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Editorial & Journal Policies
PNAS Author Center
Direct Submission
The standard mode of transmitting manuscripts is Direct Submission. Authors should submit a single combined PDF in any format or style for initial submissions. Manuscripts do not need to be formatted according to specific journal guidelines at this stage. The Editorial Board screens all incoming submissions and may reject manuscripts without further review, or review and reject manuscripts that do not meet PNAS standards. More than 50% of Direct Submissions are declined by the Editorial Board without additional review, within 2 weeks on average. For papers that are sent on to an editor and reviewers, the average time to receive a decision is 45 days. If accepted, authors have their articles published as soon as 4 weeks after acceptance.
Authors must recommend three appropriate Editorial Board members, three NAS members who are expert in the paper's scientific area, and five qualified reviewers. The Board may choose someone who is or is not on that list or may reject the paper without further review. Authors should indicate in their cover letter why their suggested editors are qualified to handle the paper and why any nonpreferred reviewers should be excluded. See the directory of PNAS member editors and their research interests. The editor may obtain reviews of the paper from at least two qualified reviewers, each from a different institution and not from the authors' institutions.
PNAS manages the review process. The name of the editor is anonymous to the author until the paper is accepted. Direct Submissions are published as “Edited by” the member editor, who oversees the review but is not the guarantor of the work.
Contributed Submission
An NAS member may contribute up to two of her or his own manuscripts for publication in PNAS each year. Contributed papers go through open peer review (named reviewers), with the administrative aspects of the review process handled by PNAS. About 25% of articles published in PNAS are contributed. To contribute a paper, the member must affirm that she or he had a direct role in the design and execution of all or a significant fraction of the work, and the subject matter must be within the member's area of expertise. Contributed articles must report the results of original research. Academy members who have a real or perceived competing interest, financial or otherwise, that could be seen to significantly impair their objectivity or to create an unfair competitive advantage for any person or organization tied to the research should consider submitting their work as a Direct Submission. The final version of the paper must be submitted by the last day of the year to count toward that year's annual limit.
Members who have selected at least two reviewers should submit information about their manuscript to PNAS, including a PDF file for review and documentation that the reviewers have agreed to review the paper. Each reviewer should be from a different institution and not from the authors’ institutions. Reviewers are asked to evaluate revised manuscripts to ensure that their concerns have been adequately addressed.
Members must select reviewers who have not collaborated with the authors in the past 48 months. See section iv and our Competing Interest Policy. Members must verify that reviewers are free of competing interests, or must disclose any competing interests and explain their choice of reviewers. The names and institutional affiliations of all reviewers of Contributed articles are published in a footnote. The NAS member must be one of the corresponding authors on the paper. These papers are published as "Contributed by" the responsible editor.
Review
The Direct Submission track has anonymous peer review, and the Contributed track has open peer review (named reviewers). Papers on both tracks go through a three-tier peer review process. At submission, papers are assigned to an Editorial Board member in one of the 31 NAS disciplines. If the Board member determines that the paper should proceed further, she or he assigns it to a member editor or, if the NAS membership lacks sufficient expertise, to a nonmember guest editor to oversee the peer review process. Member editors and guest editors determine whether the paper should be sent for review; if so, they solicit and evaluate peer reviews and make recommendations to the Editorial Board member, who makes the final decision to accept or reject the paper.
All manuscripts are evaluated by the Editorial Board. The Board may reject manuscripts without further review, or review and reject manuscripts that do not meet PNAS standards. Replication studies are held to the same standards as other submissions. A single negative review for a paper on either track, with which the editor agrees, is sufficient to recommend rejection. Manuscripts rejected by one member cannot be resubmitted through another member or as a Direct Submission. Information about submitted manuscripts or the identity of the assigned Board member is confidential and not shared with authors or third parties. The names of reviewers are also confidential and not shared, unless express permission is granted by the reviewers.
Appeals of decisions on rejected papers will be considered; however, appeals on the basis of novelty or general interest are unlikely to be granted. Due to the high volume of submissions that PNAS receives, a quick decision on appeals cannot be guaranteed. Appeals must be made in writing and should be sent to PNAS@nas.edu. If an appeal is rejected, further appeals of the decision will not be considered and the paper may not be resubmitted. Repeated appeals or resubmissions of a rejected manuscript without invitation by the Editorial Board will not be considered and may result in the authors being banned from submitting to PNAS.
Submission Guidelines
(i) Papers are considered provided they have not been Published Previously or concurrently submitted for publication elsewhere. What constitutes prior publication must take into account many criteria, including the extent of review, and will be determined on a case-by-case basis. Related manuscripts that are in press or submitted elsewhere must be included with a PNAS submission.
Figures, tables, or videos that have been published elsewhere must be identified, and permission from the copyright holder for both the online and print editions of the journal must be provided.
(ii) Posting on Preprint Servers, such as arXiv or bioRxiv, is permitted and will not affect editorial consideration. However, the license selected for a preprint will affect the sharing, adaptation, and reuse of material (see Licenses for PNAS Articles and the PNAS statements on prior publication and preprints for details, and see section vii for media embargo policies).
(iii) Authorship must be limited to those who have contributed substantially to the work. The corresponding author must have obtained permission from all authors for the submission of each version of the paper and for any change in authorship. Throughout submission and peer review, a single corresponding author is responsible for providing all necessary manuscript information and interactions with the editorial office. After acceptance and publication, multiple corresponding authors, who are responsible for checking the accuracy of the proof contents and who will act as points of contact for queries about the paper, are permissible; they should be indicated in the title page (see Manuscript Format and Files).
All collaborators share some degree of responsibility for any paper they coauthor. Some coauthors have responsibility for the entire paper as an accurate, verifiable report of the research. These include coauthors who are accountable for the integrity of the data reported in the paper, carry out the analysis, write the manuscript, present major findings at conferences, or provide scientific leadership to junior colleagues.
Coauthors who make specific, limited contributions to a paper are responsible for their contributions but may have only limited responsibility for other results. While not all coauthors may be familiar with all aspects of the research presented in their paper, all collaborators should have in place an appropriate process for reviewing the accuracy of the reported results.
Authors must indicate their specific contributions to the published work. This information will be published as a footnote to the paper. Published contributions are taken from the submission system, not from the manuscript file. Examples of designations include:
- Designed research
- Performed research
- Contributed new reagents or analytic tools
- Analyzed data
- Wrote the paper
An author may list more than one contribution, and more than one author may have contributed to the same aspect of the work. PNAS strongly encourages all authors to use their ORCID identifier when submitting papers. ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher. When provided, published articles display the ORCID logo and link to an author’s ORCID record.
(iv) Failure to disclose a Competing Interest at submission may result in author sanctions. Authors must disclose, at submission, any association that poses or could be reasonably perceived as posing a financial or personal competing interest in connection with the manuscript, and acknowledge all funding sources supporting the work. Disclosures must be entered directly into the submission system; providing a link to full disclosures hosted on a website is not permissible. When asked to evaluate a manuscript, members, reviewers, and editors must disclose any association that poses a competing interest in connection with the manuscript. Please see our Competing Interest Policy for details.
(v) Regarding Research Misconduct, all work should be free of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism as defined by the US Office of Research Integrity.
PNAS is a member of CrossCheck by Crossref and iThenticate, a plagiarism screening service that checks submissions against millions of published research papers and web pages. PNAS uses this software to screen manuscripts for potential text duplication. PNAS will also evaluate issues with text, data, or figures that are brought to our direct attention. Authors must place direct quotes or excerpts in quotation marks and must identify the original source reference(s). For overlapping passages that are not verbatim, authors must include the original source reference(s). PNAS may discuss the concerns with a member of the Editorial Board, the editor, or the authors. PNAS may request from the authors source data, descriptions of how experiments were performed, or explanations of how figures were prepared. Responses are assessed by subject experts.
In submitting to PNAS, all authors must agree to abide by relevant PNAS policies. Manuscripts are reviewed with the explicit understanding that all authors have seen and approved of the submitted version. In cases of suspected or alleged misconduct, PNAS follows the recommended procedures from COPE.
(vi) Completion of the online submission form gives a License to Publish the work to the NAS. If a paper is declined for publication, the license to publish is terminated.
(vii) PNAS may distribute Embargoed copies of an accepted article to the press prior to publication. Embargoes expire at 3:00 PM Eastern time, Monday of the publication week. Authors may talk freely with the press about their work but should coordinate with the PNAS News Office so that reporters are aware of PNAS policy.
If a version of your PNAS manuscript has ever been posted, in whole or in part, in any publicly accessible form, including on preprint servers, or if you plan on presenting your embargoed paper at a conference prior to publication, please note that different embargo policies may apply and you must contact the PNAS News Office immediately at 202-334-1310 or PNASnews@nas.edu.
(viii) Research involving Human and Animal Participants and Clinical Trials must have been approved by the author's institutional review board. Authors must include in the methods section a brief statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments. For all experiments involving human participants, authors must also include a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from all participants, or provide a statement why this was not necessary.
All experiments must have been conducted according to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki. Authors must follow the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors' policy and deposit trial information and design into an accepted clinical trial registry before the onset of patient enrollment. For animal studies, authors must report the species, strain, sex, and age of the animals.
(ix) Dual Use Research of Concern. Authors and reviewers must notify PNAS if a manuscript reports potential dual use research of concern. PNAS will evaluate such papers and, if necessary, will consult additional reviewers.
(x) For research using Recombinant DNA, physical and biological containment must conform to National Institutes of Health guidelines or those of a corresponding agency.
(xi) Materials and Data Availability. To allow others to replicate and build on work published in PNAS, authors must make materials, data, and associated protocols, including code and scripts, available to readers. Authors should follow the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) data principles and deposit data in community-approved public repositories (see the DataCite Repository Finder to search for appropriate repositories). Authors must disclose upon submission of the manuscript any restrictions on the availability of materials or information. Authors must include a data availability statement in the methods section describing how readers will be able to access the data, associated protocols, code, and materials in the paper. Authors are encouraged to deposit laboratory protocols and include their DOI or URL in the methods section of their paper. Data not shown and personal communications cannot be used to support claims in the work.
Authors should deposit as much of their data as possible in community-endorsed publicly accessible databases, and when possible follow the guidelines of the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles. If deposition of data is not possible, authors may use SI to show all necessary data. Research datasets should be cited in the references. (See References for citation information.) In rare cases where subject-specific repositories are not available, authors may use a general repository such as figshare, Dryad, or Open Science Framework. Fossils or other rare specimens must be deposited in a museum or repository and be made available to qualified researchers for examination.
PNAS encourages the use of Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs), unique searchable identifiers, for critical reagents and tools (antibodies, organisms, cell lines, and software projects). RRIDs link readers to external resources and enable search engines to return all papers in which a particular antibody, organism, or tool was used. Once you have located an RRID, please insert "RRID:" plus the identifier in the appropriate location in the manuscript.
For further information about accessibility of data and materials, see Sharing Publication-Related Data and Materials: Responsibilities of Authorship in the Life Sciences (2003) and Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in a Digital Age (2009).
Authors must make Unique Materials (e.g., cloned DNAs; antibodies; bacterial, animal, or plant cells; viruses; and algorithms and computer codes) promptly available on request by qualified researchers for their own use. Failure to comply will preclude future publication in the journal. It is reasonable for authors to charge a modest amount to cover the cost of preparing and shipping the requested material. Contact pnas@nas.edu if you have difficulty obtaining materials.
Plasmids: Authors are encouraged to deposit plasmid constructs in a public repository such as Addgene.
Databases: Before publication, authors must deposit large datasets (including microarray data, protein or nucleic acid sequences, and atomic coordinates for macromolecular structures) in an approved database and provide an accession number for inclusion in the published article. When no public repository exists, authors must provide the data as SI or, if this is not possible, on the author's institutional website. Authors should contact PNAS regarding special circumstances or privacy concerns.
Characterization of Chemical Compounds: Authors must provide sufficient information to establish the identity of a new compound and its purity. Sufficient experimental details must be included to allow other researchers to reproduce the synthesis. Characterization data and experimental details must be included either in the text or in the SI.
Protein and Nucleic Acid Sequences: Authors must deposit data in a publicly available database such as GenBank, EMBL, DNA Data Bank of Japan, UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, or PRIDE and provide a link to the data and associated accession numbers prior to publication.
Structural Studies: For papers describing structures of biological macromolecules and small molecules, the atomic coordinates and the related experimental data (structure factor amplitudes/intensities and/or NMR restraints) must be deposited at a member site of the Worldwide Protein Data Bank: RCSB PDB, PDBe, PDBj, or BMRB prior to publication. The PDB ID should be included in the manuscript. For nuclear magnetic resonance structures, data deposited should include resonance assignments and all restraints used in structure determination and the derived atomic coordinates for both an individual structure and a family of acceptable structures.
Papers must include literature references for all coordinate datasets as well as dataset identification. Authors must agree to release the atomic coordinates and experimental data when the associated article is published. Authors may be asked to provide the atomic coordinates and experimental data during the review process and are encouraged to provide PDB validation reports at submission. Send questions relating to depositions to deposit@wwpdb.org.
For papers describing structures of biological macromolecules from electron microscopy experiments that involve any averaging method (including subtomogram averaging), the 3D map should be deposited at either the EMBL-EBI (UK) or RCSB (USA) EMDB deposition site. Any atomic structure models fitted to EM maps must be deposited in the PDB. For electron tomographic studies with no averaging, deposition of one or more representative tomograms in EMDB is strongly recommended. PDB and/or EMDB accession codes must be included in the manuscript, together with a brief descriptive title for each accession. In cases where PDB models have been fitted into EMDB maps, the correspondences between them should be clearly stated.
For papers describing small-angle scattering experiments, authors are encouraged to follow the guidelines presented by the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr). Prior to submission, authors are encouraged to use the IUCr checkCIF service to validate their crystallographic information files (CIFs) and structure factors. Validation reports may be submitted as SI for editors and reviewers.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Studies: Authors should deposit data with XNAT Central, or other suitable public repositories.
Genomic and Proteomic Studies: Authors of papers that include genomic, proteomic, or other high-throughput data are required to submit their data to the NCBI gene expression and hybridization array data repository (GEO) or equivalent publicly accessible database and must provide the accession number. Deposition in dbGaP is encouraged. Access to the deposited data must be available at the time of publication. Submitted data should follow the MIAME checklist.
Enzymology Data: Authors should follow the Standards for Reporting Enzymology Data (STRENDA) commission guidelines when reporting kinetic and equilibrium binding data. See the Beilstein Institut/STRENDA commission website for details.
Earth and Space Sciences Data: Authors are encouraged to follow the FAIR data principles (see the DataCite Repository Finder).
Design and Analysis Transparency: Authors should follow field standards for disclosing key aspects of research design and data analysis, and should report the standards used in their study. See the Equator Network for information about standards across disciplines. PNAS encourages authors to preregister their studies and analysis plans and to provide links to the preregistration in their submission.
Statistical Analysis: Authors should include the source and version of any software used, full information on the statistical methods and measures used, full information on the statistical methods and measures used for each table and figure, such as a statistical test, estimates of parameters, exact sample sizes, and measures of evidence strength (frequentist or Bayesian). Statistical analyses should be done on all available data and not just on data from a "representative experiment." Statistics and error bars should only be shown for independent experiments and not for replicates within a single experiment (see Figure Legends for error bar details). Editors may send manuscripts for statistical review.
(xii) Figure Preparation. No specific feature within an image may be enhanced, obscured, moved, removed, or introduced. The grouping or consolidation of images from multiple sources must be made explicit by the arrangement of the figure and in the figure legend. Adjustments of brightness, contrast, or color balance are acceptable if they are applied to the whole image and if they do not obscure, eliminate, or misrepresent any information present in the original, including backgrounds.
Questions about images raised during image screening will be referred to the editors, who may request the original data from the authors for comparison with the prepared figures. If the original data cannot be produced, the manuscript may be rejected. Cases of deliberate misrepresentation of data will result in rejection of the paper and will be reported to the corresponding author's home institution or funding agency. Authors must obtain consent for publication of figures with recognizable human faces.
(xiii) SI. SI enhances articles in PNAS by providing additional substantive material, but the paper must stand on its own merits. SI may take the form of supplemental figures, tables, datasets, derivations, and audio and video files. SI is reviewed along with the paper and must be approved by the editors and reviewers. SI is posted exactly as the author has provided it on the PNAS website at the time of publication. SI is referred to in the text and cannot be altered by authors after acceptance.
(xiv) PNAS Latest Articles. PNAS articles are published daily. Papers may be published online 1 to 4 weeks before they appear in an issue. Authors who return proofs quickly and keep changes to a minimum get maximum publication speed. The article publication date is the official date of record and the final version of the article.
(xv) Open Access. All PNAS articles are free within 6 months of publication. Authors who choose the open access option can have their articles made available without cost to the reader immediately upon publication. Open access articles are published under a nonexclusive License to Publish and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license or a CC BY license for authors whose funders or institutions require it.
(xvi) Errata. PNAS publishes corrections for errors, made by the journal or authors, of a scientific nature that do not alter the overall basic results or conclusions of a published article. PNAS articles may be retracted by their authors or by the editor because of pervasive error or unsubstantiated or irreproducible data. Articles may be retracted, for example, because of honest error, scientific misconduct, or plagiarism. Errata are published at the discretion of the editors and appear as formal notices in the journal. Requests to publish errata should be sent to PNAScorrections@nas.edu.
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