(4 Apr 2024) F1000 and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have announced plans to launch a new verified preprint platform that will enable the rapid availability of new findings and promote research integrity. VeriXiv [pronounced very-kive] will support researchers in complying with the Gates Foundation’s refreshed open access policy that requires all their funded research to be made available as a preprint from January 2025.
Preprints are the version of a research paper shared prior to peer review and publication in a journal. While preprints make the latest research available more quickly, their growing use in sharing findings ahead of peer review has added to concerns about the potential for dissemination of misinformation. However, unlike many preprint servers, VeriXiv will conduct a series of rigorous pre-publication checks to support greater research integrity.
Twenty different ethics and integrity checks will assess a range of issues, including plagiarism, image manipulation, author verification and competing interests. In addition, open research transparency checks will check whether the data is available in an appropriate repository and that methods have been included to support reproducibility. Each preprint will have clear labelling so that readers know the level of verification conducted on the article, and which levels have been passed.
In March, the Gates Foundation announced a refreshed open access policy, mandating all grantees to make the preprint of new research outputs available from January 2025. Researchers will be able to fulfill this requirement by sharing their work on the new platform. Once it is available on VeriXiv, authors can choose for their preprint to be peer reviewed prior to publication on the Foundation’s own publishing platform, Gates Open Research, or they can submit it to any other publication for consideration. Alternatively, researchers may decide not to take the paper any further, in which case it will remain openly accessible as a verified preprint on VeriXiv.
The press release in full is here.
