General Information for Authors

Science is a weekly, peer-reviewed journal that publishes significant original scientific research, plus reviews and analyses of current research and science policy. Our main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, U.K. We welcome submissions from all fields of science and from any source. Competition for space in Science is keen, and many papers are returned without in-depth review. Priority is given to papers that reveal novel concepts of broad interest. We are committed to the prompt evaluation and publication of submitted papers. [Download PDF copy of Information for Contributors from 1 February 2008 print issue.]

• Categories of signed papers
• Science Express
• Manuscript selection
• Submission Requirements
• Authorship
• Prior Publication
• Human research studies
• Animal Care
• Related Papers
• Unpublished data and personal communications
• Conditions of acceptance
• Funding and conflict of interest
• Database deposition policy
• License
• Data availability
• Access policies
• Materials sharing
• Embargo policy
• Science contact information

Categories of Signed Papers

[Note: Unless otherwise stated, word-count limits cited in the following paragraphs include text, references, notes, and table and figure captions.]

Reviews (4 journal pages, on average) describe new developments of interdisciplinary significance and highlight unresolved questions and future directions. All Reviews undergo peer review. They include an abstract, an introduction that outlines the main point, and brief subheadings. A maximum of 40 references is suggested. Most Reviews are solicited by the editors, but unsolicited submissions may also be considered

Brevia are brief contributions of 600 to 800 words of text (including authors' names, affiliations, and references) accompanied by one illustration (a maximum of four panels) or table and not more than six references. Titles should be no more than eight words in length. Authors should also submit an abstract of 100 words or less, which will appear online only. Supporting online material is allowed (no more than one illustration or table or 500 words of text). Brevia present research results on subject matter attractive to, and understandable by, scientists from a wide range of fields. Interdisciplinary work, or experiments or analyses that produce a result of general interest, are especially appropriate for this section. Authors should avoid highly technical presentations and jargon specific to particular disciplines. Manuscripts are peer-reviewed in the usual manner.

Research Articles (up to ~4500 words, Including references, notes and captions, or ~5 journal pages) are expected to present a major advance. Research Articles include an abstract, an introduction, up to six figures or tables, sections with brief subheadings, and a maximum of 40 references. Materials and Methods should usually be included in supporting online material, which should also include information needed to support the paper's conclusions.

Reports (up to ~2500 words or ~3 journal pages) present important new research results of broad significance. Reports should include an abstract, an introductory paragraph, up to four figures or tables, and a maximum of 30 references. Materials and Methods should usually be included in supporting online material, which should also include information needed to support the paper's conclusions.

Technical Comments (up to 1000 words, excluding references and captions; up to 15 references), which are published only on Science's Web site, Science Online, discuss papers published in Science within the previous 6 months. Technical Comments should have no more than two figures or tables; authors should submit a brief abstract (less than 50 words) to accompany their comment. The authors of the original paper are given an opportunity to reply. Comments and responses are peer reviewed and edited as needed. As noted, the full text of comments and responses is published online only; abstracts of the discussions appear in the Letters section of the print journal.

The following Science sections offer broadly accessible commentary by scientists and other experts on issues of interest to Science readers. With the exception of Letters and the Education Forum, most items in these sections are commissioned by the editors, but unsolicited contributions will be considered on occasion.

• Letters (up to 300 words) discuss material published in Science in the last 3 months or issues of general interest. Letters should be submitted using our Web submission form (www.submit2science.org), although we can also accept letters by postal mail. Letters are not acknowledged on receipt, nor are letter authors generally consulted before publication. Whether published in full or in part, letters are subject to editing for clarity and space. E-letters are online-only, 400-word contributions for promoting rapid, timely discussion.
• Policy Forum (1000 to 2000 words plus 1-2 figures or illustrations) presents issues related to the intersections between science and society that have policy implications.
• Education Forum (approximately 2000 words) presents original research and, occasionally, essays on science education and its practice. Unsolicited submissions are welcome.
• Books et al. (up to 1000 words) presents reviews of current books, multimedia, exhibitions, and films of interest to Science readers.
• Perspectives (up to 1000 words plus 1 figure) highlight recent exciting research, but do not primarily discuss the author's own work. They may provide context for the findings within a field or explain potential interdisciplinary significance. Perspectives commenting on papers in Science should add a dimension to the research and not merely be a summary of the experiments done in the paper. Although many of the Perspectives that comment on research published in Science are solicited, we welcome inquiries regarding new advances and fresh insights. As these are meant to express a personal viewpoint, with rare exceptions, Perspectives should have no more than two authors

Science Express

Each week, Science selects several papers for rapid online publication in advance of the scheduled print publication date. These papers are published essentially as supplied by the authors, with minimal copyediting by Science; a fully copyedited version appears later In print. The official publication date of these papers Is the date that they are posted online; the print version of a paper originally published on Science Express indicates the date the paper was published online and gives access and citation information. Papers published online are available free to AAAS members, and others on a pay per view basis or through institutional site license subscriptions to Science Express.

Manuscript Selection

Science is committed to prompt evaluation and publication of submitted papers. Our submission and review process is now fully electronic. Papers are assigned to a staff editor who has knowledge of the field discussed in the manuscript. Most submitted papers are rated for suitability by members of Science's Board of Reviewing Editors. The editors at Science consider this advice in selecting papers for in-depth review; priority is given to papers that reveal novel concepts of broad interest. Authors of papers that are not highly rated are notified promptly, within about 1 to 2 weeks. Authors are notified of decisions by e-mail only. (Membership in AAAS is not a factor in selection of manuscripts for publication.) Repeated submissions of the same manuscript will not be acknowledged. Science treats all submitted manuscripts as confidential documents. Science also instructs and expects our Board of Reviewing Editors and reviewers to treat manuscripts as confidential material. Our peer review process is also confidential and identities of reviewers are not released. (Letters and Technical Comments are sent to the authors of papers on which they comment for response or rebuttal, but otherwise are treated in the same way as other contributions with respect to confidentiality.)

Papers are reviewed in depth by at least two outside referees. Reviewers are contacted before being sent a paper and asked to return comments within 1 to 2 weeks for most papers. We are able to expedite the review process significantly for papers that require rapid assessment. Selected papers are edited to improve accuracy and clarity and to shorten, if necessary. Papers cannot be resubmitted over a disagreement on interest or relative merit. If a paper was rejected on the basis of serious reviewer error, resubmission may be considered.

Press coverage and presentation at scientific conferences can affect consideration of papers at Science. Reporting the main findings of a paper in the mass media may compromise the novelty of the work and thus its appropriateness for Science. Authors are free to present their data at scientific meetings but should not overtly seek media attention or give copies of the figures or data from their manuscript to any reporter, unless the reporter agrees to abide by Science's press embargo. If a reporter attends an author's session at a meeting and writes a story based only on the presentation, such coverage will not affect Science's consideration of the author's paper. (For more information, please see the embargo entry in the Science Contributors FAQ.)

Some papers may need additional editorial oversight or present potential security concerns. Such papers will be brought to the attention of the Editor-in-Chief for further evaluation. If necessary, outside reviewers with expertise in the area will be consulted.

Most papers are published 4 to 8 weeks after acceptance; selected papers are published online within 2 weeks of acceptance on Science Express (www.sciencexpress.org).

Papers submitted to Science but not accepted for publication may, in some cases, be eligible for publication in Science Signaling. Two scenarios are likely to be most common: In certain cases, reviewers are satisfied that a paper's conclusions are adequately supported by the data presented, but the general interest of the findings is not found to be sufficient to justify publication in Science. In such a case, the authors will be offered the opportunity for publication in Science Signaling, with further review required when reviewers have asked for additional experiments during revision. Conversely, some papers provide provocative new concepts, but are not thought to be sufficiently persuasive to be appropriate for a general-interest journal like Science. In this case again, reviewers and editors may find an appropriately worded version of the paper to be acceptable for publication in Science Signaling, without further in depth review. The authors will be notified in their rejection letter, if their paper can be considered at Science Signaling.

Submission Requirements

Authorship All authors must agree to be so listed and must have seen and approved the manuscript, its content, and its submission to Science. Any changes in authorship must be approved in writing by all the original authors. Science will send an email to all authors to confirm receipt of each paper. Submission of a paper that has not been approved by all authors may result in immediate rejection without appeal.

Prior publication Science will not consider any paper or component of a paper that has been published or is under consideration for publication elsewhere. Distribution on the Internet may be considered prior publication and may compromise the originality of the paper as a submission to Science. Please contact the editors with questions regarding allowable postings. Also see section on press coverage above under manuscript selection.

Human research studies Informed consent must be obtained for studies on humans after the nature and possible consequences of the studies were explained. All research on humans must have IRB approval.

Animal care Care of experimental animals must be in accordance with the authors' institutional guidelines.

Related papers Copies of papers submitted to other journals by any of the authors that relate to the paper submitted to Science must be included with the submission.

Unpublished data and personal communications Citations to unpublished data and personal communications cannot be used to support claims in the paper.

Conditions of Acceptance

When a paper is accepted for publication in Science, the following conditions apply:

Funding and conflict of interest Authors must agree to disclose all affiliations, funding sources, and financial or management relationships that could be perceived as potential sources of bias, as defined by Science's conflict of interest policy.

Database deposition policy Science supports the efforts of databases that aggregate published data for the use of the scientific community. Therefore, before publication, large data sets (including microarray data, protein or DNA sequences, and atomic coordinates or electron microscopy maps for macromolecular structures) must be deposited in an approved database and an accession number provided for inclusion in the published paper.

• Molecular structure data. Atomic coordinates and structure factor files from x-ray structural studies or an ensemble of atomic coordinates from NMR structural studies must be deposited and released at the time of publication. Three-dimensional maps derived by electron microscopy and coordinate data derived from these maps must also be deposited. Approved databases are the Worldwide Protein Data Bank [through the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics, Macromolecular Structure Database (MSD EMBL-EBI), or Protein Data Bank Japan], BioMag Res Bank, and Electron Microscopy Data Bank (MSD-EBI), and for synthetic molecules, the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre.
• DNA and protein sequences. Approved databases are GenBank or other members of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (EMBL or DDBJ) and SWISS-PROT.
• Microarray data. Data should be presented in MIAME-compliant standard format. Approved databases are Gene Expression Omnibus and ArrayExpress.
• Large data sets with no appropriate approved repository must be housed as supporting online material at Science, or when this is not possible, on the author's web site, provided a copy of the data is held in escrow at Science to ensure availability to readers. For answers to questions regarding allowable supporting online material, please see our guidelines; further questions can be directed to swills{at}aaas.org, Online Editor.

License Authors retain copyright but agree to grant to Science an exclusive license to publish the paper in print and online.

Data availability After publication, all data necessary to understand, assess, and extend the conclusions of the manuscript must be available to any reader of Science. We recognize that discipline-specific conventions or special circumstances may occasionally apply, and we will consider these in negotiating compliance with requests. Any concerns about your ability to meet Science's requirements must be disclosed and discussed with an editor. For further information about accessibility of data and materials, see the following resources.

• Cech, T. R. (2003), Sharing Publication-Related Data and Materials: Responsibilities of Authorship in the Life Sciences.
• American Psychological Association, Responsible Conduct of Research: Data Sharing and Data Archiving.
• National Science Foundation Policy on Data Sharing [PDF].

Access policies After publication, authors may post the accepted version of the paper on the author's personal Web site and are provided one referrer link that can be posted on a personal or institutional Web page, through which users can freely access the published paper on Science's Web site. For research papers created under grants for which the authors are required by their funding agencies to make their research results publicly available, Science allows posting of the accepted version of the paper to the funding body's archive or designated repository (such as PubMed Central) six months after publication, provided that a link to the final version published in Science is included. (Details on this can be found in the license agreement for authors.) Original research papers are freely accessible with registration on Science's Web site 12 months after publication.

Materials sharing After publication, all reasonable requests for materials must be fulfilled. A charge for time and materials involved in the transfer may be made. Science must be informed of any restrictions on sharing of materials [Materials Transfer Agreements or patents, for example] applying to materials used in the reported research. Any such restrictions should be indicated in the cover letter at the time of submission, and each individual author will be asked to reaffirm this on the Conditions of Acceptance forms that he or she executes at the time the final version of the manuscript is submitted. The nature of the restrictions should be noted in the paper. Unreasonable restrictions may preclude publication.

Embargo policy The paper will remain a privileged document and will not be released to the press or the public before publication. Questions should be referred to the AAAS Office of Public Programs (202-326-6440). (For more information, please see the embargo entry in the Science Contributors FAQ.) Science also provides a free electronic reprint service.

Science Contact Information

Editorial Inquiries:

Washington DC, USA office:

• Phone 202-326-6550
• Fax 202-289-7562

Europe office, Cambridge, UK:

• Phone + 44 (0) 1223 326500
• Fax + 44 (0) 1223 326501

E-Mail:

• science_editors{at}aaas.org (general editorial queries)
• science_letters{at}aaas.org (queries about letters to the editor)
• science_bookrevs{at}aaas.org (general book review queries)

Contact information for individual editors can be found on the Science Magazine Meet the Editorspage.

Manuscript Submission:

Manuscripts and Letters to the Editor for Science should be submitted online at submit2science.org. We do not accept submissions by email or postal mail. Before submitting, all prospective contributors should carefully read the detailed article guidelines, formatting instructions, and uploading directions found on the Science Author Help Site.

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