Submitting papers to preprint servers (bioRxiv) is finally getting popular in biology. Unfortunately, many of these papers are formatted in a way that is very inconvenient to read, possibly because authors stick to the format asked by journals. Here are 10 simple rules to format your preprints:

1. Format your preprint in the way you would like to read it. The next rules simply implement this first rule.
2. Use single spacing. No one is going to write between the lines.
3. Insert figures and their captions in the text, at the relevant place. It is really annoying when you have to continuously go back and forth between the text and the last pages. Putting figures at the end of the paper and captions yet at another place should be punished.
4. Don’t forget the supplementary material.
5. We don’t really need 10 rules. In fact the first rule is just fine.