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Style and Format

Content Types

Article types below are all handled through this online submission system, including:

Cover Letter

Upload a cover letter as a separate file in the submission system. The length limit is 1 page. The cover letter should include the following information:

- Explain of what was previously known

- Summarize the study’s contribution to the scientific literature

- Describe the significance of the findings to a broad readership

- Suggest appropriate Academic Editors/Reviewers to handle your manuscript

The cover letter is confidential to the editors and will not be available to reviewers.

Manuscript Organization

Manuscripts should be organized as follows. Instructions for each element appear below the list.

Main Manuscript

Open Science are flexible with regard to the format of initial submissions. Within reasons, style and length will not influence consideration of a manuscript. If revisions are requested, the editor will provide detailed formatting instructions at that time.

Title Page

Title

Write in sentence case and better not contain technical terms, abbreviations, punctuation, and active verbs.

 

Author List

Author names and affiliations

Write author names in the following order:

- First name (if used)

- Middle name (if used)

- Last name (surname, family name)

Each author on the list must have an affiliation. The affiliation includes the following core information in this order: department(s), university(-ies), or organizational affiliation(s), city, state/province (if applicable), zip code or postal code, country.

 

Multiple addresses

Authors have the option to include a current address in addition to the address of their affiliation at the time of the study. The current address should be listed in the byline and clearly labeled “current address.” At a minimum, the address must include the author’s current institution, city, and country.

 

Multiple affiliations

If an author has multiple affiliations, enter all affiliations on the title page only. In the submission system, enter only the preferred or primary affiliation. Author affiliations will be listed in the typeset PDF article in the same order that authors are listed in the submission.

 

Corresponding author

Corresponding author(s) should be identified with an asterisk. The submitting author is automatically designated as the corresponding author in the submission system. The corresponding author is the primary contact for the journal office and the only author able to view or change the manuscript while it is under editorial consideration.

 

The corresponding author role may be transferred to another coauthor. However, note that transferring the corresponding author role also transfers access to the manuscript. (To designate a new corresponding author while the manuscript is still under consideration, watch the video tutorial below.)

 

Only one corresponding author can be designated in the submission system, but this does not restrict the number of corresponding authors that may be listed on the article in the event of publication. Whoever is designated as a corresponding author on the manuscript file will be listed as such upon publication. Include an email address for each corresponding author listed on the manuscript.

 

Group authorship

Unrestricted group authorship is permitted. Group authors should be footnoted with numerical superscripts. The footnote should read "These authors contributed equally to this work" and should appear directly after the affiliation addresses.

 

Main Text

Abstract

The Abstract consists of a single paragraph of 150 words or fewer. It should provide a general introduction to the topic and a brief nontechnical summary of your main results and their implication.

 

The Abstract should:

- Describe the main objective(s) of the study

- Explain how the study was done, including any model organisms used, without methodological detail

- Summarize the most important results and their significance

- Not exceed 300 words

Abstracts should not include:

- Citations

- Abbreviations, if possible

 

Introduction

The introduction should:

- Provide background that puts the manuscript into context and allows readers outside the field to understand the purpose and significance of the study

- Define the problem addressed and why it is important

- Include a brief review of the key literature

- Note any relevant controversies or disagreements in the field

- Conclude with a brief statement of the overall aim of the work and a comment about whether that aim was achieved

 

Materials and Methods

The Materials and Methods section should provide enough detail to allow suitably skilled investigators to fully replicate your study. Specific information and/or protocols for new methods should be included in detail. If materials, methods, and protocols are well established, authors may cite articles where those protocols are described in detail, but the submission should include sufficient information to be understood independent of these references.

 

Results, Discussions, and Conclusions

These sections may all be separate, or may be combined to create a mixed Results/Discussion section (commonly labeled “Results and Discussion”) or a mixed Discussion/Conclusions section (commonly labeled “Discussion”). These sections may be further divided into subsections, each with a concise subheading, as appropriate. These sections have no word limit, but the language should be clear and concise.

 

Together, these sections should describe the results of the experiments, the interpretation of these results, and the conclusions that can be drawn.

 

Authors should explain how the results relate to the hypothesis presented as the basis of the study and provide a succinct explanation of the implications of the findings, particularly in relation to previous related studies and potential future directions for research.

 

Acknowledgments

Keep acknowledgments brief and do not include thanks to anonymous referees or editors, or effusive comments. Grant or contribution numbers may be acknowledged. 

 

This section should be proofread carefully, as amendments or corrections are unlikely to be considered for publication as corrections. Declare the following: “The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript”.

Authors are responsible for ensuring that anyone named in the Acknowledgments agrees to be named.

 

References

Any and all available works can be cited in the reference list. Acceptable sources include:

- Published or accepted manuscripts

- Manuscripts on preprint servers, providing the manuscript has a citable DOI or arXiv URL.

Do not cite the following sources in the reference list:

- Unavailable and unpublished work, including manuscripts that have been submitted but not yet accepted (e.g., “unpublished work,” “data not shown”). Instead, include those data as supplementary material or deposit the data in a publicly available database.

- Personal communications (these should be supported by a letter from the relevant authors but not included in the reference list)

- Submitted research should not rely upon retracted research. You should avoid citing retracted articles unless you need to discuss retracted work to provide historical context for your submitted research. If it is necessary to discuss retracted work, state the article’s retracted status in your article’s text and reference list.

Ensure that your reference list includes full and current bibliography details for every cited work at the time of your article’s submission (and publication, if accepted). If cited work is corrected, retracted, or marked with an expression of concern before your article is published, and if you feel it is appropriate to cite the work even in light of the post-publication notice, include in your manuscript citations and full references for both the affected article and the post-publication notice. Email the journal office if you have questions.

 

References are listed at the end of the manuscript and numbered in the order that they appear in the text. In the text, cite the reference number in square brackets (e.g., “We used the techniques developed by our colleagues [19] to analyze the data”). Open Science uses the numbered citation (citation-sequence) method and first three authors, et al.

 

Do not include citations in abstracts.

 

Make sure the parts of the manuscript are in the correct order before ordering the citations.

 

Please use the following styles for references

 

Author Contributions Statement

Provide at minimum one contribution for each author in the submission system. Authors should:

- Use initials to identify individual contributors (e.g., "A.B. designed the experiments")

- Provide concise descriptions of each author's specific contributions

- Use the CRediT Taxonomy to describe each contribution.

Contributions will be published with the final article, and they should accurately reflect contributions to the work. The submitting author is responsible for completing this information at submission, and we expect that all authors will have reviewed, discussed, and agreed to their individual contributions to ensure that they are aware of the submission.

 

Data and Code Availability

Provide a data and code availability statement as a separate section after the Methods section but before the References, under the heading “Data and Code Availability”;

Deposit all data and related metadata underlying the findings reported in a submitted manuscript in an appropriate public repository.

This section is needed for Article, Report and Review. For no data sharing: "No new data were created or analyzed in this study" or "Data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request."

 

Supporting information

Supporting information files are published exactly as provided, and are not copyedited. Authors are encouraged to deposit all research data in a suitable repository where appropriate.

File Types

The Open Science publishing platform supports any file type for supporting information files. 

File Size

For ease of reader access, we recommend that supporting information files be less than 10 MB.

TIP: Ways to reduce file size

- Compress very large files (e.g., LZW compression of TIFFs, etc.)

- Change format (e.g., convert a very large EPS or SVG to PDF)

- Collect as a ZIP file (e.g., multipage datasets)

Figures and Tables

Supporting figures and supporting tables need to adhere to our supporting information guidelines. They do not follow the same requirements as tables and figures in the main body of your manuscript, because we host them on servers that can handle a wider variety of file types than our published articles.

Item Description

You may use almost any description as the item name of your supporting information as long as it contains an "S" and number. For example, “S1 Appendix” and “S2 Appendix,” “S1 Table” and “S2 Table,” and so forth.  

Common item descriptions include, but are not limited to:

- Alternative Language Abstract

- Appendix

- Checklist

- Dataset

- Figure

- File

- Movie

- Protocol

- Supporting Information

- Table

- Text

- Video

Use whole numbers when naming your supporting information files. Combine separate parts (e.g., S1A and S1B Table) into one file (e.g. S1 Table) or rename with whole numbers (e.g., S1 and S2 Table).

 

Match the names of your supporting information files with the supporting information captions within your manuscript. For example, a PDF file for “S2 Fig.” must be named “S2_fig.pdf”.

Captions

The supporting information name and number are required in a caption, and we highly recommend including a one-line title as well. You may also include a legend in your caption, but it is not required. Format your supporting information captions as follows:

 

     S1 Text. Title is strongly recommended. Legend is optional.

 

In the published article, supporting information files are accessed only through a hyperlink attached to the captions. For this reason, you must list captions at the end of your manuscript file. You may include a caption within the supporting information file itself, as long as that caption is also provided in the manuscript file. Do not submit a separate caption file.

In-Text Citations

We recommend that you cite supporting information in the manuscript text, but this is not a requirement. Cite the files using the format outlined in Item Description.

If you cite supporting information in the text, citations do not need to be in numerical order.

If you wish to refer to an element within a supporting information file, such as a table within a supporting text file, cite it in one of the following ways: “Table A in S1 Text,” “Table in S1 Table,” or “data in S1 Text.” Do NOT cite it as “S1 Table in S1 Text.” This may lead to hyperlinking errors. 

Multimedia Files

Quality and format

We expect reasonable video quality and prefer 128 kbit/s AAC audio ZD and 480p H.264 video in an MPEG-4 (mp4) container. However, we accept other video file formats: mov, avi, mpg, mpeg, mp4.

File size

Preferred size limit of videos is 10 MB. If making the dimensions smaller or recompressing the video compromises the image quality or usefulness of the video, we can accept the video file as is.

Video players

Videos must open and play in common players, such as QuickTime Player, Windows Media Player, or VLC.  

Codecs

A codec (“compression-decompression”) is a software module that contains algorithms used by encoding or playback software to encode or decode video and/or audio information.

Popular proprietary codecs include Windows Media Video and QuickTime. Open source video codec alternatives include x264 or the XviD codec. XviD is a high-quality codec and is the most widely supported open source option available. It is relatively simple for most people to watch as many players have native support for XviD.

Standards

Videos compression standards, such as the MPEG1, MPEG2, and MPEG4 standards set by the Motion Picture Experts Group, are a set of rules that video codecs and formats must be designed to adhere to. The MPEG4 standard contains several parts including Advanced Simple Profile (MPEG4 Part 2) that contains elements implemented in codecs such as XviD, 3ivX, DivX, and H.264 (MPEG4 Part 10).

 

Figures and Tables

Figures

Do not include figures in the main manuscript file. Each figure must be prepared and submitted as an individual file. Figures may not exceed one page.

 

Cite figures in ascending numeric order at first appearance in the manuscript file.

Figure Titles and Legends

- A figure label with Arabic numerals, and “Figure” abbreviated to “Fig” (e.g. Fig 1, Fig 2, Fig 3, etc). Match the label of your figure with the name of the file uploaded at submission (e.g. a figure citation of “Fig 1” must refer to a figure file named “Fig1.tif”).

- Figure titles may not contain parenthetical information, reference citations, or footnotes.

- All reference citations within a figure must also be included in the figure legend.

- For any figures presenting pooled data, the measures should be defined in the figure legends (for example, data are represented as the mean ± SEM).

Tables

Word tables should not be tab or space delineated and should not include colored text or shading, but embedded graphics with color are OK.

 

Do not use paragraph returns to separate data within a cell.

 

Cite tables in ascending numeric order upon first appearance in the manuscript file.

 

Place each table in your manuscript file directly after the paragraph in which it is first cited (read order). Do not submit your tables in separate files.

Tables Titles and Legends

- Tables require a label (e.g., “Table 1”) and brief descriptive title to be placed above the table. Place legends, footnotes, and other text below the table. 

- Table titles may not contain parenthetical information, reference citations, or footnote citations.

- Use superscripted lowercase letters (beginning with "a") for footnotes in tables. Do not use numbers or symbols.

- Tables must be numbered as Table 1, Table 2, Table 3, etc., rather than as Table 1a, Table 1b, Table 1c, etc.

- If italic font is used within a table to indicate some feature of the data, an explanation of its meaning must be given in the table legend. Bold text may not be used in tables.

- If a referenced paper or study is mentioned within a table, it must be included in the references list and must be followed by its appropriate citation number (e.g., "Author et al.1") within the table.

- All abbreviations within a table must be defined in the table legend or footnotes.

Additional Information Requested at Submission

Financial Disclosure Statement

This information should describe sources of funding that have supported the work. It is important to gather these details prior to submission because your financial disclosure statement cannot be changed after initial submission without journal approval. If your manuscript is published, your statement will appear in the Funding section of the article.

 

Enter this statement in the Financial Disclosure section of the submission form. Do not include it in your manuscript file.

 

The statement should include:

- Specific grant numbers

- Initials of authors who received each award

- Full names of commercial companies that funded the study or authors

- Initials of authors who received salary or other funding from commercial companies

- URLs to sponsors’ websites

 

Also state whether any sponsors or funders (other than the named authors) played any role in:

- Study design

- Data collection and analysis

- Decision to publish

- Preparation of the manuscript

If they had no role in the research, include this sentence: “The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”

 

If the study was unfunded, include this sentence as the Financial Disclosure statement: “The author(s) received no specific funding for this work."

 

Related manuscripts

Upon submission, authors must confirm that the manuscript, or any related manuscript, is not currently under consideration or accepted elsewhere. If related work has been submitted to Open Science or elsewhere, authors must include a copy with the submitted article. Reviewers will be asked to comment on the overlap between related submissions.

 

We strongly discourage the unnecessary division of related work into separate manuscripts, and we will not consider manuscripts that are divided into “parts.” Each submission to Open Science must be written as an independent unit and should not rely on any work that has not already been accepted for publication. If related manuscripts are submitted to Open Science, the authors may be advised to combine them into a single manuscript at the editor's discretion.

 

Preprints

Open Science is committed to accelerating the dissemination of research and encourages authors to support this important goal by posting a preprint of their manuscript. Posting a manuscript on a preprint server does not impact its consideration at Open Science.

 

Open Science allows papers that have been previously posted on preprint servers, such as arXiv, bioRXiv, medRxiv, ChinaXiv or other recognized preprint servers. This policy applies only to the original submitted version of the paper; authors should not post revisions that respond to editorial input and peer review, or post the final published version to preprint servers.

 

Competing Interests

Submit a competing interest statement for all content of the journal.

If there are no interests to declare, please note that with the following wording: "The authors declare no competing interests." The text in this section should match the text provided in the declaration of the interests form.