Document Guidelines

In addition to articles that you would expect to find in traditional journals, F1000Research publishes documents, which are research outputs such as end-of-grant report, policies, guidelines, workflows etc. Unlike articles, documents are not peer reviewed in F1000Research. F1000Research also publishes posters and slides.

F1000Research only offers the publication of documents within gateways and collections (as of December 2019) and must have prior approval from the editorial office. Documents submitted to the platform without prior approval will be removed. If you would like to create a gateway or collection for the hosting of your community’s documents then please contact us.

We accept documents in all languages; however we do require that the metadata i.e. the title, the author’s names and affiliations, the description and the keywords are written in English.

We are happy to accept documents that directly relate to previous publications, as well as those that are unpublished elsewhere. If the work includes figures or tables used in a previously published paper and the publisher holds the copyright, authors need to ensure that they have permission from the journal to reuse those figures/tables. This needs to be done before submitting the document.

For any documents that include information that can potentially identify an individual, please ensure that you have obtained written, informed consent from all patients or healthy participants (or their legal guardians for minors, or next of kin if the participant is deceased), confirming that the results and any accompanying images can be published. This includes large clinical datasets with direct or indirect identifiers (see this article for information), specific details about individuals, images and so on.

If your document contains any identifiable images of individuals, you must include a statement confirming that you have permission to publish these images. If your document contains any clinical images or identifiable data then you must include an explicit consent statement under a separate heading of the ‘Consent’ section (we suggest: “We confirm that we have obtained permission to use [images/data] from the participants/patients/individuals included in this presentation”). Please also state the conditions under which the permission was obtained.

Alternatively, if no consent for publication was required (e.g. the data has been anonymised), then this should be clearly stated and a note should be added confirming that such alterations have not distorted scientific meaning.

Signed consent forms should be made available to the F1000Research editorial office if requested.

We will not accept content of an advertorial nature. The purpose of the submitted material must be for the dissemination of scholarly information.

We accept documents in PDF format.

Currently, documents are published under a CC-BY 4.0 license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and leaves the copyright with the current copyright holder (usually the author or their institution).

Yes, documents published on F1000Research will receive a digital object identifier (DOI). After submission, documents are checked before publication and then assigned a DOI on publication.

Documents can be removed from F1000Research before being assigned a permanent DOI. However, once the content has been assigned a DOI then that content cannot be removed from the platform.

Documents are not peer reviewed or edited before being posted on F1000Research, so it is the authors’ responsibility to ensure that all research is conducted in accordance to international ethical standards for human and animal research. We strongly recommend that authors of documents consult our policies, which reflect general good scientific practice and publishing standards.

Publication of a document in F1000Research does not imply endorsement of the methods and ethical standards. If a case of suspected research or publication misconduct is brought to our attention, we will follow the guidelines provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), of which F1000Research is a member.

Yes, F1000Research reserves the right to retract content that is found to be fraudulent (e.g. containing data manipulation or misrepresentation) or in serious breach of one of F1000 Research Ltd’s terms and conditions. Evidence of plagiarism, falsification of data, or other scientific misconduct associated with published documents is determined at the discretion of F1000Research; this may involve contacting the authors’ research institution, an ethics committee or other third parties.