Editorial and Journal Policies

In submitting to PNAS, all authors must agree to abide by PNAS editorial and journal policies. Manuscripts are reviewed with the explicit understanding that all authors have seen and approved of each submitted version.

Peer Review Process

Learn more about the peer review process for member-contributed submissions.

Editorial Policies

Authorship and Contributions

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. Use of artificial intelligence (AI) software, such as ChatGPT, must be noted in the Materials and Methods (or Acknowledgments, if no Materials and Methods section is available) section of the manuscript and may not be listed as an author.

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, which 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.

ORCID

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. Learn more or register for ORCID.

Corresponding Authors

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, 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 published article, are permissible; these authors should be indicated on the title page (see Submitting Your Manuscript).

Group Authors

A group author is an organization or conglomerate of researchers that is collectively credited with authorship. An individual can appear as both an author and a member of a group author on the same paper. Group authors usually share contributions collectively, such as "performed research" or "contributed new reagents or analytic tools." The group author is listed on the author byline instead of listing all individual members. Individual members of the group are displayed within the Supporting Information of the published article and are included within the article metadata to ensure that the article is correctly indexed and linked to individual members in searches. Before submitting a manuscript with a large author list, please contact [email protected].

Competing Interest

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.

PNAS recognizes the multiplicity of financial and other competing interests confronting authors, referees, and editors. The PNAS policy is designed to manage, not eliminate competing interests. The most important element of our policy is that all authors, members, referees, and editors must disclose any association that poses or could be reasonably perceived as posing a financial or intellectual competing interest in connection with the manuscript. Divulging a potential competing interest usually does not invalidate the research or the comments of a referee or editor; it simply provides the reader information necessary to independently assess the work.

When a competing interest is disclosed either by the author or the editor, a descriptive footnote will be included with the published article.

PNAS reserves the right to publish an erratum disclosing competing interests related to a previously published paper. Authors, referees, or editors who have deliberately or recklessly failed to disclose a competing interest may receive sanctions, including being banned from publishing in PNAS.

This policy applies to all material published in PNAS, including research articles, Perspectives, Editorials, Reviews, Colloquium papers, and Commentaries. For further details, please contact PNAS.

Guidance

Financial Competing Interest

A financial interest in an organization whose products or services are related to the article’s subject matter and could be reasonably perceived as capable of influencing the objectivity, integrity, or interpretation of a publication should be disclosed as a competing interest.

In determining whether the financial interest meets the “reasonably be perceived as…” criterion, use your best judgment to arrive at a good-faith determination.

These financial interests may include employment, substantive ownership of stock or mutual funds*, membership on a standing advisory council or committee, service on the board of directors, public association with the company or its products, consulting fees, patent filings, compensation as a spokesperson, honoraria received in exchange for services, or financial support.

These considerations apply to financial interests held by you, your spouse or domestic partner, or your dependent children within the last 48 months.

*For example, many US universities require faculty members to disclose interests exceeding $10,000 or 5% equity in a company.

Personal Association Competing Interest

A competing interest due to a personal association arises if you are asked to serve as editor or reviewer of a manuscript whose authors include a person with whom you had an association, such as a thesis advisor (or advisee), postdoctoral mentor (or mentee), or coauthor of a paper, within the last 48 months. When such a competing interest arises, you may not serve as editor or reviewer.

A competing interest due to personal association also arises if you are asked to serve as editor or reviewer of a manuscript whose authors include a person with whom you have a family relationship, such as a spouse, domestic partner, or parent–child relationship. When such a competing interest arises, you may not serve as editor or reviewer.

A personal association competing interest may exist for Academy members who submit a Contributed manuscript if a suggested reviewer was, for example, the member’s thesis advisee (or advisor), postdoctoral mentee (or mentor), or coauthor of a paper, within the last 48 months. When such a competing interest arises, an alternative reviewer must be suggested.

Author Responsibilities

During manuscript submission, authors are required to complete the online form, disclose any competing interests, and acknowledge all funding sources supporting the work. The corresponding author must ensure that all authors have disclosed any competing interests.

Editor and Reviewer Responsibilities

When asked to evaluate a manuscript, reviewers and editors must disclose any association that poses a competing interest in connection with the manuscript. Referees and editors are asked to recuse themselves from handling a paper if the competing interest makes them unable to make an impartial scientific judgment or evaluation. A referee or editor who has a competing interest but believes that it does not preclude his or her making a proper judgment must disclose to the journal the nature of the interest.

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.

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.

Embargo Policy

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 [email protected].

Errata

Authors should notify PNAS when a correction to a published article is needed by completing the Correction Request form. At the discretion of PNAS, errors discovered after the publication of the article that do not substantively affect the scientific results, such as minor typographical mistakes that could affect meaning, may be corrected online without a formal Correction. A note regarding the postpublication update will be appended to the updated article.

For errors of a scientific nature that do not alter the overall results or conclusions of a published article, PNAS will publish independent, citable corrections. Requests for these corrections will be sent to an editor for review to determine whether the errors warrant a Correction.

PNAS articles may be retracted by their authors or by the editors because of pervasive error or unsubstantiated or irreproducible data. Articles may be retracted, for example, because of honest error, scientific misconduct, or plagiarism.

Name changes do not require a formal correction, unless specifically requested. See Name Changes for more information.

Human and Animal Participants and Clinical Trials

Studies 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, or provide a statement why this was not necessary. 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.

Image Integrity

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.

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 in a public repository upon publication. Exceptions for legal, ethical, and logistical (e.g., size) must be noted. 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) prior to publication. At submission, authors must describe how readers will be able to access the data, associated protocols, code, and materials mentioned in the paper. A statement detailing data sharing plans (including all data, unique materials, documentation, and code used in analysis) will be included in the published article. Any restrictions on access to the data, or any parts of it, must be disclosed in detail at submission. 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 supporting information (SI) to show all necessary data. Research datasets, whether original or previously published, must be cited in the references as a condition for publication. In rare cases where subject-specific repositories are not available, authors may use a general repository such as figshare, Dryad, or Open Science Framework.

For further information about accessibility of data and materials, see:

• Reproducibility and Replicability in Science (2019)
• Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles

Failure to comply with the PNAS materials and data availability policies may preclude future publication in the journal. Contact [email protected] if you have difficulty obtaining materials or data.

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.

Data availability requirements:

Material	Policy
Algorithms and Computer Codes	Authors must make algorithms and computer codes available to readers, e.g., through GitHub or Zenodo. The version of code associated with the paper must be maintained by the authors.
Characterization of Chemical Compounds	Authors must provide sufficient information to establish the identity of a new compound and its purity. Authors must include sufficient experimental details to allow other researchers to reproduce the synthesis. Authors must include characterization data and experimental details either in the text or in the SI.
Datasets	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. Citation to the dataset should be included in the references. 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 privacy concerns, legal constraints to sharing, or to provide instructions for accessing large datasets.
Earth and Space Sciences Data	Authors should follow the FAIR data principles. See DataCite Repository Finder
Enzymology Data	When reporting kinetic and equilibrium binding data, authors should follow the Standards for Reporting Enzymology Data (STRENDA) commission guidelines.
Fossils and Rare Specimens	Fossils, other geological samples, archeological materials, or other rare specimens must be deposited in a museum or repository and be made available to qualified researchers under conditions stipulated by the institution and/or relevant entities that permitted the work and/or house the collections. Authors must ensure that specimens were collected in concordance with international norms, and with all national and local laws of the territory in which they were discovered.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Studies	Authors should deposit data to XNAT Central or equivalent publicly accessible repository.
Genomic and Proteomic Studies	Authors must submit genomic, proteomic, or other high-throughput data to the NCBI gene expression and hybridization array data repository (GEO) or equivalent publicly accessible database. Authors should deposit data in dbGaP. Accession numbers must be provided and access to deposited data must be available at the time of publication. Submitted data should follow the MIAME checklist.
Plasmids	Authors are encouraged to deposit plasmid constructs in a public repository such as Addgene.
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. Including raw data in the public repositories is recommended. Authors must provide a link to the data and associated accession numbers prior to publication. Showing examples within the manuscript (body or supplementary information) of individual replicates prior to averaging in order to provide a sense of variability of the data is recommended. Detailed information should be available in associated datasets.
Structural Studies: Small-angle Scattering Experiments	Authors are encouraged to follow the guidelines 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.
Structural Studies: Structures of Biological Macromolecules from Electron Microscopy Experiments that Involve any Averaging Method (including subtomogram averaging)	Authors should deposit the 3D map at either the EMBL-EBI (UK) or RCSB (USA) EMDB deposition site. Any atomic structure models fitted to EM maps must be deposited in 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. Where PDB models have been fitted into EMDB maps, the correspondences between them should be clearly stated.
Unique Materials (e.g., cloned DNAs; antibodies; bacterial, animal, or plant cells; viruses)	Authors must make unique materials promptly available on request by qualified researchers for their own use. Failure to comply will preclude future publication in the journal. Authors may charge a modest amount to cover the cost of preparing and shipping the requested material.

Name Changes

PNAS recognizes that people change their names for a variety of reasons (e.g., gender identity or change in marital status). An author, editor, or reviewer who wishes to change how their name appears on a published PNAS article should complete the Name Change Request form. PNAS will work on each request to ensure that the change is made quickly, accurately, and confidentially, if requested. Given/family names and initials will be updated in all versions of the article (HTML and PDF), as well as metadata records of the paper. No indication or notification of the change will be published unless a formal correction is requested. Once the change is made, only the new name will be associated with the paper. PNAS will send the updated information to PubMed, PubMed Central, and Crossref, but cannot control changes in other downstream repositories or indexing services. PNAS cannot update references (in text or reference list), only listed names of authors, reviewers, or editors in the byline.

For additional questions or information, please contact [email protected].

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 Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY).

Preprint Servers

Posting on preprint servers, such as arXiv or bioRxiv, is permitted and will not affect editorial consideration. However, authors must disclose preprint deposition. 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, preprints, and the media embargo policy for details). Please contact the PNAS News Office ([email protected]) before posting an accepted manuscript as a preprint.

Previous Publication

Submitted manuscripts must not have 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.

Recombinant DNA

Physical and biological containment must conform to National Institutes of Health guidelines or those of a corresponding agency.

Research Misconduct

All work should be free of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism as defined by the US Office of Research Integrity. In cases of suspected or alleged misconduct, PNAS follows the recommended procedures from COPE.

PNAS uses 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 and may request from the authors source data, descriptions of how experiments were performed, or explanations of how figures were prepared. PNAS may discuss concerns with a member of the Editorial Board, the editor, or the authors.

Authors should place direct quotes or excerpts from others’ publications in quotation marks and must identify the original source reference(s). For text passages that overlap with another, published work, but that are not verbatim, authors must include the original source reference(s).

Transfers, Resubmissions, and Appeals

PNAS Nexus was established as a transfer journal of quality papers from PNAS. Submissions that have been reviewed and declined by PNAS, along with the associated reviewer and editor comments, may be transferred PNAS Nexus to save time for authors and reviewers. Questions about the suitability of your manuscript for PNAS Nexus should be directed to [email protected]. Once a manuscript is transferred from PNAS, authors may edit their files and manuscript details before completing the submission process at PNAS Nexus. Authors may always submit directly to PNAS Nexus without mentioning their PNAS submission.

Resubmissions to PNAS may be allowed upon request. Appeals must be made in writing and sent to [email protected]. PNAS may consider author appeals of decisions on rejected papers; 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. 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.

Statistical Analysis

Statistical analyses should be done on all available data and not just on data from a "representative experiment." Statistical analyses should include:

• the source and version of all software used, and
• 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).

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.