Submit a single PDF to PeerJ for peer-review

PeerJ’s mission is to “help the world efficiently publish its knowledge” and so we are pleased to announce the latest step towards fulfilling that mission – single file submission.

It is a sad fact that most people find the process of submitting their work to a journal to be unnecessarily onerous. This fact was made painfully apparent in a recent tweet from Craig Winstanley

Which is why we have been so pleased to see the great feedback we get from everyone who uses the PeerJ submission system. Building a user-friendly experience has been one of our core goals:

However, we appreciate that even with our user-friendly system, we could further reduce the author burden by allowing authors to submit a single file for peer-review (e.g. a PDF or a Word doc with all figures or tables embedded within it).

Therefore, from now on, when you submit your article to PeerJ for peer-review you will get the choice of submitting it as a single file (with embedded images/tables) or as individual component files + metadata (which we then merge into a reviewing PDF). If you pick the former, then you can move swiftly into peer-review with the minimum of additional work or effort.

The single file will be used for the first round of peer-review. If the submission gets a decision of “Major Revisions” or “Minor Revisions” then you will still be asked to supply the component files at the next submission round.

Individual component files are still required for a number of reasons before final production, including making sure that what actually goes into production is what was peer-reviewed; and to ensure that we have the highest resolution images possible (you would be surprised to learn that some authors cannot find their original figure files by the time they get to production…). However, we hope that you agree that by allowing a single file for the initial round of peer-review we have moved one step closer towards making our system as user friendly as possible and to fulfilling our mission to “help the world efficiently publish its knowledge”.

Experience the PeerJ process for yourself, and take advantage of our free publication offer (when you also submit a PrePrint) through the last day of March.