Information for authors

Article types

Research Articles
Full research articles should contain original scientific research. Their length should be over 2500 and not exceed 8000 words (this includes cover page, references and acknowledgements). The word count is strictly enforced.

Reviews
Review articles should be around 8000 words, but there is some scope for flexibility. They should aim to interest communities working at the physical sciences/life sciences interface and should cover the latest developments in an area of cross-disciplinary research. These articles should put such research in a wider context and be written in a style that will make them accessible to readers in a wide range of disciplines. Reviews will normally be published by invitation, although we are happy to receive proposals for prospective articles from authors. Complete literature surveys are not encouraged. Please contact the Editorial Office if you wish to propose a review article.

Reports
Reports are short, letters-style contributions of no more than 2500 words, (including references and figure captions) and up to four displays (i.e. figures and tables), of which no more than two should be figures. These articles are published rapidly, and preliminary and more speculative work of high quality is strongly encouraged.

Preparing your article

Please take care to follow the Royal Society Publishing Instructions for Authors when preparing your article for submission. Our editorial policies can be found here. Please read these carefully before submission, paying particular attention to our ethics, open data and open access policies.

Articles published in J. R. Soc. Interface should be accessible to readers from a wide variety of scientific backgrounds. We therefore encourage authors to include equations and technical details in appendices rather than in the main article.

Please note: J. R. Soc. Interface is not typeset in LaTeX and therefore does not provide template files, however we happily accept submissions in this format.

Charges

J. R. Soc. Interface does not have page or colour charges.

Open data in J. R. Soc. Interface

We require supporting data and information, including source code and other digital research materials, to be made available at the time of submission. This is in line with our policies to promote greater openness in scientific research and to allow, as well as encourage, other researchers to perform full replications of published studies. For more information please refer to our data sharing policies. Data submitted as electronic supplementary material will, upon acceptance of a manuscript, be deposited at the Royal Society's figshare portal free of charge.

Datasets and code that have been deposited in an external repository should be appropriately cited in both the reference list and data accessibility section. Unless there are strong extenuating circumstances for doing so, we will not accept statements such as "Data and materials are available upon request from the authors" in our data accessibility statements. The data, code or other digital research materials must be publicly accessible and clearly indicated as such, and your manuscript will be returned to you in the event the Editor does not consider your data accessibility statement to meet our submission requirements, and you will be asked to provide further details. Exceptions to this policy are at the Editor’s discretion only.

Submit your article

Papers must be submitted using our online submission system.

Processing your manuscript

The journal operates a single-blind peer-review policy, whereby reviewers are aware of the author(s) identities but the reviewer identities are withheld. Guidance is given to all staff and the Editorial Board to prevent biases affecting the processing of a manuscript. Reviewers are also provided with information on how to peer review for the journal. The peer reviewers are informed of the decision returned to the authors.

The peer review process may be repeated for subsequent versions of a manuscript submitted to J. R. Soc. Interface.

Please note that J. R. Soc. Interface reserves the right to reject a paper if we cannot find referees.

Open Access in J. R. Soc. Interface

Authors may have their article made freely available to all, immediately upon publication, by payment of an article processing charge. Such articles are covered by a Creative Commons license allowing redistribution and re-use, and we deposit them in PubMedCentral on the author's behalf. For full details including information on our Article Processing Charge please visit our Open Access page.

Preprint and direct transfers

In accordance with our preprint policy, we encourage authors to deposit early versions of articles in appropriate subject repositories or preprint servers.

J. R. Soc. Interface supports submission of manuscripts via bioRxiv, meaning that after submitting to bioRxiv there is the facility to transmit their manuscript files and metadata directly to J. R. Soc. Interface for consideration. There is no need to upload files again and re-enter author information, thus saving the author time. Please see our policy for more information on sharing your work at the prepublication stage.

Unconscious bias

J. R. Soc. Interface is committed to the efforts undertaken by the Royal Society and Royal Society Publishing to make users of our services aware of and responsive to the challenges posed by unconscious biases. As part of these efforts, the Royal Society has published an In Verba blog post, a guidance PDF, and short video animation to support users in understanding and tackling unconscious bias. Our authors are strongly encouraged to familiarise themselves with these publications when considering submitting to the journal.