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Ask everyONE: Figure files in your merged PDF

Jen Laloup Aggregators Ask EveryONE Manuscript submission and peer review system PLoS Editorial Manager Service improvements Submissions

This post comes to us from Caroline McCormick, a publications assistant. Caroline has been working for PLoS ONE since last summer, and she spends her days handling press queries, ethics consultations, and answering emails.

When you submit your paper to PLoS ONE, you will need to upload each of your files individually, and our system will build a merged PDF from the file inventory. The PDF will contain the manuscript text, your figures, and links to the supplementary information.

There are two important things to note about the PDF:

  1. Your figures will almost certainly look blurry. This is totally normal, and it is not a problem since the academic editor and reviewers will still be able to download the higher-resolution source files (and those higher-quality figures are the ones that will be published, not the blurry ones).
  2. Each supplementary information file will be available through the PDF as a link: thumbnails of the images will not appear. Instead, you will see a link at the top of a blank page at the end of the manuscript, and this link is what the academic editor and reviewers will use to access the supporting or supplementary information.

To find answers to more commonly asked questions please check out our Most Commonly Asked Questions page. If you have a more immediate question though, please contact us directly at plosone [at] plos.org.

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