 Welcome to Scientific Reports! If you are looking for an open access peer-reviewed journal to showcase your primary research from the natural and clinical sciences, you've come to the right place. Our goal is to let the community at large determine the impact of your work. That means while all papers we accept must make an original contribution, our editorial decisions focus on the robustness and validity of your research and not on subjective measures of perceived interest. Want to learn more about our editorial process? Let's talk about what happens to your manuscript after you submit it. Your manuscript is first checked for compliance with our editorial and publishing policies. These policies are based on the standards set by Nature Research and are some of the most rigorous in the publishing industry. We'll ensure your manuscript contains everything that's needed for our editors and peer reviewers to perform a fair and thorough assessment of your work. This includes checks on authorship, competing interests, ethics approval, plagiarism and image integrity. The process is overseen by a dedicated team of manuscript assistants whose job is to help authors ensure that their papers comply with these policies. If your manuscript passes our initial quality check following our standard process, we will assign it to a member of our editorial board. This individual will be an active researcher in your field and they'll be the one deciding whether your manuscript is suitable for peer review. It's the responsibility of the editorial board member to choose appropriate reviewers. Their choice is based on many factors, including expertise, previous experience and any apparent conflicts of interest. The editorial board member will ultimately decide how many reviewers are needed to evaluate your work, usually it's two or three. The reviewers will be asked to assess your paper based on the technical soundness and scientific validity of your methods, analysis and interpretation. The methods must be appropriate and properly conducted and the conclusions must be fully supported by the data. The editorial board member will consider the reviewers reports when deciding whether to accept your work as is, request minor or major revisions or reject it. A decision to reject a manuscript would occur if the editorial board member feels your work would not be suitable for publication even after revision. Published manuscripts typically undergo one or two rounds of revision before being accepted for publication. One of our large team of publishing assistants will assist you throughout the review process. If your paper is accepted, it will be prepared for online publication and you will receive a proof. Once your paper is ready, we'll let you know the publication date before it's made freely available to millions of readers. Ready to submit? Click on the link below to get started.