellular level. Computational approaches which elucidate mechanisms of cell function, regulation, and disease.

Epidemiology and Clinical/Translational Studies
Studies of communicable and non-communicable disease spread and of clinical research yielding insight relevant to disease spread.

Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior
Studies with a strong computational focus on all aspects of evolution, ecology, and behavior.

Genomics, Epigenomics, and Proteomics
Studies of the organization, variation, and dynamics of genomes, epigenomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, and other genome-scale molecular profiles.

Immunology, Infectious Disease, and Microbes
Studies of pathogenic and non-pathogenic microbes and immune responses directed towards them.

Neuroscience
Studies on the biological mechanisms underlying neuronal plasticity and activity, neural circuit dynamics, animal and human behavior, neurological diseases, or mental disorders.

Systems Biology
Integrative studies of interacting components (e.g. proteins, metabolites, cells, and tissues) in biological systems.

Methods
Studies describing outstanding methods of exceptional importance that have been shown to provide, or have the promise to provide, new biological insights (see below for further information).

Software
Studies describing outstanding open source software of exceptional importance that has been shown to provide new biological insights, either as a part of the software article, or published elsewhere (see below for further information).

Benchmarkng Submissions

PLOS Computational Biology publishes designated Benchmarking articles that present good and comprehensive benchmarks, in which the performance metrics of each tool evaluated reflect its real-world utility.

The benchmarked methods must be in an active area of research. Tools evaluated in the study should be comprehensive, or judiciously selected, among those publicly available in the field and evaluated with regard to their practical relevance for potential users. Novel tools created by the authors in parallel with the benchmark should not be included in the article.

The study must be transparent about how the benchmark was conducted. To ensure the results are reproducible, the training conditions of each tool should be clearly indicated and the input and expected output datasets used in the benchmark must be made freely available in a form that makes them easy to apply and reuse. For further information please consult the editorial by Peters et al.

Methods Submissions

PLOS Computational Biology publishes Methods articles that describe outstanding methods of exceptional importance that have been shown to provide, or have the promise to provide, new biological insights.

The method must already be widely adopted or have the promise of wide adoption by a broad community of users. Enhancements to existing published methods will only be considered if those enhancements bring exceptional new capabilities. The authors must clearly provide detail, data, and, where necessary, software to ensure readers’ ability to reproduce the methods and results.

Methods articles require a cover letter outlining answers to the following questions:

• What is the major innovation in the paper, compared with the state of the art of the field?
• Why is the innovation substantial and relevant?
• What is the concrete method being put forth and what is its intended user community?
• How has the method been validated?
• How is the method being made available?

Methods articles should be submitted through our online submission system. The article should follow the same general style and format and organization as in a general research article. Examples of Methods papers can be found in the Methods Collection.

Software Submissions

PLOS Computational Biology publishes articles describing an open-source tool of broad utility that represents a significant advance in providing new biological insights either as a part of the software article, or published elsewhere.

The software must already be widely adopted, or have the promise of wide adoption by a broad community of users. Enhancements to existing published open-source software will only be considered if those enhancements bring exceptional new capabilities. The software must be downloadable anonymously in source code form and licensed under an Open Source Initiative (OSI) compliant license. The source code must be accompanied by documentation on building and installing the software from source, as well as for using the software, including instructions on how a user can test the software on supplied test data.

Software articles require a cover letter explaining how the above criteria are met.

Format

Articles should be concise (less than 3500 words, not including supplementary material) and be organized as follows:

​A prerequisite for publication is that the results described in the paper must be reproducible when peer reviewers or editors choose to run the software on the deposited dataset using the parameters provided.

There is no minimal set of hardware platforms or operating systems that the software is required to run on provided they do not limit broad adoption of the software. Similarly, open-source software may depend on proprietary ancillary software, or external closed-source APIs, to run or to build. Such a dependency does not render software ineligible if it is otherwise open-source, but the dependency may be considered when judging the limits to broad adoption.

Authors are required to deposit the following with the journal upon submission for archival and review purposes.

• Source code, accompanied with the OSI-compliant license.
• Binaries (optional).
• Documentation. This must include instructions for building and installing the software from source, and any dependencies on both proprietary and freely available prerequisites. For software libraries, instructions for using the API are also required.
• Test data and instructions. The test dataset(s) must enable complete demonstration of the capabilities of the software, and may either be available from a publicly accessible data archive via a provided URI, or may be specifically created and made available with the software. The results of running the software on the test data should be reproducible, and any external dependencies (such as external databases that may change) must be documented.

The archived software and associated test data, parameters and documentation are the copy of record that matches the associated published article. They must be deposited as supplemental information file of less than 100 MB (ideally as .7z or .rar). This ensures that a version of the software is always available to the community.

Recognizing that software is subject to ongoing development we strongly encourage authors to deposit and manage their source code revisions in an established software version control repository (see Wikipedia for a list, and a feature comparison matrix). We further encourage software projects to provide active support and interact with their user communities via public mailing lists. Authors should provide links to the location of the software, mailing lists, etc. as part of the article.

Software articles should be submitted through our online submission system.

For papers written in LaTeX, the LaTeX Guidelines for formatting the paper should be followed.

Other Article Types

If you are submitting content other than a research article, read the guidelines for other article types.

You may be eligible for APC support

Many institutional partners globally have publishing agreements with PLOS to allow their corresponding authors to publish with reduced or no APCs. To determine if your corresponding author is eligible, please visit our institutional partners page to determine what kind of agreement your institution has with PLOS.

If your corresponding author is affiliated with a participating institution, they must follow the instructions below to demonstrate eligibility.

If your corresponding author is not from a participating institution and requires assistance paying publishing fees, please consider applying for a fee waiver at submission.