How to prepare your research for submission on VeriXiv
| 29 April, 2025 | Jack Nash |
VeriXiv is a preprint server exclusively for Gates Foundation-funded authors, supporting them in complying with the updated 2025 Gates Foundation Open Access policy.
In this blog, we discuss the considerations you should make when submitting your work as a preprint to VeriXiv.
Authorship and author affiliation
Authors must be formally affiliated with an accredited institution or recognized organization, and at least one of the authors must be funded by the Gates Foundation to be eligible to publish on VeriXiv. To confirm this, you will asked to provide your grant number and full authorship and affiliation information. Author affiliation is often verified through an institutional/organizational email address and an official website profile. However, other methods also exist that can be used to check whether the author mentioned in a paper is a genuine researcher who contributed to the final publication.
Originality
Only original work can be submitted to VeriXiv. We use similarity checkers to check for plagiarism, and our team will reject the preprint if the system identifies plagiarism (including self-plagiarism). To help increase your chances of passing the plagiarism checks on VeriXiv, try to avoid including extensive quotations from any one source and be mindful of excessive or inappropriate self-citations.
The work, or significant parts of it, must not be published elsewhere or currently be under consideration or review by another preprint server; however, having your work under consideration with a peer-reviewed journal is permitted.
Ethics and consent
When submitting your research to VeriXiv, you must comply with our ethical policies, which align with COPE guidelines. It is important to always provide ethics information for research involving humans, animals, or plants, even if you do not deem the participant data included in the paper to be sensitive or identifying. You should aim to provide informed, preferably written, consent, and if a review board waived ethical approval, this should be clearly stated in the ethics statement.
Data availability
You do not need to share your data to be published on VeriXiv. However, to pass the optional Open Research checks on VeriXiv, authors must deposit any datasets related to their preprint in an appropriate data repository. The dataset(s) must have a license applied to them that allows reuse by others (CC0 or CC-BY) and have an associated permanent identifier (e.g., a DOI) allocated by a data repository. You should also prepare a data availability statement at the end of your submission, detailing where and how the data can be accessed.
By providing all your data, you can further verify your preprint as an Open Research preprint, which is required if you intend to submit your work for consideration on Gates Open Research.
Learn more about VeriXiv’s data guidelines here.
Scope
We accept a broad range of Article types across a range of disciplines. Our editorial team will also check whether the submission has followed the appropriate reporting guidelines for the study design and included sufficient methodological detail.
Be aware of the Article guidelines for the Article type you are submitting. This is important for ensuring you submit your Article under the appropriate Article type and that the Article’s content meets the scope, word count, reporting guidelines, and content requirements of that Article type.
Language
Articles submitted to VeriXiv should be well-written, and language quality shouldn’t impact the understanding of the research. If an Article needs extensive copyediting, it will be rejected. The author will be made aware of some suggested copyediting services they may wish to consider using before resubmitting their work.
To avoid this, you should rigorously check your preprint before submission to catch those easy-to-miss typos. However, if English is not your first language or you’re unsure if the language quality of the manuscript is satisfactory, consider asking a native English speaker to proofread the Article or have it professionally copyedited before submitting to ensure flow and readability.
Once your Article has been published as a preprint on VeriXiv, you can continue to submit it to Gates Open Research or another peer-reviewed journal of your choice. If you submit your research to Gates Open Research, you must pass additional Open Research checks and undergo open peer review on VeriXiv. Submit your work to VeriXiv today.
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