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Are you considering submitting your research? HRB Open Research’s platform uses the F1000 publication model, which is advances editorial transparency through open publishing and peer review practices while avoiding bias and misconduct through rigorous pre-publication checks. Rather than relying on journal Editors (or Editor-Chief) to accept or reject an article, our in-house editorial team diligently checks each submission to ensure it meets our quality and ethical standards.

To help you prepare for these research quality checks, this blog post outlines how to pass the checks for six key criteria we assess, to maximise your chances of your work being published on HRB Open Research.

Authorship and author affiliation

Verified authorship is a crucial part of academic integrity. As such, authors must be formally affiliated with an accredited institution or recognised organisation, and the research must be funded by the Health Research Board Ireland. Author affiliation is often verified through institutional / organisational email address AND an official website profile, however other methods also exist and can be used to check whether the author mentioned on a paper is a genuine researcher who contributed to the final publication. At least one author on the paper must meet the key authorship criteria for the submission to pass the necessary checks.

Authorship on the submission should also abide by the guidelines outlined by CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy), which provide insight on the valid roles an author/contributor may be credited for an article. Additionally, some Gateways and Collections may have more specific authorship criteria, which can be found on each Gateway/Collection in the “About” section.

Plagiarism

Only original work can be submitted to HRB Open Research. The work, or significant parts of it, must not be published elsewhere or currently be under consideration or review from another journal or publication. Our platform uses similarity checkers to check for plagiarism in articles, and our team will reject the article if plagiarism (including self-plagiarism) is identified by the system. To help increase your chances of passing the plagiarism checks at HRB Open Research try to avoid including extensive quotations from any one source and be mindful of excessive or inappropriate self-citations.

Data availability

One of the most common reasons why articles are rejected from publication on HRB Open Research is that the supporting data is not openly available. On our platform, we take open data seriously, and stringently uphold our open data policy and endorse the FAIR Data Principles.

Authors must deposit the dataset underlying their results in an appropriate data repository. The dataset must have a license applied to it which allows reuse from others (CC0 or CC-BY) and have an associated permanent identifier (e.g. a DOI), allocated by a data repository. You must also prepare a data availability statement at the end of your submission, detailing where and how the data can be accessed.

However, we understand that sometimes openly sharing data may not be feasible for all researchers, due to the ethical considerations involved. As such, our platform has policies in place to allow the publication of papers associated with such data in a way that is as open as possible, but as closed as necessary. If sharing your data may not be feasible, please explain why — and if your paper doesn’t include any underlying data, it is important to disclose this too — in your data availability statement.

Ethics and consent

If you are submitting your research to HRB Open Research, 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 ethical approval was waived by a review board, this should be clearly stated in the ethics statement.

Scope

At HRB Open Research, 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 not only important for ensuring you are submitting your article under the appropriate article type, but to also ensure the article’s content meets the scope, word count, reporting guidelines and content requirements of that particular article type.

Language

Articles on HRB Open Research 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 article before submission to catch those easy-to-miss typos. However, if English is not your first language or if 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.

Be sure to consider these six helpful tips before submitting your work to HRB Open Research and check out our scope guidelines before hitting the submit button!