Information for authors

Submission of articles for theme issues

Philosophical Transactions B does not consider unsolicited submissions, and only publishes issues on dedicated theme topics, some of which derive from Royal Society Discussion meetings. If you're looking to publish an individual research or review article please consider one of our sister journals, such as Proceedings B, Biology Letters, Open Biology or Royal Society Open Science. Information about these journals can be found here. If you're interested in Guest Editing a Theme Issue please see our Proposals information page for details of how to submit a proposal.

Please note that your paper will be required to fit the brief given when commissioned, and meet the high quality standard of the journal. Therefore whilst we endeavour to allow opportunities to revise throughout the process, the Guest Editors and the journal’s Editorial Board retain the right to reject papers. Prompt submission on schedule will allow for the maximum revision time possible.

Article types

Issues of Philosophical Transactions B contain a mix of article types, including original research, reviews, opinion pieces, hypotheses etc. Hybrid papers (reviews with a small amount of new data) can be appropriate. The Guest Editor(s) of the issue will make it clear what type of article is expected from you when commissioning your contribution. More information on different article types can be found on the Guest Editor information page.

When submitting your article, you will be required to select a type from ‘Research’, ‘Review’ or ‘Opinion piece’. Please select the most appropriate for your paper. If you have any problem deciding, please contact the Guest Editor or the Editorial Office.

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.

A PDF or Word document with figures embedded is acceptable at initial submission for review, however we will require an editable text document and individual figure files for production.

You may find it useful to use our manuscript template, which will have been sent to you previously. A LaTeX template can be downloaded here.

Details on length will have been sent to you by the Editorial Office. As a rough guide, please aim for no more than 9 printed pages. This equates to approximately 6000 words, 250 words of tables and 3 medium figures.

Charges

Philosophical Transactions B does not have page or colour charges.

Open data in Philosophical Transactions B

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. The Royal Society will cover the costs of depositing data with Dryad. This service allows you to upload material under embargo, providing a link that can be shared with the reviewers and Editors – please include this in the data accessibility statement on submission.

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.

This article may be useful for preparing your data:
Jenkins, G.B. et al. (2023). Reproducibility in ecology and evolution: Minimum standards for data and code. Ecology and Evolution, 13, e9961. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.9961

Submission checklist

Before submitting your invited paper to the journal, please ensure that you have prepared your article in line with our submission checklist. If anything is unclear, or if you have any queries before submitting, please contact the Editorial Office.

Submit your article

Papers must be submitted using our online submission system. You should have already received instructions and a login for the site via email in advance but if you have any problems then please contact the Editorial Office. You will need to use the existing link to 'Submit an invited paper' or 'Create a resubmission' as appropriate.

Suggesting reviewers

We are committed to increasing the diversity of our reviewer pool. When recommending reviewers, we would particularly appreciate suggestions of suitably qualified researchers from underrepresented groups (including women, ethnic minority scientists, scientists with disabilities and other underrepresented groups), early career researchers, and researchers from the global South.

Processing your manuscript

The Guest Editor(s) will manage the review process for these articles and make decisions on papers, overseen by the journal’s Editorial Office. Each paper is assigned to a particular handling Editor from the Guest Editor team; however they may discuss your paper and reviewer reports with their co-editors. All submitted papers are reviewed externally and are usually seen by at least two reviewers. Reviewers are selected by the handling Guest Editor, who is provided with tools to help them to find suitable reviewers and avoid bias. The review process is a single-anonymised model, whereby reviewers are aware of the authors’ identities but reviewer identities are withheld. Reviewer comments are used as a guide for the Editors, but final decision rests with the Guest Editor handling the paper, and they may also provide their own feedback. For information on what reviewers are asked to look for please see here. Once all papers have been approved by the Guest Editor(s) and the Editorial Office, the articles for the issue will be put into production.

The journal’s Editorial Board will assist with decisions on papers in the case of conflicts of interest or if the Guest Editors have concerns about ethical irregularities.

Submissions are routinely screened for plagiarism and, where relevant, image integrity (to mitigate against image manipulation and the growing threat of paper mills).

For more details on how your paper will be processed please read the Guidelines for Guest Editors.

Publishing licences

As a condition of submission, we ask authors to agree to the terms and conditions set out in our licence to publish. Authors submitting to Philosophical Transactions B will be asked to agree to our standard licence by default. If and when an author chooses to publish their paper as open access, they are asked to agree to the open access licence.

Open Access in Philosophical Transactions B

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. If you are a researcher from an institution signed up to one of our Read & Publish agreements, all open access fees and invoices are automatically covered by your library. Corresponding authors in low- and middle-income countries and territories included in our Royal Society Open Access Equity scheme are eligible for a full waiver, which will be applied automatically. This is applicable for papers first submitted after 31 July 2023. Please ensure that you select the Open Access option when prompted if you wish to benefit from this.

Preprint repositories

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

Appeals

Authors will be informed once a final decision has been reached by the Guest Editor. Appeals will only be considered if there has been a fundamental and clear misunderstanding of the research presented in the manuscript. Authors must provide a formal rebuttal letter to the Philosophical Transactions B Editorial Office. Appeals are only allowed under exceptional circumstances at the discretion of the appropriate Editor and must be submitted as soon as possible; within the schedule for the theme issue.

Language editing services

Language editing services provide professional editing of manuscripts prior to submission. Authors are encouraged to use language editing services if needed, but the Royal Society does not take responsibility for or endorse these services, and their use has no bearing on acceptance of a manuscript for publication. The Royal Society has negotiated a discount with certain services for its authors - find out how to claim this here.