Information for Authors in Developing Countries

As part of its mission to widen the distribution of scientific literature, the Public Library of Science is particularly concerned with the disparities in access to information between developed and developing countries. PLoS provides immediate, free, and unrestricted access to all the scientific and medical literature that it publishes. In addition, PLoS is also dedicated to establishing a medium for publishing science from the developing world. Thus, a major goal of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases is to promote and profile the efforts of researchers, health practitioners, and public-health experts in endemic countries in order to help build science and health capacity in those regions.

PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases offers the following means of support to authors in developing countries:

• Fee Waiver. We offer a complete or partial fee waiver for any authors who do not have funds to cover publication fees. Editors and reviewers have no access to payment information, and hence an author's inability to pay will not influence the decision to publish a paper.
• Editorial Support. PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases is organized to provide additional editorial support for authors in developing countries. Papers that are accepted for publication will receive additional support from our editorial staff or professionals from our partner organizations.
• International Editorial Board. About 40% of our Associate Editors—who handle peer review of research articles—are based in developing countries. These experts understand the issues involved in confronting these diseases in their endemic settings, and they will help to ensure that the journal is a voice for researchers in these countries.
• Worldwide Readership. As an open-access journal, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases articles will always be freely available online via the journal Web site as well as through PubMed Central. Our open-access license means that readers are free to download, print, distribute, and translate your work, provided that they give you credit and cite the source. This means that your work will have the broadest possible audience: the entire world. And recent studies suggest that open-access articles are downloaded and cited more frequently.
• Influence. Your research has the chance to be highly influential. Select papers about neglected tropical diseases published in PLoS journals have been downloaded many thousands of times, have been mentioned in international news sources, and have had an important impact on health policy. For example, a paper in PLoS Medicine led to a UN mandate to integrate control of the NTDs into the UN's malaria control efforts.