Discover our publishing process

Find out how our processes and policies support the publication of high quality science in the Royal Society journals.

The Six Steps to Publication

1. Submission: Authors are requested to provide their name, verifiable information (e.g., ORCID), and co-authors' details.
2. Screening: We conduct tests to assess journal scope suitability, ethical compliance, dataset accessibility, and plagiarism.

   In addition to our expert advisors, each journal is managed by an in-house team of publishing professionals, who are responsible for ensuring that all submitted and published research passes through our checklist of strict requirements. This is to ensure that readers can trust the research that we publish. Requirements include:

   • All research papers must include a data accessibility statement which allows readers to access the data behind the paper
   • All research must have been carried out in an ethical manner, and authors are required to provide details of how this has been done
   • Papers must not be plagiarised (we use tools to check this)

3. Triage: We assign the most suitable editor with the most relevant expertise, ensuring there are no conflicting interests in the process.

The key to maintaining a high-quality process lies in our fantastic editorial teams. Each of our journals has a set of researchers, all experts in their respective fields, to oversee the papers that are submitted to us. Every journal works a little differently, but in all cases these active researchers will handle the papers themselves, or act in an advisory capacity. As practising scientists, who carry out research and publish their own work, they know exactly what authors and reviewers need. 

4. Review: Our rigorous peer-review process is pivotal in upholding research integrity and progression.
   

   Access to a wide net of experts means that we can find the right reviewers for papers, thus ensuring that high quality reviews are received. Our editors play a large role in safeguarding authors, by ensuring that feedback is given in a polite, professional and constructive manner. They all receive training on avoiding unconscious bias to ensure that researchers who submit to our journals are treated fairly. 
   
   

5. Revision and Acceptance: We evaluate the author's response to reviewer comments and thoroughly check data accessibility and funding.
   
   Our in-house editorial team plays a large role in ensuring that all papers are processed in a professional manner, for example by ensuring confidentiality to protect reviewers and authors. They also provide day-to-day advice and customer service to our editors, authors and reviewers, as well as handle any difficult situations, such as retractions or disputes between authors and editors. Royal Society Publishing is a member of COPE so we have access to resources to help us to resolve any particularly difficult cases, should these arise.
   
   
6. Production: Our Production team oversees final checks on all associated materials, including supplementary files, data, and review history documents.

If you would like to get a feel for how transparent peer review works, you can now view the review history on several of our journals. We publish the reports, decision letters and author responses from each step of the process alongside the final version. This helps readers to see what problems were flagged with the paper in earlier versions, and should help them to decide whether they feel that the final paper is trustworthy. This also provides an excellent resource for new authors and reviewers – it helps them to understand the process and also to understand that peer review is there to support and improve the science, rather than acting as a barrier to publication.

We hope that this has helped you get a better idea of how we are here to help, and encouraged you to submit your research to one of our journals in the future.