BCINexus · Publishing

Publishing a study

Every publication moves through one state machine. There is a single code path that can mark something published, and every hop through it is logged — which is why the states below are worth knowing.

The publication states

State	What it means
draft	Private. Yours alone, not queued for anything.
author_approval	Waiting for required co-authors to accept authorship. Only used when a study has a formal co-author list.
submitted	Queued for review. Visible to reviewers, not to the public.
under_review	A reviewer is actively working on it.
needs_revision	Changes requested. Back in your hands.
approved	Reviewer-approved but not yet public. Used by the co-author and reviewer governance flow.
rejected	Declined. Can be reworked and resubmitted.
published	Publicly visible and citable.
retracted	Withdrawn after publication. The page and DOI still resolve to a retraction notice; the study leaves every listing and stops downloading.

Which moves are legal

The graph is enforced server-side, so a status can never be set by accident from a UI that got out of date. The common path is the top line:

draft ─→ submitted ─→ under_review ─→ published ─→ retracted
             ↘ needs_revision ↗                          ↓
             ↘ rejected                            draft / submitted

under_review may also go to approved first, and approved then to published — the two-step route used with reviewer governance.
needs_revision can go back to submitted, under_review, draft, or rejected.
rejected is not a dead end: it can return to draft or submitted.
published has exactly one outgoing move: retracted, which needs a reason and a public notice. Nothing can quietly revert to draft after people have started citing it — see moderation and integrity.
retracted is not a dead end either: corrected work can go back to draft or submitted and be reviewed again. The retraction stays on the record.
submitted and under_review can return to draft — that is you withdrawing your own submission from review.

The authorship gate

A study cannot enter under_review, approved, or published until every co-author marked required has accepted authorship. The error names who is still pending. Studies with no formal co-author list satisfy this automatically.

Publishing, step by step

1
Fill in the study metadata
Title, signal modality, task type, and an abstract or description are the hard minimum. Licence, keywords, author byline with affiliations, and references are strongly recommended and feed the readiness score.
2
Attach the work itself
At least one pipeline definition — NeuralFlow, ML Suite, or Workflow — must be present, either on the study or on one of its experiments. A study with metadata and no pipeline has nothing to publish.
3
Invite co-authors and wait for acceptance
Add the byline with contributor roles. Required co-authors receive an invitation and must accept before the study can move past submission.
4
Run the readiness preflight
The desktop publish dialog shows blocking issues, warnings, and a score. The server runs the same rule set again on the publish hop, so passing locally is not a formality that can be skipped by calling the API directly.
5
Submit
Submitting creates a review submission on the default review pipeline and drops the study into the pool that eligible reviewers pick from. You do not have to find a reviewer yourself.
6
Respond to review, then publish
Answer comments, resubmit if changes were requested, and on final approval the study is published and becomes publicly visible.

What happens the moment it publishes

Visibility flips to public. This is the one place that rule lives, so every publish route behaves identically.
The study is indexed for similarity and recommendation, so related work starts surfacing next to it.
You and any linked co-authors gain the researcher capability, which is what puts the badge on your profile.
A transition record and an audit entry are written, giving the study a visible, permanent history.
The submission's completed reviewers are added to its contributor list — anonymised if the pipeline was blind.

Versions and updates

Published studies are versioned rather than edited in place. A new version is a new snapshot with its own history, so a citation keeps pointing at what the citer actually read. Review submissions carry their own independent version counter — resubmitting during review bumps that, not the public version.

Citation and identifiers

Every published study gets a citation export you can paste into a reference manager.
Author identity is strongest when co-authors have verified ORCID identifiers on their accounts.
Affiliations let work roll up to an institution, which is why the readiness check nags about them.

Publish readiness

Every check, what blocks, what only warns.

How review works

What happens after you submit.

Publishing datasets

Versions, paradigms, licences.

Moderation & integrity

Corrections, disputes, retraction.

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