Accepted Manuscripts
Accept Decisions
There are two types of accept decisions: editorial accept and formal accept.
Editorial accept
Editorial acceptance means that the manuscript is provisionally accepted pending final checks for formatting and technical requirements. You will be notified of these requirements by email. See details of our final checks below.
The editorial acceptance date is is the acceptance date that will appear on the published article.
Formal accept
Formal acceptance is issued when the final checks are complete. At this time, the manuscript will be sent to our production department.
All communication about editorial accept decisions and final checks will be sent to the corresponding author.
Final Checks
When a manuscript is editorially accepted, it will go through a final round of checks to ensure the formatting and content meet our technical requirements. Some of the manuscript elements checked at this stage include:
- Author names and affiliations
- Funding statement
- Competing interests statement
- Data availability statement
- Figure and table formatting
- File names for figures, tables, and supporting information
You can expedite the progress of your manuscript during this stage by reviewing our submission guidelines beforehand and by responding promptly to our queries.
Author Proof
To ensure prompt publication, your manuscript will not be subject to detailed copyediting and you will not receive a typeset proof for review. You will be able to review the final version of your manuscript when it is returned to you at editorial accept.
Press and Media
Accepted manuscripts are under embargo until 2 p.m. Eastern Time, USA, on the date of publication. This is the time when the article becomes available online.
A manuscript is considered “in press” when it has been formally accepted by the journal.
Every week, the journal will identify research to be featured in a press release. You may also choose to issue a press release yourself or through your institution. Read more about press releases.
You may discuss your research prior to publication for scientific purposes only. This includes talking about your research at conferences and on preprint servers.
Please do not discuss your research with the press until after your manuscript has been accepted and assigned a publication date.
Indexing and Archiving
All published articles will be deposited in PubMed Central. Read about our other indexing and archiving services.
Reprints
All PLOS content is Open Access and you can print as many copies as you like for any purpose for free. For professionally produced reprints, use the EzReprint service. Read more about reprints.