The entire guide for authors and referees is available in PDF format.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NATURE JOURNALS
Nature Neuroscience is editorially independent, and its editors make their own decisions, independent of the other Nature journals. If a paper is rejected from one Nature journal, the authors can use an automated manuscript transfer service to submit the paper to another Nature journal via a link sent to them by the editor handling the manuscript. Authors should note that referees' comments (including any confidential comments to the editor) and identities are transferred to the editor of the second journal along with the manuscript. In that case, the journal editors will take the previous reviews into account when making their decision, although in some cases the editors may choose to take advice from additional or alternative referees. Alternatively, authors may choose to request a fresh review, in which case they should not use the automated transfer link, and the editors will evaluate the paper without reference to the previous review process. Click here for details of the manuscript transfer service, and for links to NPG journals and subject areas. A general explanation of the relationships between Nature titles can be found here.

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LICENSE AGREEMENT AND AUTHOR COPYRIGHT
Since February 2002, the policy of Nature Publishing Group has been to allow authors to retain copyright to their own primary research. We therefore no longer require authors to transfer copyright to us, although we require that they grant us a license to publish their work in print and electronic form. We cannot proceed with publication until the license form has been signed and returned to us along with the corrected proofs. We encourage authors to release the accepted version of their paper, before copy editing, six months after publication to public archives, such as PubMed Central.

The license agreement PDF is available here, US government employees click here.

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EMBARGO POLICY AND PRESS RELEASES
Publication in Nature Neuroscience is conditional on there being no prior disclosure of the work to the media. Thus, authors should not give press conferences or otherwise encourage media coverage of submitted work, except on the understanding that the embargo will be respected. Failure to do so may prejudice further consideration of the manuscript. This policy is in no way intended to restrict open discussion within the scientific community, however, and so the presentation of results at scientific meetings (including the publication of abstracts) is acceptable, as is the deposition of unrefereed preprints in electronic archives.

Once scheduled for publication, papers are listed in a press release that is distributed to the media, under embargo, about one week before publication. Papers that are deemed especially newsworthy are highlighted by a brief summary, written by the editors. Authors may therefore receive calls from the media during this time; we encourage them to cooperate with journalists to ensure that media coverage of their work is as accurate and balanced as possible. Authors whose papers are already scheduled for publication may also arrange their own publicity (for instance through their institutional press offices), but they must strictly adhere to our press embargo.

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USE OF EXPERIMENTAL ANIMALS AND HUMAN SUBJECTS
For manuscripts reporting experiments on live vertebrates or higher invertebrates, authors must identify the committee approving the experiments, and must confirm that all experiments were performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. For manuscripts reporting experiments on human subjects, authors must identify the committee approving the experiments, and must also include a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from all subjects. These statements should appear in the Methods section (or for contributions without Methods sections, within the main text or in the captions of relevant figures or tables). Referees may be asked to comment specifically on any cases in which concerns arise.

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COMPETING FINANCIAL INTERESTS
In the interest of transparency, the Nature journals now require authors of research, review and perspective articles to make a declaration of their competing financial interests in relation to papers accepted for publication. For details, please see our policy and Nature Neuroscience editorials from October 2001 and October 2003.

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AVAILABILITY OF MATERIALS AND DATA
An inherent principle of publication is that others should be able to replicate and build upon the authors' published claims. Therefore, a condition of publication in Nature Neuroscience is that authors are required to make materials, data and associated protocols available to readers on request. Any restrictions on the availability of materials or information must be disclosed at the time of submission of the manuscript, and the methods section of the manuscript itself should include details of how materials and information may be obtained, including any restrictions that may apply. One preferred form of disclosure is a link from the methods section to a copy of the relevant Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) form, which will be hosted as supplementary information on the journal's web site. Authors may charge a reasonable fee to cover the costs of producing and distributing materials. If materials are to be distributed by a for-profit company, this should be stated.

For materials such as mutant and genetically modified organisms and cells, authors are expected to use established public repositories (for example, Jackson Laboratory, Mutant Mouse Regional Resource Centers, American Type Culture Collection, UK Stem Cell Bank, and so on) wherever possible.

Referees may be asked to comment on the terms of access to materials, methods and/or datasets, and we reserve the right to refuse publication in cases where authors are unable to provide adequate assurances that essential resources will be made freely available to the community.

Papers reporting protein or DNA sequences and crystallographic structures will not be accepted without an accession number to Genbank/EMBL/DDBJ, PDB, SWISS-PROT or other appropriate, identified, publicly available database in general use in the field that gives free access to researchers from the date of initial publication (normally the date of online publication); see Nature 394, 105; 1998 and 404, 317; 2000. All novel sequence or structure data must be made available to editors and referees either as Supplementary Information (5 copies if provided on disk) or by an accession number to an appropriate publicly accessible database which can be accessed before publication. Please note this policy includes even short stretches of novel sequence information such as epitopes, functional domains, genetic markers or haplotypes. Short novel sequences must include surrounding sequence information to provide context. An author's web site is not acceptable for providing this type of information.

Structures:
Papers must state that atomic coordinates have been deposited in the Protein Data Bank (or Nucleic Acids Database, as appropriate), and must list the accession code(s). Accessibility must be designated "for immediate release upon publication." For X-ray crystal structures, structural factor files must also be submitted to PDB and released upon publication. Authors must provide atomic coordinates and structure factor files upon request of referees or editors for the purposes of evaluating the manuscript, if they are not already freely accessible in a publicly available and recognized database. Please note that a table containing data collection and refinement statistics (see templates for X-ray crystallography and NMR), as well as a figure showing experimental electron density map (for X-ray crystallography) or superposition of the lowest energy ensemble (for NMR) must be included at the time of submission. At this time, there is no formal requirement for deposition of NMR assignments and constraints, molecular envelope reconstructions from electron microscopy data or coordinates generated from modeling. However, we encourage authors to deposit such data in appropriate, publicly available databases, provide accession codes and release data upon publication.

Microarrays:
Please see the MGED open letter specifying microarray standards at http://www.mged.org/Workgroups/MIAME/miame_checklist.html. Authors submitting manuscripts containing microarray data must supply the data as Supplementary Information on CD at time of submission. The data must be MIAME-compliant and supplied in a form that is widely accessible, with the completed checklist also placed on the CD. Five copies of the CD are required, so they can be sent to referees. We also require submission of microarray data to the GEO (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/) or ArrayExpress (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/arrayexpress) databases, with accession numbers at or before acceptance of the paper for publication. See Nature 419, 323; 2002 for further details and explanation.

Any supporting data sets for which there is no public repository must be made available to any interested reader on and after the publication date from the authors directly, the author providing a URL to be used in the paper on publication. Researchers who encounter a persistent refusal to comply with these guidelines should contact the editors of Nature Neuroscience by email, with "materials complaint" as part of the subject line. See Nature 416, 1; 2002 for further details. In cases where editors are unable to resolve a complaint, we reserve the right to refer the correspondence to the author's funding institution and/or to publish the fact that readers have been unable to obtain necessary materials or reagents to replicate the findings.

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GUIDE FOR DIGITAL IMAGES
Images submitted with a manuscript for review should be minimally processed (for instance, to add arrows to a micrograph). Authors should retain their unprocessed data and metadata files, as editors may request them to aid in manuscript evaluation. If unprocessed data are unavailable, manuscript evaluation may be stalled until the issue is resolved. All digitized images submitted with the final revision of the manuscript must be of high quality and have resolutions of at least 300 dpi.

A certain degree of image processing is acceptable for publication (and for some experiments, fields and techniques is unavoidable), but the final image must correctly represent the original data and conform to community standards. The guidelines below will aid in accurate data presentation at the image processing level; authors must also take care to exercise prudence during data acquisition, where misrepresentation must equally be avoided. Manuscripts should include a single Supplementary Methods file (or a subsection of a larger Supplementary Methods file) labeled 'equipment and settings' that describes for each figure the pertinent instrument settings, acquisition conditions and processing changes, as described in this guide.

1. Authors should list all image acquisition tools and image processing software packages used.
2. Authors should document key image-gathering settings and processing manipulations in the Supplementary Methods.
3. Images gathered at different times or from different locations should not be combined into a single image, unless it is stated that the resultant image is a product of time-averaged data or a time-lapse sequence. If juxtaposing images is essential, the borders should be clearly demarcated in the figure and described in the legend.
4. The use of touch-up tools, such as cloning and healing tools in Photoshop, or any feature that deliberately obscures manipulations, is to be avoided.
5. Processing (such as changing brightness and contrast) is appropriate only when it is applied equally across the entire image and is applied equally to controls. Contrast should not be adjusted so that data disappear. Excessive manipulations, such as processing to emphasize one region in the image at the expense of others (for example, through the use of a biased choice of threshold settings), is inappropriate, as is emphasizing experimental data relative to the control.
6. When submitting revised final figures upon conditional acceptance, authors may be asked to submit original, unprocessed images.

Electrophoretic gels and blots
Positive and negative controls, as well as molecular size markers, should be included on each gel and blot - either in the main figure or an expanded data supplementary figure. For previously characterized antibodies, a citation must be provided. For antibodies less well characterized in the system under study, a detailed characterization that demonstrates not only the specificity of the antibody, but also the range of reactivity of the reagent in the assay, should be published as supplementary information.

The display of cropped gels and blots in the main paper is encouraged if it improves the clarity and conciseness of the presentation. In such cases, the cropping must be mentioned in the figure legend and the supplementary information should include full-length gels and blots wherever possible. These uncropped images should be labeled as in the main text and placed in a single supplementary figure. The manuscript's figure legends should state that "full-length blots/gels are presented in Supplemental Figure X."

• Vertically sliced gels that juxtapose lanes that were not contiguous in the experiment must have a clear separation or a black line delineating the boundary between the gels.
• Cropped gels in the paper must retain important bands.
• Cropped blots in the body of the paper should retain at least six band widths above and below the band.
• High-contrast gels and blots are discouraged, as overexposure may mask additional bands. Authors should strive for exposures with gray backgrounds. Multiple exposures should be presented in supplementary information if high contrast is unavoidable. Immunoblots should be surrounded by a black line to indicate the borders of the blot, if the background is faint.
• For quantitative comparisons, appropriate reagents, controls and imaging methods with linear signal ranges should be used.

Microscopy
Authors should be prepared to supply the editors with original data upon request, at the resolution collected, from which their images were generated. Cells from multiple fields should not be juxtaposed in a single field; instead multiple supporting fields of cells should be shown as supplementary information.

Specific guidelines: Adjustments should be applied to the entire image. Threshold manipulation, expansion or contraction of signal ranges and the altering of high signals should be avoided. If 'Pseudo-coloring' and nonlinear adjustment (for example 'gamma changes') are used, this must be disclosed. Adjustments of individual color channels are sometimes necessary on 'merged' images, but this should be noted in the figure legend.

We encourage inclusion of the following with the final revised version of the manuscript for publication:

• In the Methods, specify the type of equipment (microscopes/objective lenses, cameras, detectors, filter model and batch number) and acquisition software used. Although we appreciate that there is some variation between instruments, equipment settings for critical measurements should also be listed.
• A single Supplementary Methods file (or subsection of a Supplementary Methods file) titled 'equipment and settings' should list for each image: acquisition information, including time and space resolution data (xyzt and pixel dimensions); image bit depth; experimental conditions such as temperature and imaging medium; and fluorochromes (excitation and emission wavelengths or ranges, filters, dichroic beamsplitters, if any).
• The display lookup table (LUT) and the quantitative map between the LUT and the bitmap should be provided, especially when rainbow pseudocolor is used. If the LUT is linear and covers the full range of the data, that should be stated.
• Processing software should be named and manipulations indicated (such as type of deconvolution, 3D reconstructions, surface and volume rendering, 'gamma changes', filtering, thresholding and projection).
• Authors should state the measured resolution at which an image was acquired and any downstream processing or averaging that enhances the resolution of the image.

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GENE NOMENCLATURE
Authors should use approved nomenclature for gene symbols, and use symbols rather than italicized full names (Ttn, not titin). Please consult the appropriate nomenclature databases for correct gene names and symbols. A useful resource is LocusLink. Approved human gene symbols are provided by HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC), e-mail: nome@galton.ucl.ac.uk; see also http://www.gene.ucl.ac.uk/nomenclature. Approved mouse symbols are provided by The Jackson Laboratory, e-mail: nomen@informatics.jax.org; see also http://www.informatics.jax.org/mgihome/nomen.

For proposed gene names that are not already approved, please submit the gene symbols to the appropriate nomenclature committees as soon as possible, as these must be deposited and approved before publication of an article.

Avoid listing multiple names of genes (or proteins) separated by a slash, as in 'Oct4/Pou5f1', as this is ambiguous (it could mean a ratio, a complex, alternative names or different subunits). Use one name throughout and include the other at first mention: 'Oct4 (also known as Pou5f1)'.

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SECURITY CONCERNS
The editors may seek advice about submitted papers not only from technical referees but also on any aspect of a paper that raises concerns. Very occasionally, concerns may relate to the societal implications of publishing a paper, including threats to security. In such circumstances, advice will usually be sought simultaneously with the technical refereeing process. As in all publishing decisions, the ultimate decision whether to publish is the responsibility of the editor of the journal concerned.

The threat posed by bioweapons raises the unusual need to assess the balance of risk and benefit in publication. Editors are not necessarily well qualified to make such judgments unassisted, and so we reserve the right to take expert advice in cases where we believe that concerns may arise. We recognize the widespread view that openness in science helps to alert society to potential threats and to defend against them, and we anticipate that only very rarely (if at all) will the risks be perceived as outweighing the benefits of publishing a paper that has otherwise been deemed appropriate for a Nature journal. Nevertheless, we think it appropriate to consider such risks and to have a formal policy for dealing with them if need arises.

The editorial staff of Nature journals maintain a network of advisers on biosecurity issues. All concerns on that score, including the commissioning of external advice, will be shared within an editorial monitoring group consisting of the Editor-in-Chief of Nature publications, the Executive Editor of the Nature research journals, the Chief Biological Sciences Editor of Nature, and the chief editor of the journal concerned. Once a decision has been reached, authors will be informed if biosecurity advice has informed that decision. See Nature 421, 771; 2003 for a joint statement by journal editors, and for other links.

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REFUTATIONS AND COMPLAINTS
We recognize our responsibility to correct errors that we have previously published. Our policy is to consider refutations of primary research papers, and to publish them (in concise form) if and only if the author provides compelling evidence that a major claim of the original paper was incorrect. Refutations are peer-reviewed, and where possible they are sent to the same referees who reviewed the original paper. A copy is normally also sent to the corresponding author of the original paper for signed comments. Refutations are typically published in the Correspondence section, along with a brief response from the original authors if they so choose.

Complaints, disagreements over interpretation and other matters arising should be addressed to the editor. Because debates over interpretation are often inconclusive, we do not automatically consider criticisms of review articles or other secondary material, and in the event that we decide to publish such a criticism we do not necessarily consult with the original authors. Editorial decisions in such cases are based on considerations of reader interest, novelty of arguments, integrity of the publication record and fairness to the parties involved. Publication may take various forms (Correspondence, Corrigendum from the original author, Statement by Editors, etc), and the right of reply is at the discretion of the editor.

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CORRECTIONS
Errata: errors introduced by the journal during editing or production and for which the journal takes responsibility. Our policy is to correct such errors in cases where they distort the scientific meaning or the bibliographic record, or where they have significant potential to damage the reputation of the authors, the journal and/or third parties.

Corrigenda: errors introduced by authors, for which they take responsibility. Our policy is to allow authors to correct such errors in cases where they distort the scientific meaning or the bibliographic record, or where they have significant potential to damage the reputation of the journal or third parties.

Addenda: additional information from authors that, while not correcting a specific error, nevertheless alters the interpretation of a paper. Publication of addenda is at the discretion of the editor.

Authors should note that advance online publication (AOP) represents definitive publication. Authors should therefore make every effort to check for errors in their proofs before the paper is published online. In order to maintain the integrity of the publication record, online corrections are normally accompanied by print corrections and are decided by the same criteria.

Supplementary information online is subject to the same policies as the main article. In order to maintain the integrity of the publication record, corrections must be accompanied by a print erratum, corrigendum or addendum.

More detailed information on our corrections policy is available here.

The entire guide for authors and referees is available in PDF format.

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