Figure 1: Publication review process

If a manuscript requires modification and resubmission, the authors should share the final accepted version with the Communications team for record-keeping and compliance verification.

Presentations at conferences and scientific meetings

Abstracts must be submitted to the PIPELINE Communications team for circulation to partners and internal review at least 15 days before their official submission deadline, with details of the conference, date and place provided.

While posters and presentations are not subject to the full internal review process, they must still be shared with the Communications team prior to submission to the conference to ensure all mandatory elements are included for archiving and reporting purposes. This will also allow the Communications team to prepare social media material in advance for timely release after the conference.

Urgent publication submissions review process

In exceptional cases requiring urgent publication (e.g., related to emerging public health concerns), a shorter review procedure might be necessary. The partner must immediately notify the coordinator and relevant work package leads, requesting a fast-track internal review. This request should be sent via email to the PIPELINE Communications team communication@pentafoundation.org, along with the draft manuscript at its current stage of development.

Upon such a request, the PIPELINE Communications team will promptly inform the Scientific Coordinators and Work Package leads (PSC) to facilitate a timely decision regarding the specific manuscript.  The draft manuscript will then be circulated to all partners for review within the timeframe agreed upon by the PSC.  Every effort will be made to expedite feedback and complete the review process within a shortened timeline.

Collaboration with other studies

Any publications derived from data generated by both the EU-funded PIPELINE study and other studies must be approved by the Sponsors and Chief Investigators of both the EU-funded PIPELINE study and the other studies. All publications derived from the combined datasets must acknowledge PIPELINE funding or co-funding by the EU (see section 5) and the other funding source(s).

4.   Authorship and project acknowledgment

Authorship on PIPELINE-related publications should reflect substantial intellectual or practical contributions, in line with International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) criteria which recommends that authorship be based on fulfilling the following four criteria:

1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work;
2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
3. Final approval of the version to be published;
4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved

To appropriately recognise the contributions of clinical sites involved in PIPELINE studies as data providers, PIPELINE Consortium members should offer principal investigators (PIs) and other staff members involved at site level the option of authorship on any resulting publications, in accordance with ICMJE criteria.

As there may be limits to the number of co-authors on a paper, it may be necessary to utilize individual authorship followed by a group authorship name, which allows all authors to be individually identified through PubMed or other relevant database searches. The preferred and default authorship style for the abstract trial is “on behalf of the PIPELINE-RSV Trial Group”.  This should be considered for papers presenting combined results of the EU-funded trial together with the French-funded trial, as well as the EU-funded trial alone and the French-funded trial alone, to recognise the collaborative working of partners across all three permutations.  However, there may be cases where “on behalf of the PIPELINE-RSV International Trial Group” (for the EU-funded trial alone) or “on behalf of the PIPELINE-RSV France Trial Group” (for the French-funded trial alone) is acceptable.  Key publications (defined as those presenting the main outcomes of each WP) from the PIPELINE Consortium outside of the trial, and those involving a large group of authors, will be published under group authorship “on behalf of the PIPELINE Consortium”.

All other publications based on PIPELINE data or activities should reference “and the PIPELINE Consortium” at the end of the authors list; the exception is largely methodological papers, which often involve substantial collaboration outside of the Consortium, and where individual authorship alone can be used.

Work package leads and first and senior (typically last) authors for PIPELINE project publications are responsible for identifying who meets these criteria when planning the work, making modifications as appropriate as the work progresses.

Contributors are those who meet fewer than all four of the above criteria for authorship. They will not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged. Because acknowledgment may imply endorsement by acknowledged individuals of the study’s data and conclusions, the WP Lead and first and/or senior author are advised to require that the corresponding author obtain written permission to be acknowledged from all acknowledged individuals.

All study related publications arising from the EC-funded PIPELINE project must acknowledge Fondazione Penta ETS as the sponsor.  For publications including data from other studies, the sponsor of each respective study must be acknowledged accordingly.

5.   EU funding acknowledgement

All PIPELINE scientific communications including journal articles, conference abstracts, posters, presentations, must include a clear acknowledgment of EU funding in line with Horizon Europe requirements.

The standard wording as stipulated in Article 17.2 is:

“Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Health and Digital Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Posters, presentation and other forms of visual dissemination must also include the following:

• EU emblem (Funded by the European Union): The emblem can be downloaded from the Microsoft Teams folder, accessible to all partners, or from the European Commission’s website.
• PIPELINE logo: The PIPELINE logo and visual guidelines are available for all Consortium members on Microsoft Teams.

Only activities including these acknowledgements can be reported as part of PIPELINE’s dissemination work.

6.   Open access and repository use

PIPELINE partners must ensure full open access to peer-reviewed publications of results in accordance with Horizon Europe, Article 17 of the GA and Section 8.4 of the CA.

The corresponding author is responsible for depositing the electronic copy of either the final published version or the author-accepted manuscript in a trusted repository for scientific publications no later than the time of publication. Acceptable repositories include institutional, subject-based, and centralized online archives. Repositories that claim rights over deposited publications or restrict access are not permitted. Researchers can use the Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe (OpenAIRE) to identify suitable repositories. For partners without a preferred repository, the dedicated PIPELINE community on Zenodo, an open repository under OpenAIRE linked to GitHub and Binder, is recommended.

Immediate open access must be provided via the chosen repository under the latest available Creative Commons Attribution International Public License (CC BY) or a license with equivalent rights. For monographs and other long-text formats, licenses may exclude commercial uses and derivative works (e.g., CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND). Furthermore, the repository record must include information about any research output or other tools and instruments needed to validate the publication’s conclusions.

Pre-prints (e.g. medRxiv, bioRxiv) should include EU acknowledgement and be updated with the journal DOI once published.

Data needed to validate the results must be deposited in a repository compliant with FAIR principles and linked to the publication via a DOI. The timing of the data deposit will take into account the statistical analysis plan for each study and/or will not compromise timely further planned papers by Consortium partners, to allow reasonable exploitation of data by those who generated it before it becomes open access. If ethical, legal or commercial constraints prevent open access, partners must provide open metadata and clear access conditions.

Publication fees in full open access journals for peer-reviewed scientific publications can be covered by the project budget.

7.   Creative Commons

Authors are encouraged to retain sufficient intellectual property rights to comply with the open access requirements. To this end, they are invited to share their publications under the latest available version of the Creative Commons Attribution International Public Licence (CC BY). For monographs and other long-text formats, the licence may exclude commercial uses and derivative works (e.g. CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND).

Please note that, once a CC licence has been granted, it is not revocable unless there has been a breach, and even then the license is terminated only for the breaching licensee.

An overview of the Creative Commons License Options is provided in the infographic in Figure 2. Further information can be found on the Creative Commons website and in the FAQ section.