Submitting your paper: final checks If you have written your paper, critically self-evaluated it and/or asked a colleague to evaluate it, and believe it to be as scientifically robust and well written as possible, you are ready to submit it to your target journal. You should by now have selected the most appropriate journal for your paper and written a convincing cover letter to the editor. Check that all of the instructions in the target journal’s Guide for Authors are complied with—if any are not, then these should be addressed before the paper is submitted or they could cause delays later on. This includes ensuring that the manuscript and any figure files are saved in the appropriate file format and of the requested resolution. Most journals encourage online submission, which usually requires registering with the target journal and setting up a submission account. This is a step-by-step procedure in which details such as full names, departmental addresses, highest degrees awarded and full contact information for all authors, not just the corresponding author, are usually requested. Following registration of an account, the submitting author will be able to upload all relevant files, including manuscript file, cover letter, separate figure files and any supplementary material files, to the journal’s online submission system. Some journals request submission by post, which requires posting the requested number of identical printed copies of the manuscript along with an electronic copy of all files on a CD. Frequently, each author is required to sign a declaration agreeing to the submission to the journal of a paper bearing their name, although some journals now verify this by e-mail. During the submission process, there might be a requirement to pay any submission costs, although publication costs are not usually requested until after a manuscript is accepted. Any figures or other content that are being reproduced or modified from previously published work will require the appropriate permissions, and these are sometimes requested at the time of submission. If a manuscript is accepted, the copyrights to the manuscript will need to be transferred to the publisher; the relevant forms for copyright transfer are sometimes made available during the submission process. The submission process sometimes allows you to recommend or exclude potential reviewers of your manuscript. If not, it is usually worthwhile doing so in your cover letter. The journal editors will try to appoint independent experts as reviewers, but will also be aware that many fields are intensely competitive among labs. They will also appreciate that your unpublished data needs to be treated sensitively, and that it might not be appropriate to put that in the hands of a competitor working on the same thing. Thus, it will help them to know who might be a ‘friendly’ reviewer and who might be less friendly. The editors will almost certainly not appoint only the reviewers you suggest and exclude all those you ask to be excluded, but they will use the information you provide to make an objective decision about who should and who should not review your paper. In choosing who to recommend as a potential peer reviewer, you should consider any researchers whose hypotheses and ideas your work supports; for example, if your work builds on previously published work, extending or confirming the findings of that work, then the senior author(s) on such a study would likely be a good candidate reviewer. A look through your reference list will help you to identify such candidates, and reading their papers closely will give you an idea of whether their thoughts are in line with your own, or perhaps opposed to them. Ideally, recommend senior researchers in the field who have propounded ideas that would be supported by the findings of your study. International collaborators in the same field also represent potential ‘friendly’ reviewers, although if you have previously co-published work with those researchers the journal editors might exclude them for potentially being bias. Working out who to exclude can be more difficult, but if you know that some other lab is working closely on the same thing, perhaps because you have seen researchers from that lab speak or present a poster at a recent meeting, it would be a good idea to ask the editors to exclude the Principle Investigator of that lab as a candidate reviewer. Also ask the editors to exclude researchers whose hypotheses or ideas are known to run counter to those suggested in your manuscript. Of course, any reviewers that are appointed will be asked to be completely objective in their assessment of your manuscript. Moreover, the editors will also be able to assess your manuscript to some degree and identify if the points raised by the reviewers are fair or not. If completely polarized reports (for example, one very positive and one very negative) are received, the editors may choose to appoint additional reviewers and delay a decision on your manuscript until they are satisfied with the reports they receive. Ultimately, if you have designed and executed your study well, show something novel and interesting, and written a clear and concise manuscript complying with the instructions for authors, you will have maximized your chances of getting over the final hurdle before acceptance.