Author guidelines

Royal Society journals only accept submissions in English. Spelling should be British English. Abbreviations should be used only when necessary and should be defined when they are first used. SI units should be used throughout.

Language editing services provide professional editing of manuscripts prior to submission. Authors who believe their manuscripts would benefit from professional editing prior to submission are encouraged to use a language editing service. The Royal Society has negotiated a 10% discount for its authors with AJE and Charlesworth.

Royal Society Open Science has partnered with PaperPal Preflight which offers free technical checks and comprehensive language recommendations at a small discounted fee.

AuthorAid hosts a variety of useful resources to help researchers prepare articles for publication.

In order to make manuscript submission as easy as possible for authors, we have introduced format-free initial submission for the majority of our journals, apart from Proceedings B and Biology Letters which requires a Word version upon initial submission to enable accurate length estimation.

At first submission, authors can submit their manuscript in any format; however, we do still encourage authors to read the manuscript preparation guidelines below and to consider how easy a manuscript is to read by reviewers and editors.

Where applicable, manuscripts must adhere to our guidelines regarding length (see each journal website).

Once an article has been accepted for publication the main manuscript must be submitted as an editable file, not a PDF, and the source files of any figures and tables must be provided. If you are submitting a LaTeX file please see our LaTeX guidelines below.

Submissions should include the following sections.

Title page

Your article title should be a short description of the research you are reporting. The best titles are written with both human readers and search engines in mind; including keywords in your title will help readers discover your article online. The title page should also contain full names and affiliations for each author.

Abstract

The abstract should be no more than 200 words and should not contain references or unexplained abbreviations or acronyms. Your abstract should be concise and informative and should read well as a standalone piece. The general scope of the article as well as the main results and conclusions should be summarised. Please also ensure that your abstract contains all likely search terms, to assist indexers (e.g. PubMed) that scan only the title and abstract of articles. If possible, it is beneficial to have all your keywords written into the abstract. Your abstract provided at initial submission is included in reviewer invitation emails - please think about how to describe your work to make it easy for a potential reviewer to determine whether they would be suitable to review it.

Keywords

Please include at least 3 and up to 6 keywords. Try to avoid overly broad or specialised terms that might be meaningless to a reader.

Think about the words you would use to search online for articles on the same topic; these often make the best keywords. They do not necessarily need to be single words; keywords can include short phrases or terms that are easily recognised by researchers in your field.

Main text

The main text of your article should be split into clearly-labelled sections. Usually these will be background, methods, results, discussion and conclusions, however please feel free to use whatever headings and subheadings best suit your article. Abbreviations should be written out in full on first use.

Methods section (if applicable)

The Methods section should contain all elements necessary to allow interpretation and replication of the results. Please include full specific details of materials used, such as reagents, animal models or software. References to published methods or protocols (e.g. protocols.io) can also be provided. You are also encouraged to preregister your methods at a suitable repository (e.g. https://osf.io/prereg). You will also be required to provide a Data Availability statement; detailed guidance can be found below. Please additionally include the accession details in your methods sections where appropriate.

Field Stations and Marine Laboratories (FSMLs) and related research institutions and facilities are key aspects of scientific infrastructure. To ensure the support provided by FSMLs etc to our research communities is recognised, where authors have conducted research at or with the support of FSMLs etc, we encourage authors to provide the names and locations of FSMLs etc in both the methods and acknowledgements sections of their manuscript. Formal recognition of FSMLs will also give funding bodies and FSML managers the ability to track research output and deliverables more effectively to justify budgets, engage with the public to share results, and better meet broader impacts and accessibility goals. See example, with sample text included: “We studied yellow-bellied marmots from 2015 to 2020 at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in the Upper East River Valley in Gothic, CO, USA (38°57′ N, 106°59′ W; ca 2900 m elevation).”

Acknowledgements

Please acknowledge anyone who contributed to the study but did not meet the authorship criteria.

Funding

Please state the sources of funding including grant number for each author. Including this information is a requirement of many funders. You will also be asked to enter this information during the submission process, but please ensure that you also include it in the manuscript.

We suggest the following format:

This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [grant numbers xxxx, yyyy]; the Natural Environment Research Council [grant number zzzz]; and the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number aaaa].

References

All our journals use a system based on Vancouver style referencing. All references to the literature cited will be given in the order of their appearance in the text in a consecutively numbered list at the end of the article.

Whilst it will aid our production team if your final manuscript uses this format, it is not a requirement for submission. However please note that numbered references reduces your word count significantly and may be helpful for meeting page limits.

Please note that references to datasets must also be included in the reference list with DOIs where available. For example:

1. Torres-Campos I, Abram PK, Guerra-Grenier E, Boivin G, Brodeur J. 2016 Data from: A scenario for the evolution of selective egg colouration: the roles of enemy-free space, camouflage, thermoregulation, and pigment limitation. Dryad Digital Repository. (http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.5qt2k)

Each reference should contain as many of the following elements as possible:

• Author surnames with initials (up to 10 before et al. is used)
• Year of publication
• Title of paper or book
• Journal name using standard abbreviation
• Volume number
• Book publisher and location
• First and last page numbers, or article number
• Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

EndNote style files are available for most of our journals. For Royal Society Open Science please use the Open Biology style file.

Please submit a PDF as your main document. At final revision you will also be required to provide the source files.

• TeX files submitted must be generated using pdfTeX Version 3.1415926-2.4-1.40.13, TeXLive 2012 or earlier versions.
• All files required to compile the TeX source must be uploaded with the submission:
  o input Tex file and input PDF
  o ".bib" or ".bbl" file
  o if the style is specified in the Tex file, then ".bst" file is required
• All files that are needed to compile the TeX source correctly must be uploaded with the submission.
• Please do not send master TeX files containing file call-ups (except to figures and references); the TeX file must be complete with all article sections.
• Figures must be supplied as gif, tiff, jpg, png, ps or eps files, and should be a single flattened layer.
• Type 3 fonts are not accepted. Vector fonts (such as Type1, truetype, opentype etc.) are preferred.

Guidelines for document and image conversions in ScholarOne Manuscripts can be found in the Get Help Now section.

It is a requirement of Royal Society Publishing that data and code underlying a study are made publicly available, usually within a designated repository or from the supplementary material. Authors will need to complete the data accessibility section in the submission form with details about how the data and code can be accessed. Please note that it is not permitted to state that data will be available from the authors upon request.

For more information, including information about specific repositories and guidance around restricted data, please take a look at our full data sharing policy.

Supplementary material can be used for supporting data sets, supporting movies, figures and tables, and any other supporting material. Larger datasets should be uploaded to an appropriate repository rather than provided as supplementary material (see section below). The main article should stand on its own merit. The number of references included in the supplementary material should be kept to an absolute minimum as these are not recognised by many indexing services. You will be asked during the submission process if supplementary material contains data sets, code or materials.

Note that supplementary materials are created by the authors themselves and are not edited by the Royal Society so please proof-read these thoroughly before submitting. If your supplementary file contains complex formatting or equations we would recommend that you submit it as a PDF file with fonts embedded to avoid compatibility problems for readers.

All supplementary material will be published under a CC-BY licence. For more information see our data sharing policies and our licence to publish.

Authors should submit supplementary materials as supporting files with their submission via ScholarOne Manuscripts, including titles and descriptions in the submission form. Each file can be up to 350MB, but should ideally be much less. Authors with supplementary material files of a larger size (in particular, movies) should contact the relevant journal editorial office for further assistance.

All supplementary material accompanying an accepted article will be published alongside the paper on the journal website and posted on figshare, an online repository for research data. Files on figshare will be made available approximately one week before the accompanying article so that the supplementary material can be attributed a unique DOI. Online supplementary material will carry the title and description provided during the submission process, so please ensure these are accurate and informative. An example, showing the title and description as provided during the submission process, is available here.

All figures and tables should be numbered and cited in the text.

Figure and table captions must be provided and should be brief and informative and include any relevant copyright information, if taken from a published source.

At initial submission, figures can be provided within the manuscript or as separate files. Images should be minimally processed and accurately reflect the original data. Authors should retain their unprocessed data and metadata files, as editors may request them to aid in manuscript evaluation. 

Final submission: figures should be uploaded as separate files and tables must be provided in an editable format.

Accepted figure formats (no PDFs):

• PNG
• EPS
• TIFF
• JPG
• JPEG
• Powerpoint
• TeX/LaTeX-coded figures should be converted to postscript format (PS or EPS)

Figure labels:

• Times New Roman is journal style for figure labels
• 9pt, 11pt leading is preferred. Text can be reduced, where necessary or restricted for space, but should be no smaller than 7.5pt
• Special characters, such as Greek letters and mathematical operators, should be formatted in Symbol font
• Numbers and units: please use a thin space between values and units (e.g. 300 nm, 400 μm)
• In numbers, thousands should be separated by thin spaces, not commas (e.g. 10 000 000)
• Equal-to sign: please insert a full space either side (e.g. x = 300)

Multipart figures:

• Figure parts should be labelled alphabetically and in a consistent manner (left to right, then top to bottom)
• Alphabetical labels should be italicized in roman brackets, e.g. '(a)'
• Sub-parts should be labelled using bracketed roman numerals, e.g. '(ii)'
• All figure parts should be labelled in the same position
• Figure labels that appear on a coloured background, should be placed inside a white circle
• If a label interferes with the figure content, it should be placed outside the figure part (top left)

All figures will be published in colour online (the version of the record), but will be reproduced in black and white in any print versions by default. If you feel that print colour is essential for any of your figures, please list the relevant figure numbers on submission of your article.

Accessibility

Authors are encouraged to consider the needs of colour-blind readers when choosing colours for figures. Many colour-blind readers cannot interpret visuals that rely on discrimination of green and red, for example. The use of colour-safe combinations, such as green and magenta, turquoise, and red, yellow, and blue or other accessible colour palettes is recommended.

Please consider accessibility, colour alone should not be used to convey information in images and tables.

Figures from other sources should be fully acknowledged in the caption, and written permission sought for both print and electronic reproduction before being used (where relevant). For more information please read our guidance document.

If publishing an open access paper, the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence will cover all components of the paper, so any third party material used (e.g. figures) will also fall under this usage agreement. Permission must be obtained to use any material in this way, and copyright holders must be aware of the terms. This may affect how the same material can be used in other situations. If material cannot be included under the CC-BY licence then this must be identified within the text, e.g. by adding copyright information to the figure caption, or material must be identified to the Royal Society production team so that the relevant information can be added to the general copyright line for the paper. For more information please see Creative Commons guidance.

As part of the submission process in ScholarOne, you will be required to provide statements on the following, which are essential for rapid assessment. You are no longer required to add these statements in the manuscript itself - these statements will be automatically added to the paper if accepted for publication. Please have these statements ready when you submit your manuscript.

Ethics

Research on humans or human tissues will require a statement detailing ethical approval (including the name of the research body that granted approval and the project/licence number). Please also detail whether informed consent was obtained and by whom. If your study uses animals please include details of the ethical approval received, including the name of the committee that granted approval and number of the licence/approval received. Relevant fieldwork details (approvals, licences, permissions) should also be listed here. For studies requiring the removal of, for instance, fossil specimens, please also include details of the approvals sought to carry out extraction. The details of any museum and/or fossil specimens used (e.g. the specimen numbers and the institutions holding these) must be provided either in the manuscript or the supplementary files. For more information about preparing this section please visit our ethics and policies page.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and AI-assisted technologies

You will be asked to declare whether you have used AI technologies in the preparation of your paper. If you have, please provide a statement about how you have used this – the statement will be published in the final article. Please read our policy for full details of allowed use.

Data, code and materials

All papers that report primary data will require a section that states where the article's supporting data, materials and code can be accessed. Please see the above section for more information on our policies.

If these have been deposited in an external repository this section should list the database, accession number and any other relevant details. Datasets included here must also be listed in the reference section. Citing datasets and code ensure effective and robust dissemination and appropriate credit to authors.

For example:

• DNA sequences: Genbank accessions F234391-F234402 [REF#]
• Phylogenetic data, including alignments: TreeBASE accession number S9123 [REF#]
• Climate data and MaxEnt input files: Dryad doi:10.5521/dryad.12311 [REF#]

If supporting data, materials or code have been included in the article’s supplementary material, this should be stated here, for example:

The datasets supporting this article have been uploaded as part of the supplementary material.

Competing interests

Please provide a statement if you have any competing interests to declare. Competing interests are defined as those that, through their potential influence on behaviour or content or from perception of such potential influences, could undermine the objectivity, integrity or perceived value of publication. Please see the Competing Interests section of our authorship policy for more information.

If you are unsure whether you have a competing interest please contact the relevant journal editorial office for advice.

CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy)

The submitting author will be required to allocate roles to authors from a taxonomy. This taxonomy will be used to create an Authors’ Contributions section which lists the specific contribution of each author in the published article. The taxonomy consists of 14 roles that represent the different contributions authors make to journal articles. The roles are as follows: Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Funding acquisition; Investigation; Methodology; Project administration; Resources; Software; Supervision; Validation; Visualization; Writing – original draft; Writing – review & editing. More information can be found at https://credit.niso.org/.

The list of authors should meet the criteria provided on our authorship policy page. All contributors who do not meet all of these criteria should be included in the acknowledgements section.

Please carefully read our ethics and policies page before submitting. Please also review our licensing and open access conditions.

Papers submitted to Royal Society science journals are normally peer reviewed in a single-anonymized fashion (author names are not concealed, but referee names are). The referee reports and other correspondence relating to your paper must remain confidential and should not be shared or made publicly available unless the journal is operating under open/Transparent peer review. Open peer review is optional for Proceedings A and mandatory for Proceedings B, Open Biology, Royal Society Open Science.

Royal Society Open Science and Open Biology are fully open access journals and all articles in these journals are published under a CC-BY licence. All our other journals offer an open access option. Find out more about our open access options here.

All authors are required to grant us a licence to publish. Please read this carefully before submission.

Open access papers are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY) licence. This allows anybody to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt, even for commercial purposes, under the condition that the user must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse the user or their use of the work). Users do not need to notify the authors or the publisher about using the material.

Transfers may be offered when an article does not meet the scope requirement of the original journal. Editors' comments and reviewer reports on the article are transferred over and will be available to the editorial team of the receiving journal.

If your article is declined by Proceedings A and B, Interface, Biology Letters or Open Biology on the basis of scope or competition for space, editors may provide the opportunity to transfer the manuscript and peer review reports to another Royal Society journal, most commonly Royal Society Open Science.

Transferring is usually much quicker than resubmitting to another publisher as the editors can use the transferred reports rather than inviting a full set of new reviewers. 

Transferring is a two-step process and should be completed as soon as possible by the author after receiving the offer to transfer – this offer expires after four weeks.

Editors of the following journals have the option to offer the author a transfer to another Royal Society journal.

Possible transfers are:

• Biology Letters (to Royal Society Open Science)
• Interface (to Royal Society Open Science)
• Open Biology (to Royal Society Open Science)
• Proceedings A (to Royal Society Open Science)
• Proceedings B (to Royal Society Open Science, Biology Letters, Open Biology or Interface)

When you are submitting your final files for publication you will be prompted to submit a media summary. This should be no more than 100 words and aim to outline, to a lay audience, your research and any relevant findings.

If possible try to highlight why the research is important, i.e. does your research discover something new? Does it change perceptions or previous understanding? Try to link your research with examples or analogies as this enables journalists to understand and relate to your work. Please avoid using excessive jargon or statistics, unless absolutely necessary.

It is important to ensure that your user details are up to date (institution, email and telephone number). This information will be provided to journalists wishing to promote your paper, so please ensure it is updated while uploading your revisions. If you have any questions, please contact the Royal Society press office.

You are welcome to submit a potential cover image for use on the journal website and on our press site for media promotion of your article. Please ensure you obtain all relevant copyright permissions before submitting the image to us. You can upload any potential images as a 'Cover Image' when submitting your revised files.

The corresponding author will be sent a link to review the article proof through the Kriyadocs platform. All changes and queries are tracked, and authors can raise queries and regenerate the proof PDF before submitting their corrections. Users can save each session and return to the proof at a later stage.

Proofs should be read carefully, and the accuracy of tables, references and mathematical expressions checked. Major alterations to content should not be made at this stage.

Since our journals aim to publish as rapidly as possible after acceptance, only a few days may be available for checking proofs. Authors who may be absent, should either inform the relevant journal or make alternative arrangements for their proofs to be checked.

Please send any production related queries to: proofs@royalsociety.org.

On publication, we will provide you with a link providing free access to your paper. You may forward the email to your co-authors or colleagues in order for them to access the paper, however please note that these electronic reprints may NOT be used for commercial purposes or posted on openly accessible websites, unless published under a CC-BY licence. All reprints are subject to our terms and conditions.

Copies of the printed issue can be purchased on request for some journals. For further details contact our sales team.

After publication, we encourage you to share your work on social media and across your professional networks. Sharing and promoting your article to ensure that your publication is seen by a wide and relevant audience is key to maximising the impact of your research. We want to provide you with the right tools to disseminate your published article. Take a look at our top tips for promoting papers published in our journals.

Media promotion

The Society's press office promotes articles that appear in our scientific journals through weekly lists of media summaries to journalists. Please note that, like many publishers, the Royal Society employs a strict embargo policy whereby the reporting of a scientific article by the media is embargoed until a specific time. If you are approached by a journalist prior to publication, please contact the Society's press office.

It is a good idea to alert your institution's press office to the fact you are having an article published. Given enough advance warning, they may want to produce a press release to coincide with the weekly list from the Society's press office.

Closer to the time of publication, the Society's press office will contact you to confirm the online publication date for your paper, to provide additional information on the Society's embargo policy and to give you advance warning of when you may expect to be contacted by journalists.

Online article seminars

We encourage you to give an online seminar about your accepted article. Author seminars are given a DOI and are listed on our Cassyni seminar collection page and alongside published articles. For more information contact us.