1. Purpose and Scope
Weekend Research is a collaborative research initiative in which researchers, scientists, engineers, students, and enthusiasts work together to explore ideas, conduct experiments, develop prototypes, analyze data, and communicate research outcomes.
This policy establishes a common framework for projects that are initiated, coordinated, or substantially conducted through Weekend Research. Its purpose is to promote transparent authorship, accurate affiliations, appropriate acknowledgement, reproducibility, research integrity, and responsible publication practices.
2. Project Registration
Research intended for publication under the Weekend Research initiative should be documented from an early stage. Wherever practical, each project should be assigned a stable internal project identifier using the format:
WR-YYYY-NNN — for example, WR-2026-001.
A project record should contain, where applicable:
- project title and research question;
- project lead or coordinating researcher;
- participating researchers and contact information;
- ORCID identifiers where available;
- planned author contributions;
- institutional, ethics, or regulatory approvals;
- funding and in-kind support;
- links to data, code, notebooks, protocols, or repositories;
- preprints, conference submissions, manuscripts, and final publications.
3. Authorship
Authorship must reflect genuine scholarly contributions and must not be granted solely because a person founded Weekend Research, organized meetings, provided seniority, supervised an institution, supplied routine administrative assistance, or participated in discussions without making a substantial intellectual contribution.
The author list should be discussed early in a project and reviewed again before submission. Final authorship must also satisfy the criteria of the target journal or conference.
Expected principles
- Every listed author should have made a substantial contribution to the work.
- Every author should review and approve the manuscript before submission.
- Every author should be able to identify their own contributions and should take appropriate responsibility for the integrity of the work.
- Individuals who contributed but do not meet authorship criteria should be recognized appropriately in the acknowledgements.
- Guest, honorary, and ghost authorship are not acceptable.
4. Author Contributions
Weekend Research encourages the use of the CRediT Contributor Roles Taxonomy to describe each contributor's role. Relevant roles may include conceptualization, methodology, software, validation, formal analysis, investigation, resources, data curation, writing, visualization, supervision, project administration, and funding acquisition.
A contribution statement should be prepared before manuscript submission whenever the target venue permits one.
Example: K.T.: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal Analysis, Software, Writing – Original Draft. A.A.E.: Validation, Investigation, Writing – Review & Editing. A.K.S.: Methodology, Visualization, Writing – Review & Editing. All authors reviewed and approved the final manuscript.
5. Affiliations
Authors must use affiliations that accurately describe where the research was performed and the organizations with which they were genuinely associated during the work.
- Researchers working through a university, laboratory, company, research institute, or other organization should normally retain that institutional affiliation.
- Researchers conducting the work independently may use Independent Researcher together with an appropriate city and country when accepted by the publisher.
- Weekend Research should not be used to conceal, replace, or inaccurately represent an author's actual institutional relationship.
- Weekend Research may be listed as an additional affiliation only when this accurately reflects the author's genuine research relationship with the initiative and is permitted by the target publisher.
6. Acknowledging Weekend Research
Publications arising substantially from a Weekend Research project should acknowledge the initiative in a transparent and consistent manner.
Standard acknowledgement
This work was initiated and coordinated through Weekend Research, a volunteer-led global research initiative that facilitates collaborative research projects during weekends. Weekend Research provided the collaborative framework and project-coordination support for this study. No financial support was received from Weekend Research.
When technical or computational resources were provided
This work was conducted as part of the Weekend Research initiative. Weekend Research facilitated collaboration, project coordination, and access to shared computational and research resources. No dedicated financial support was received from Weekend Research.
When financial support was provided
This work was conducted as part of the Weekend Research initiative and was supported by Weekend Research through [describe the grant, award, equipment, computing allocation, or other support], under project number [project ID].
The wording should be adapted when necessary to remain factually correct and to comply with the target publisher's funding and acknowledgement requirements.
7. Funding, Resources, and Competing Interests
All financial support, donated resources, equipment access, computational allocations, data access, travel support, or other material assistance relevant to the research should be disclosed as required by the publication venue.
Authors must also disclose competing interests or conflicts of interest in accordance with the rules of the target publisher and their home institutions.
8. Research Ethics and Approvals
Research involving human participants, personal or sensitive data, animals, clinical material, regulated environments, or other activities requiring formal oversight must obtain the appropriate ethics, institutional, regulatory, or legal approvals before the relevant research is undertaken.
Weekend Research does not itself substitute for an Institutional Review Board, Research Ethics Committee, animal ethics committee, or other legally recognized approval body.
The responsible researchers must retain records of approvals, consent procedures, permits, and other required documentation.
9. Data, Code, and Reproducibility
Weekend Research supports open and reproducible research whenever ethical, legal, contractual, and privacy constraints permit. Projects are encouraged to make research outputs available through appropriate repositories.
Where applicable, a publication should provide:
- a data availability statement;
- a code or software availability statement;
- versioned source code and documentation;
- analysis notebooks, workflows, or computational environments;
- experimental or simulation parameters;
- appropriate open-source or data licences;
- persistent identifiers such as DOIs when available.
Data that cannot be shared openly should be described accurately, including the reason for access restrictions and any lawful process through which qualified researchers may request access.
10. Manuscript Review and Use of the Weekend Research Name
Before a manuscript publicly represents itself as a Weekend Research project, participating authors should ensure that:
- the author list and contributions have been agreed;
- affiliations are accurate;
- funding and competing interests have been disclosed;
- required ethics or institutional approvals are documented;
- the Weekend Research acknowledgement is accurate;
- data and code statements are complete where applicable;
- all authors have approved the submitted version.
The Weekend Research name or logo should not be used in a manner that implies institutional endorsement, funding, legal responsibility, or certification beyond the initiative's actual role in the project.
11. Publication Records
Weekend Research should maintain a public or internal record of scholarly outputs produced through the initiative. For each output, the record should include as many of the following as are available:
- Weekend Research project identifier;
- publication title;
- authors and ORCID identifiers;
- journal, conference, repository, or publisher;
- DOI or other persistent identifier;
- preprint link;
- data and software links;
- the acknowledgement used in the published work;
- publication status and date.
12. Corrections, Retractions, and Authorship Disputes
Researchers participating in Weekend Research are expected to correct the scholarly record when significant errors are identified. When a correction, expression of concern, withdrawal, or retraction is necessary, the authors should cooperate fully with the relevant publisher and institutions.
Authorship or contribution disputes should first be addressed through documented discussion among the project participants. Where the dispute involves institutional responsibilities, research integrity, or matters that Weekend Research is not competent to adjudicate, the issue should be referred to the appropriate institutions or publisher.
13. External Publication Standards
This policy is intended to complement, not replace, the policies of journals, conferences, publishers, and research institutions. Researchers are encouraged to consult widely recognized publication standards, including:
14. Policy Review
Weekend Research may update this policy as the initiative develops, its organizational structure evolves, or publication standards change. Major revisions should be versioned and dated so that the applicable policy can be identified for each project.