Pre-publication checks

Authorship and author affiliation

To publish with F1000, you must have a formal affiliation with an accredited institution or recognized organization. This means that even if you have not reached a certain level of research-based qualification, such as a Ph.D. or an MD, you can still publish your paper with us. Our Editorial team will verify author affiliations using a range of indicators, including institutional email addresses and website profiles. 

At least one author of the article (who should have made a key contribution to the article) must meet these key criteria for it to be suitable for publication. 

To publish on an F1000 publishing venue associated with a specific funder, you must meet the criteria for publication outlined on the venue’s website. 

Plagiarism

All articles submitted to an F1000 publishing venue must be original. You must not submit work for assessment that you have already submitted, partially or in full, to another journal or publishing venue.  

We use Similarity Check, a service provided by Crossref and powered by iThenticate, to detect plagiarism. If plagiarism, including self-plagiarism, is identified, our team will reject your paper. 

Data availability

All underlying research data, together with details of any software used to process results, must be openly available in a repository. Plus, your article should have citations to the repositories that host your data. 

To facilitate reuse by other researchers and support greater transparency of research outcomes, you must apply an open license to the data. You will also need to write a data availability statement explaining where the data can be found. Providing a data availability statement is mandatory, even if your paper does not have any underlying data. 

We recognize that openly sharing data may not always be feasible due to ethical considerations or third-party restrictions. If that is the case, get in touch with our team. We have policies to support this. 

Ethics

If your research involves humans, animals, or plants, you must comply with our ethical policies.  

Ethics approval should be obtained before your study begins if it involves human individuals, data, or material. You should provide an ethical approval statement with the name of the ethical committee and the approval number and ensure that research participants have given their informed consent to take part in your research. If consent was not required, you need to clearly state why.  

Data should be anonymized, so research participants cannot be identified. If you intend to publish identifiable data, you must have written informed consent from the participants.  

Studies involving animals or plants must follow the guidelines provided by your institution and national or international regulations. 

Article type and reporting

You will need to ensure you have chosen the correct article type for your research and that you have fully understood its specific requirements using the ‘Article Guidelines’ page of your chosen publishing venue. 

Our team will assess whether you have followed appropriate reporting guidelines and included sufficient methodological detail to allow for reproducibility. 

Language of the article

Your paper must be written in good English to ensure readability, flow, and understanding of the research. Our team will provide baseline editing, including correcting faulty spelling, grammar, and punctuation. However, if your article requires extensive copyediting, they will reject it and refer you to professional copyediting services.