In line with Open Science practices, BEPA accepts articles previously made available on preprint servers. This stance reflects the journal's commitment to promoting the rapid dissemination of research and supporting authors who wish to share their work early, allowing them to receive valuable feedback before formal peer review and accelerating scientific communication.

When submitting their articles, authors have the freedom to choose which preprint server on public platforms they want to publish them on. This flexibility is intended to facilitate the process and ensure that authors feel comfortable disclosing their work prior to peer review.

During the submission process, authors are asked to provide the link and DOI of the preprint manuscript, enabling editors to have direct access to previous versions of the work. This information must be included on the article's cover page, providing transparency and facilitating monitoring of the editorial process. This practice demonstrates BEPA's commitment to valuing and recognizing the importance of preprints in current scientific communication.

If the manuscript is accepted for publication, the authors must immediately remove the document from the preprint repository or indicate the link to the version published in BEPA in the repository.

Open data

BEPA emphasizes the importance of transparency and replicability in scientific research. In this sense, we advise that the data resulting from research collections, as well as the codes used, be shared and published in a reliable repository, ensuring their accessibility and long-term preservation. This practice not only promotes research integrity, but also contributes to the advancement of scientific knowledge by enabling validation and reuse of data by other researchers. As an example of national repositories ecommend Arca Dados, the Fiocruz data repository. To do so, the author must inform, on the cover page, in which repository the research data was published.