Journal data availability statement — check your manuscript free

Six blocking findings in one 24-line LaTeX manuscript - the file a corresponding author in Lisbon uploads to Elsevier's Editorial Manager on a Friday afternoon. Error severity, one line per finding, straight out of the linter:

ERRO L1 competing_interest_missing No declaration of competing interest. ERRO L1 data_availability_missing No data availability statement. ERRO L1 funding_statement_missing No funding statement. ERRO L2 obsolete_package Obsolete package: current TeX Live rejects subfigure. ERRO L3 obsolete_package Obsolete package: current TeX Live rejects epsfig. ERRO L16 absolute_figure_path Absolute path: /Users/rok/Desktop/figs/setup.eps

None of the six is a compilation error. The document builds: Overleaf shows a green tick, latexmk exits zero, the PDF looks like a paper. The editorial assistant who opens it first does not compile anything. They run a checklist.

Elsevier, Springer Nature, IEEE and PLOS all want the same statements inside the manuscript, not only in the web form: data availability, funding, competing interest, CRediT author contributions, and - since the ICMJE recommendations were extended to cover writing tools - a line saying whether a generative-AI tool was used. An ORCID for the corresponding author. Keywords, because that is how the system finds reviewers. Line numbers, because reviewers annotate by line.

Then there is the source itself, which the publisher compiles on their machine, not yours. That is why line 16 above is fatal: the path exists on exactly one laptop in the world, and the figure is an EPS that a pdflatex build farm will refuse or flatten into the proof. \usepackage{subfigure} and \usepackage{epsfig} were superseded years ago and still sit in templates inherited from a former postdoc. A draft class option prints overfull rules and empty figure boxes into the PDF the editor sees. An acknowledgements section thanking a named lab de-anonymises a double-anonymous submission. A \date{2024-03-01} on a paper submitted in 2026 reads as a manuscript that has already been somewhere else.

LaTeX Submission Lint is seventeen rules over that ground, run on the .tex file open in your editor. On that 24-line sample, which ships with the extension, the seventeen rules return 18 findings. Six are at error severity: the block above. Eight are statements simply absent from the file, so they are reported at line 1, where you have to add them. Three are informational: no ORCID, no line numbers, and a manuscript split across \input files when the submission system wants one flattened source plus the .bbl.

On the clean sample in the same folder, the same seventeen rules return nothing.

The free version does that for the file you have open: all seventeen rules, the full report, no watermark, no time limit, nothing locked after a number of runs. The same engine runs in a page with nothing installed, at https://getreadystack.com/tools/latex-submission-lint.

The yardstick is what you would otherwise pay a human: manuscript editing services price per word, from about $0.05, so a 6,000-word paper runs to roughly $300 and a revision cycle takes days. They will fix your commas. They will not tell you that your figure path only exists on your laptop.

What the licence adds is scope, not answers. A real submission is a project, not a file: a root main.tex, an \input{results-section}, a supplementary file. The licensed version runs the same seventeen rules over every .tex in the project, follows the include chain from the root file, and writes one submission-readiness report for the whole paper, the thing you hand a co-author. It is $29 once, one key per person or team seat.