Introducing VeriXiv – a new verified preprint server
| 29 April, 2024 | Jack Nash |
On March 27th, 2024, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a refreshed open access policy, mandating all grantees publish their research output as a preprint from January 2025. This means Gates-funded researchers will need to deposit their research as a preprint before submitting it to their journal of choice.
In this blog, we will discuss the purpose of preprint servers, the challenges with preprint servers, and VeriXiv, a proprietary preprint server from F1000, for Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded researchers.
What are preprint servers?
Preprint servers are online repositories that store early versions of research, commonly known as “preprints”. Preprints offer authors the opportunity to publish preliminary versions of their work, allowing researchers to share their discoveries early on in their research journey and receive feedback prior to formal journal publication. Moreover, work submitted to preprint servers are assigned a DOI and are citeable and recognized by major citation databases, including Crossref, Scopus, Clarivate and Google Scholar.
In addition to their openness, the speed at which research can be made available through preprints is significantly faster than traditional publishing. This enables researchers to increase the impact of their work as others can begin to cite it before full publication.
The challenges faced by traditional preprint servers
Preprint servers often face criticism around publication ethics and research integrity as most preprints won’t be peer-reviewed prior to publication. Without appropriate prepublication checks, the information contained in these early works could potentially be inaccurate compared to traditional peer reviewed publications yet are still taken as fact by those unfamiliar with the preprint process.
There have been cases, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, where information contained in preprint manuscripts was deliberately misused by journalists and non-academic stakeholders, resulting in the spread of misinformation.
What is VeriXiv?
To address concerns around the integrity of preprints and to support grantees to comply with the Gates Foundation open access policy update, F1000 and the Gates Foundation have collaborated to launch VeriXiv – a new preprint server with enhanced prepublication checks to verify preprints.
VeriXiv’s prepublication check processes assess a range of issues, including similarity concerns, image manipulation and competing interests. Authors are given the opportunity to further verify their preprint as an open research preprint through a series of open research transparency checks, including data deposition in an open repository and clear methods for research reproducibility. Each submission will need to have passed more than twenty different ethics and integrity checks before being published on VeriXiv. Preprints will be clearly labelled to identify the level of verification they have achieved.
Once the submission has passed the prepublication checks carried out on VeriXiv, authors can decide where to publish their research. Gates-funded authors have the freedom to leave their work as a preprint on VeriXiv, submit their work to Gates Open Research, or take it to a journal of their choice.
The importance of VeriXiv to open research
Although there are drawbacks to preprint servers, they are still integral to open scholarly communication as they foster collaboration and promote openness and transparency in scientific discovery. By sharing work in the form of a preprint, authors open new avenues for collaboration with each other, while allowing full access to their research findings. This transparency not only enhances the attractiveness of preprints, but also amplifies the impact of the research itself; research articles published alongside a corresponding preprint have an average of 36% more citations than only articles.
Preprints have proved indispensable, particularly during times of crisis. They allowed researchers from across the globe to cite each other’s ongoing work and swiftly build on discoveries published in preprint servers.
VeriXiv goes some way in addressing the challenges around the integrity of preprints. Prepublication checks combined with clear badging that identifies the level of verification adds an extra level of assurance for the quality of the research, more so than is currently offered by many other preprint servers.
Discover more about VeriXiv in the official announcement from F1000
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