From brainstorming your first idea to getting feedback on your preprint, here’s what you can expect from the eiRxiv process:
Start by asking a research question that interests you! Then develop a hypothesis and a plan for testing your hypothesis using experiments and/or data analysis. Make sure you get ethical approval before you start for any experiments or analysis using humans, vertebrate animals, or anything hazardous. Once you do your experiments, you can analyze your results, use them to evaluate your hypothesis, and draw conclusions.
Review our author eligibility guidelines, timeline, consent forms, copyright terms, and feedback framework with your parent/guardian and all authors to determine whether eiRxiv is right for you. We also encourage you to watch this video (link to video on front page) to learn more about the difference between a preprint and a peer-reviewed journal article.
A student creates an eiRxiv account and invites an adult author (such as a teacher, parent, or mentor), who then submits the manuscript for the student. This adult also serves as the corresponding author – meaning they handle all communication with eiRxiv and guide the students through making any changes our editors request.
Once the manuscript is received, eiRxiv performs a pre-review check to ensure the manuscript is clear and logically structured. eiRxiv also screens all submissions to make sure they meet our guidelines, aren’t plagiarized, are within the expertise of our scientific reviewers, are hypothesis-driven, and do not endanger individual or public health. eiRxiv may request revisions from students before the manuscript can be posted.
After passing the pre-review check, all adult authors and parents/guardians of student authors will be asked to give permission for the manuscript to be permanently published (often called “posting” for a printing).
With approval from all authors, the manuscript will be posted on eiRxiv and will be permanently publicly available to both the scientific community and the general public.
For every manuscript posted on eiRxiv, an eiRxiv scientific reviewer will be invited to provide constructive and supportive feedback.This feedback will highlight what students have done well in their manuscript and kindly point out areas where the manuscript could be strengthened. The feedback will be permanently posted publicly, alongside the preprint manuscript.
Two weeks after the manuscript and feedback are posted on eiRxiv, we invite student authors to share their experience with eiRxiv by participating in our survey. This voluntary survey helps us understand what students learn through the eiRxiv process and how we can improve eiRxiv to better support young researchers.
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Kindly note that these times are all approximate and will vary depending on the number of manuscripts in our system at one time. During school breaks (such as the winter and summer breaks), we receive our highest number of submissions and there are usually delays of 2 weeks at each stage of the review process while we work to process all submissions. We appreciate your patience as our volunteers work on your submissions!
You can always check the status of your manuscript by logging into your account on our submission platform.
As the eiRxiv process is already quite rapid, we do not expedite the review and publication process of any manuscript at JEI.
