Author guidelines

What the Hub asks of you as an author during the alpha, and what it does with your answers. These are the rules the Hub enforces today; where a policy is still being decided, this page says so.

01What to submit

One manuscript per upload: a PDF, a single .tex file, or a zip or tar archive of a LaTeX project, up to 10 MB from the browser. Each upload is parsed into a structured representation of the text; a PDF with embedded scripts or launch actions fails the upload.

The parse is a transcription, not a judgment: it produces no verdicts and gates nothing on quality. It can also be wrong, so you are asked to check what it extracted. You correct the title, abstract and authors in the submission form, and the body on the draft’s Preview tab before you publish.

02Who to list as an author

List every author of the work, mark which one is you, and give an email address for each of the others: it is how a co-author is identified on the Hub. You attest to the author list as the submitter.

At alpha, listing a co-author records and credits them and nothing more. They are shown by name once the work is published, but the Hub does not email them, and they gain no privileges on the work: they cannot read the draft, publish, or upload a version. The invitation-and-confirmation flow exists but is switched off, and whether publication should require co-author confirmation is being decided.

03What you declare

The Hub refuses to finalize a submission without each of these:

• your attestation of authorship;
• an AI-use declaration: either the AI contributors and their roles, or an affirmation that none of your tools were AI (see Machine contribution);
• a license;
• a primary subject field;
• an email address for every co-author, and which listed author is you.

If the work has been submitted or published elsewhere, the Published elsewhere step is where you point to its journal, conference or preprint record.

04Choosing a license

You choose between CC BY 4.0 and CC BY-SA 4.0; nothing is preselected on a first submission. The license belongs to the version, not the work, and a version cannot be published without one. A published version’s grant cannot be revoked, so the only way to correct a license is to publish a new version. The FAQ covers how the choice carries between versions.

05Before you publish

A finalized submission is a draft, and a draft is private. It is readable by you and by any co-author whose authorship has been confirmed, which at alpha means only you; the public work page and search answer everyone else as if it did not exist, and there is no share-by-link. Read it on the Preview tab of the work’s Manage page and fix the parsed body there. A work has one draft at a time, so finalizing another upload replaces a draft you have not published.

06What publishing commits you to

Publishing makes the version publicly readable under a permanent identifier, and readers may read, cite or copy it from then on. You correct a published work by publishing a new version; earlier published versions stay on the record and addressable. Until a work is public you can delete it, or a draft version, from its Manage page. Once it is public you can only request its deletion there: Valency reviews the request, and the work stays public until it is approved. A removed work’s address answers “not found”, and its identifier or version numbers are never reused. A work with a DOI can’t be removed this way. Retraction is a request that Valency decides on rather than an action you take; the request form is not wired up yet, so contact the team directly if a version needs to come down.

The FAQ has the detail on versions, what alpha means for permanence and retraction.