How authors can maximise the chance of manuscript acceptance and article visibility

The current peer-review system is being overloaded with manuscript submissions that increasingly exceed reviewer availability and journal publication space. Consequently manuscript rejections rates, peer-review requests, and subject-editors' workloads are mounting. Here we outline common problems with manuscript submissions and propose solutions that are both straightforward and easy to implement. We suggest that authors themselves can do much more to relieve the overloaded peer-review system, while simultaneously increasing their own manuscript acceptance rate and article visibility.