Holiday Service Update

With the end-of-year holiday season rapidly approaching, we wanted to let our authors know in advance that they may experience a slight delay in the peer review process of their manuscript if they submit anytime between now and the end of the year. This is because many of our academic editors and external referees will be out of the office at some point during the holiday season. We will endeavor to ensure that all manuscripts submitted to PLoS ONE are evaluated as quickly as possible, but please accept our advance apologies for any delays you experience.

Despite many people being on vacation, the work of the journal continues and so we will continue to receive a large number of emails from authors, academic editors, reviewers and readers throughout this period. Between our offices in the UK and the US, we will have some level of staff coverage every day except for Christmas Day (December 25), but with some team members being out of the office, we may not be able to respond to emails sent to the PLoS ONE inbox (plosone@plos.org) as quickly as usual. We will respond to your message as soon as we can, but in the meantime, you may wish to visit some of the following pages on our websites, which may help to answer your question:

• Journal information: http://www.plosone.org/static/information.action
• Author guidelines: http://www.plosone.org/static/guidelines.action
• Author FAQ blog post: http://bit.ly/EditorialManagerFAQ
• Figure and table guidelines: http://www.plosone.org/static/figureGuidelines.action
• Author submission checklist: http://www.plosone.org/static/checklist.action
• Information about article-level metrics: http://www.plosone.org/static/usageData.action
• Reviewer guidelines: http://www.plosone.org/static/reviewerGuidelines.action
• Information about Open Access: http://www.plos.org/oa/