The Board of Trustees of the International Human Frontier Science Program Organization (HFSPO) has decided that for competitions starting in calendar year 2017, applicants may list preprint articles in the publication section of HFSP proposals. Current HFSP awardees are also permitted to cite publications which are deposited in freely available preprint repositories in interim and final reports to the Organization.

HFSPO applies the definition of ASAPbio for preprint publications: “a preprint is a complete scientific manuscript that is uploaded by the authors to a public server. The preprint contains complete data and methodologies; it is often the same manuscript being submitted to a journal. After a brief quality-control inspection to ensure that the work is scientific in nature, the author’s manuscript is posted within a day or so on the Web without peer review and can be viewed without charge by anyone in the world. Based upon feedback and/or new data, new versions of your preprint can be submitted; however, prior preprint versions are also retained and cannot be removed. Preprints allow scientists to directly control the dissemination of their work to the world-wide scientific community.”

The scientific scope of HFSPO’s programs is to support innovative basic research into fundamental biological problems with emphasis on novel and interdisciplinary approaches that involve scientific exchanges across national and disciplinary boundaries. Our statutory mandate is “to make the fullest possible utilization of the research results for the benefit of all humankind.” To do so, HFSPO embraces the scholarly tradition of Open Access and considers the use of preprint articles as a promising tool to gain immediate and free of charge access to results of research supported by the Organization’s members.

The International Human Frontier Science Program Organization (HFSPO) is a voluntary international effort by countries committed to promoting frontier research in the life sciences. The members of the HFSPO, the so-called Management Supporting Parties (MSPs), are the governments of the following countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and the European Union, which contributes on behalf of the non-G7 EU members.