Moving through production

Once your article has been accepted for publication, the next step is production. Copy editing begins, and your proofs are created.

You’ll sign a publishing agreement, and if you submitted to an Open Select journal, you’ll now choose whether to publish your article open access.

Once your article has been accepted and sent to our production department, it is entered into our Central Article Tracking System (CATS). You’ll receive an email notification when your proof is ready for review.

When you receive your email notification, please read the instructions carefully as some journals use CATS for proofing and others use an online correction tool (OCT).

Read through what to look for when you’re checking your proofs and watch our helpful video below talking you through what to expect during the production process. Use our guide if you’re correcting your proofs using Adobe.

Avoid delays and problems in production with our guide to writing your paper.

Read the video transcript.

To publish an article and make it available, we need publishing rights from you for that work. It is important to make sure that you fully understand your copyright options

Subscription articles

There are two main options for authors publishing a (non open access) article in a subscription journal:

  1. Copyright assignment: You transfer or “assign” copyright to us as the owner and publisher of the journal (or, in the case of a society-owned journal, to that learned society).

  2. Exclusive license to publish: You grant us (or the learned society) an exclusive license to publish your paper rather than assigning copyright. In this arrangement, you as the author retain copyright in your work, but grant us exclusive rights to publish and disseminate it.

Open access articles

When you publish an open access article, you retain the copyright in your work. You’ll sign an author contract which gives us the non-exclusive right to publish the Version of Record of your article. This author contract incorporates the Creative Commons license of your choice, which dictates what others can do with your article once it has been published.

Please thoroughly read through our guidance on copyright to make sure you fully understand your options and their potential implications.

Video abstracts are a great way to introduce your article and are easy to share via social media, include in an email, or link to from a web page. A quick and easy way to tell others your research story, you can send us yours as soon as your paper has been accepted for publication.

All authors can purchase article reprints once it reaches production. Find out how to order print copies of your article.

Vector illustration of a pink light bulb and a small character in blue sat on top, with their arms in the air.

Now that your article is live online, there are many things that you can do to promote it, read our advice on promoting your research article to help increase your impact as a researcher, such as using social media, writing blog posts, using your institution network, and read tips on presenting your findings at academic conferences.

Sometimes after an article has been published it may be necessary to make changes.

If you believe a correction or retraction is necessary for your article, you’ll need to contact us as soon as possible. Read more about what to do if any corrections to published articles are needed.

If you’d like to translate a published article into another language read our guidance on translating an article

Vector illustration of a character wearing grey top and grey skirt, holding a piece of paper in their left hand and writing with their right hand.

If you have submitted your article to F1000Research, the production process looks a little bit different. Here’s a quick run-down of what to expect after submission:

  1. Immediately after submission, your manuscript will undergo a series of comprehensive checks, all undertaken by our in-house editorial team; this is to ensure that your article complies with our guidelines and policies.

  2. At this stage, you need to start thinking about who could review your manuscript – authors need to suggest at least five reviewers in line with our invited, open peer review criteria. Read our tips on finding peer reviewers here.

  3. Once your article has passed the initial checks, one of our internal editors will accept the manuscript and you’ll receive an acceptance email.

  4. You will receive another email when your typeset article is ready for review: at this stage, it’s important to proofread your article carefully and identify any corrections which are needed.

  5. Once these corrections have been made, your article is nearly ready to publish – as long as our peer review team have approved your five suggested reviewers.

  6. Your article is published, and the post-publication peer review process can begin! Keep track of your published articles and their peer review status (plus details of any draft submissions) in the My Research tab on f1000research.com.

Fun fact: the article ID for your submission to F1000Research forms the basis of your published article’s DOI! Your final DOI will also include the standard identifier code for F1000Research, and a number for the article version.

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