All PeerJ Computer Science articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (see each article for the exact CC BY version used). With this license, Authors retain copyright, but allow any user to share, copy, distribute, transmit, adapt and make commercial use of the work without needing to provide additional permission, provided appropriate attribution is made to the original author or source.

By using this license, all PeerJ Computer Science articles meet or exceed all funder and institutional requirements for being considered Open Access.

Authors cannot use copyrighted material within their article unless that material has also been made available under a similarly liberal license.

The submitting author will have created a free PeerJ account at the time of submission. Any co-authors will receive an email after submission with directions on how to confirm their co-authorship. Remember to check spam folders for missing PeerJ email, and we recommend you add accounts@peerj.com to your email contact lists.

After receiving a final decision of "Accept" and before the manuscript will move into production, you must decide how to pay for the publication of your article. There are three options:

Waiver Policy: Authors from countries that are classified by the World Bank as Low-income economies can request a waiver of our membership requirements for a single publication, one per submitting author, per year. If every co-author on a submission is from a country classified by the World Bank as a Low-income economy we will waive the membership requirements for every author upon request, thus making publication free.

Undergraduate Waiver Policy: If the authors choose the PeerJ Lifetime Membership route, any co-author who was an undergraduate at the time of the research may request a one-time waiver of the Membership requirement, provided the paper has senior co-author(s) who have a paid Lifetime membership plan.

Authors should indicate their request and reason for a waiver in the "Confidential Notes to Staff" field upon submission. Academic Editors and reviewers are not made aware of the waiver request.

Inform all co-authors of the submission of the manuscript to PeerJ Computer Science (note: each co-author will receive a confirmation email upon submission and will need to confirm their authorship).

Ensure that the manuscript is in full adherence with all journal policies (including such items as publication ethics, data deposition, materials deposition, etc). Additionally ensure that all co-authors are aware of, and in compliance with, all PeerJ Computer Science policies and procedures.

Manage all correspondence between PeerJ and all co-authors, keeping the full co-author group apprised of the manuscript progress.

Designate a substitute correspondent for times of unavailability.

Ensure that by the point of Editorial Acceptance all co-authors have paid publishing plans or assume responsibility for their publication charges (note: authors can pay for a publishing plan at any point up to, and including, Editorial Acceptance).

The submission must be created (and completed) by one of the co-authors, not by an agency or by some other individual who is not one of the co-authors.

Ensure the submission is free from spelling errors; grammatical errors; and unclear expression.

Ensure author names entered online exactly match those listed on your article's Author Cover Page.

Peer reviewers are encouraged (but not required) to provide their names to the authors when submitting their peer review. If they agree to provide their name, then their personal profile page will reflect a public acknowledgment that they performed a review (even if the article is rejected). If the article is accepted, then reviewers who provided their name will be associated with the article itself.

Authors are given the option to reproduce the complete peer review history of their article alongside the final publication of the article. If they choose this option then all submitted manuscript files, peer review comments, author rebuttals and revised materials are provided as a downloadable package. This is an all-or-nothing option; no text is edited or removed. Therefore, if the reviewers agreed to provide their name to the authors then their name will become part of this published record as well.

See examples of optional open peer review and the latest data on uptake by the community.

PeerJ Computer Science adheres to the prevailing industry standards and procedures for investigating publication ethics.

PeerJ Computer Science does not allow dual publication (the same material published twice in the peer reviewed literature), or dual submission (the same material simultaneously submitted to more than one journal).

Specifically, PeerJ Computer Science does not tolerate plagiarism, data or figure manipulation, knowingly providing incorrect information, copyright infringement, inaccurate author attributions, attempts to inappropriately manipulate the peer review process, failures to declare conflicts of interest, fraud, and libel. This list is not exhaustive - if there is uncertainty of what constitutes such actions, then more resources may be found at the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Council of Science Editors (CSE), or the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME).

PeerJ Computer Science will rigorously enforce our standards, and follow up on any transgressions. In extreme cases, this may call for individuals to be reported to their institutions and/or for manuscripts to be retracted. Any complaints should be directed to editorial.support@peerj.com

PeerJ Computer Science requires that all parties involved in a publication (i.e. the authors, reviewers and academic editors) should transparently declare any potential Competing Interests (also known as Conflicts of Interest). The disclosure of a Competing Interest does not necessarily mean that there is an issue to be addressed; it simply ensures that all parties are appropriately informed of any relevant considerations while they work on the submission.

Authors are asked to declare all competing interests upon submission. Reviewers are expected to consider any competing interests before agreeing to review, and to confirm that they have no competing interests before submitting their review. Academic Editors are expected to recuse themselves from handling a manuscript if they feel they have a competing interest.

Potential competing interests should be declared even if the individual in question feels that these interests do not represent an actual conflict. Examples of Competing Interests include, but are not limited to: possible financial benefits if the manuscript is published; prior working, or personal, relationships with any of the authors; patent activity on the results; consultancy activity around the results; personal material or financial gain (such as free travel, gifts, etc.) relating to the work; personal convictions (religious, political, etc.) which may have a bearing on the work, and so on.

While possible financial benefits should appear here, actual funding sources (institutional, corporate, grants, etc.) should be detailed in the funding disclosure statement.

Separately from declaring Competing Interests, PeerJ Computer Science also requires that authors disclose the financing which made their work possible.

The Funding statement is published in the final article. This disclosure provides added transparency.

Where applicable, PeerJ Computer Science requires that authors provide an Ethics statement which details the relevant ethical standards which were met when conducting the research.

In addition to providing an Ethics statement upon submission (for review purposes), this same statement should also be provided in the Materials and Methods section of the manuscript.

Where IRB approval was required, the authors must provide an ethics statement as part of their Materials and Methods section detailing full information regarding their approval (including the name of the granting organization, and the approval reference numbers).​​ If an approval reference number is not provided, written approval must be provided as confidential supplemental file.

When research is conducted in any location other than at the researchers’ institution or a permanent field station then appropriate permission (aka ‘field research permit’) to access the site must have been obtained according to applicable laws and norms.

• Adequate proof of this permission or a clear indication of how the access was allowed under local or international law must be provided at submission.
• If verbal permission was obtained then the name and authority of the person who gave it must be provided.

If material (samples, specimens, etc.) were collected then the field permit or a separate collection permit must be provided to show that this was permitted by the appropriate authority.

If materials were exported then documentation must also be provided to show that this was approved by the authority in the source and destination countries according to relevant national and international laws.

This documentation is not necessarily published, but by requiring these documents we aim to ensure the legality and integrity of the science we publish.

On a case by case basis, PeerJ Computer Science reserves the right to consider whether or not a submission could be considered as sensitive in this context.

If an author, editor or reviewer feels that a submission may be subject to concerns surrounding dual use then it is incumbent on them to report this concern to staff.

PeerJ Computer Science is committed to improving scholarly communications and as part of this commitment, authors must make materials, code, data, and associated protocols available at the time of submission for peer review and publication. The preferred way to meet this requirement is to publicly deposit as noted below. Cases of non-compliance will be investigated by PeerJ Computer Science which reserves the right to act on the results of the investigation.

• Authors are encouraged to extend the utility of their manuscripts with the inclusion of helpful meta-data so that published works can find connections to other works in the public domain. Journal manuscripts are often scanned by text-mining software that locates and extracts core data elements, like gene function. Adding standard ontology terms, such as the Gene Ontology or others from the OBO Foundry can enhance the recognition of your contribution and description. This will also make human curation of literature easier and more accurate. Depending on the details of the data being presented, this information may be requested by editors.
• Where suitable domain-specific repositories do not exist, authors may deposit in Dryad, Dataverse, the Open Science Framework, or an institutional repository and provide the access information with the manuscript. Alternately, authors may choose to deposit non-standard data (including figures, posters, rich media) on Figshare for example. In all cases, the DOI reference (where applicable) should be provided in the article.
• Any supporting data sets for which there are no suitable repositories may be made available as publishable Supplemental Information files by PeerJ Computer Science.
• Data should be provided in an appropriate, machine-readable format. Note: formats such as PDF, Powerpoint, and images of tables etc. are not considered suitable for raw data sharing.
• In accordance with the principles in Sharing Publication-Related Data and Materials (National Academies Press, 2003), research using proprietary data must also evaluate a piece of comparable public data if the authors cannot or do not make the proprietary data available.
• We strongly encourage that the software be made open source, available under an appropriate license, and deposited in an appropriate archive.
• 3D scans/models should be uploaded to a repository such as MorphoSource and made public at or before acceptance.
  • Data should be reported on a per-scan/specimen basis - not simply a link to a project. Morphosource provides guidance on how to cite data and can assign a DOI to each scan. If you are using a different repository, please use the most granular citation you can.
  • Authors using MorphoSource to share data during the review process must allow access to a PeerJ "reviewer account" in order to share their private data with editors/reviewers.
  • PeerJ staff will provide the authors with a MorphoSource reviewer account registered to PeerJ.
  • Authors must make this user one of their project members by inviting them using the appropriate tools under the "members" tab on the MorphoSource project dashboard.
  • At acceptance, authors must make the dataset public and provide the public DOIs for each scan. They may then remove this user from the project.
  • Authors using a different repository must make arrangements to allow anonymous reviewer access if the data are not public at the time of submission.

In all cases, accession / deposition reference numbers must be provided in the manuscript.

Some repositories offer authors the option to host data associated with a manuscript confidentially, and provide anonymous access to PeerJ Computer Science for reviewing purposes. In those cases it is the authors' responsibility to coordinate prompt public release of the data with the repository upon acceptance, if kept confidential during peer review.

Any potential restrictions on data, code or materials (for example: proprietary data, material limitations, or information relating to human subjects), including how other researchers might attempt replication without this data, must be disclosed at the time of submission. PeerJ Computer Science reserves the right to refuse consideration of such articles.

Any data or code not already available publicly without restrictions must be submitted for review. These will be handled in confidence by the Academic Editor and reviewers.

We strongly recommend (and in some cases require) that authors adhere to the reporting standards which have been adopted by their field (or which apply to their study design).

Authors should indicate which standards were followed and should, where appropriate, provide checklists, protocols, flowcharts etc as Supplemental Information as part of their article submission. Where accession or reference numbers have been obtained, these should also be provided in the text.

As a general statement, data should be referred to by the most specific identifier available for the database archive it is submitted to.

All statistical results should be reported in full, including the test that was performed, the reason for choosing that test, the corresponding test statistic, sample size, degrees of freedom, the exact p-value expressed up to 2 decimal spaces unless 'p<0.001' or confidence interval, and effect sizes. Where multiple testing is performed, suitable corrections must be made.

Do not report inferential statistics such as p values or confidence intervals for known quantities such as baseline measurements. The spread of the data can be indicated by descriptive statistics such as standard deviation, or quantiles and ranges.

Where appropriate, we recommend that you overlay bar graphs with scatter plots showing individual data points, or use another method to show the distribution of the data, such as boxplots, violin plots, etc.

For experiments involving human subjects, appropriate approval must have been obtained from the relevant approval body (in most cases the authors’ Institutional Review Board, or ethics committee). The authors must provide an ethics statement as part of their Materials and Methods section detailing full information regarding their approval (including the name of the granting organization, and the approval reference numbers). If an approval reference number is not provided, written approval must be provided as a confidential supplemental information file. Any research must have conformed to the Declaration of Helsinki. If an approval was not obtained, the authors must provide a statement explaining why it was not needed.

Authors must include a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from all subjects. If consent was written, an empty copy of the consent form used should be provided as a Confidential Supplemental Information file. If consent was verbal instead of written, then an explanation should be provided (in the Materials and Methods section), and verbal consent must have been approved by the IRB which gave permission for the study.

Individual privacy and anonymity must be protected. Identifying information (such as names, photographs, identifying data) should not be included in the manuscript. Exceptions can be made only when evidence is provided that the individuals in question have given explicit approval. More information about individual privacy, anonymity, and informed consent can be found in the ICMJE Privacy and Confidentiality guidelines.

Authors may request that specific individuals be prevented from seeing their submission (a practice known as 'opposition').

Requests to oppose individuals should be limited in nature, should refer to specific individuals (not broad lists or categories of people), and should be made only with good reason.

While we will attempt to accommodate reasonable requests, we cannot guarantee that all requests will be honored.

If an author strongly believes that a decision has been made which is not in accordance with the PeerJ Computer Science editorial criteria they may appeal the decision by emailing editor@peerj.com

Appeals cannot be prioritised over new submissions and often take some time to be resolved. PeerJ will aim to respond to the initial appeal within two weeks.

Appeals must be submitted with detailed information as to why the original decision was in error, including a point by point response to all reviewer/Academic Editor comments in the decision letter.

PeerJ will review the Appeal and may involve a member of the Editorial Board to decide whether the Appeal should be granted. In some cases this process might involve re-review of the article.

The decision resulting from this process will be considered final.

PeerJ Computer Science does not consider articles which have previously appeared in a recognized peer-reviewed journal (as this represents dual publication).

PeerJ Computer Science accepts submissions which have previously appeared on preprint servers (including PeerJ Preprints and arXiv); have previously been presented at conferences; or have previously appeared in other ‘non journal’ venues (for example: blogs or posters).

We encourage authors to discuss and disseminate their findings as they wish. If they are discussing submissions which have not yet been formally accepted, then they should state this fact. If they are discussing with journalists, they should inform the editorial office so that we are aware of potential news deadlines.

When an article is selected to be Press Released, PeerJ Computer Science will set an embargo on news coverage corresponding to the publication date of the article. Once it is set, we request that news media do not publish stories ahead of this embargo (primarily as the final article itself will not be available until that date).

Once accepted and press released, authors may not prevent journalists from discussing an embargoed article with other researchers (for example by requiring an NDA to be signed).

PeerJ requires that all public comments follow the normal standards of professional discourse.

All commenters are named and their comments are associated to their PeerJ profile.

PeerJ does not allow anonymous or pseudonymous commenting or user profiles.

If a Commenter has any possible Conflict of Interest, they should declare this conflict as part of their Comment.

PeerJ does not tolerate language that is insulting, inflammatory, obscene, or libelous.

PeerJ reserves the right to edit/remove all or parts of Comments to bring them in line with these policies. Repeat offenders will have commenting rights removed. PeerJ is the final arbiter as to the suitability of any comments.

PeerJ Computer Science publishes accepted manuscripts under a CC BY license.

It is the author’s responsibility to obtain the appropriate permissions from the original publisher to republish any previously published text, figures, tables, Supplementary Information, etc., in an Open Access journal under a CC BY license.