What do you need before you start?
You need the right to share the work, a finished file, and about ten minutes for the description. Gathering the details first makes the form quick:
- The rights to share it. For your own preprint, dataset or code this is usually straightforward. For a paper already accepted by a journal, check the publisher's policy on sharing the accepted manuscript; the open access guide explains how.
- The main file as a PDF with selectable (not scanned) text. Academic search engines read PDFs, and Google Scholar only indexes PDFs up to 5 MB.
- An abstract of at least 150 characters that says what you asked, what you did and what you found.
- Every author's full name, and, where they have them, affiliations and ORCID iDs.
- A license choice. If unsure, read choosing an open license; CC BY 4.0 suits most papers and CC0 suits most datasets.
- Any DOI the work already has, for example from a journal or from Zenodo.
Step 1: Create a free account
Depositing needs a free account; reading and downloading never do. Go to Create account and enter your name, an email address and a password of at least eight characters. No institutional email address, affiliation or invitation is required, and there are no fees at any stage.
Your name and optional affiliation and ORCID iD are used to pre-fill the first author of each new deposit, which saves typing if you deposit regularly.
Step 2: Start a deposit, or import one
Choose Upload to fill in the form yourself, or Import to copy the details from an existing source. Import works from:
- Zenodo: paste a Zenodo record URL, record number or Zenodo DOI. The title, authors, abstract, keywords, type, license, date, DOI and any journal details are read from Zenodo, and you choose which of its files to copy.
- ORCID: enter an ORCID iD to list the public works on that ORCID record and pick one to pre-fill the form (enriched from Crossref when the work has a DOI). ORCID holds no files or abstracts, so you add those yourself.
Nothing is published until you confirm. Imported metadata is often incomplete, so read every field before publishing.
Step 3: Describe the work
The description is what search engines, aggregators and readers see first, so it decides whether the work is found. Field by field:
| Field | What to enter |
|---|---|
| Title | The exact title as it appears on the PDF's first page, 3 to 500 characters. |
| Authors | One row per author in publication order: full name, then optional affiliation and ORCID iD (format 0000-0000-0000-0000; the last character may be X). Add rows with Add author. |
| Abstract | At least 150 and at most 10,000 characters. Records without a real abstract cannot be indexed by academic search engines, so the form insists. |
| Type | Journal article, preprint, dataset, thesis, report, poster, presentation, software or other. The type is permanent: it becomes part of the record's address, such as /datasets/42. |
| License | How others may reuse the files. See choosing an open license. |
| Publication date | When the work was published or completed. It defaults to today. |
| Keywords | A few subject terms separated by commas, such as river temperature, hydrology, Kenya. |
Under Publication details you can add a DOI, the journal or venue, ISSN, volume, issue and pages (for published articles), and the institution and report number (for theses and reports). These fields are optional, but they make the citation and the metadata read by Google Scholar complete.
Step 4: Attach your files, main PDF first
Attach up to 10 files of up to 100 MB each, and put the main manuscript PDF first. The first PDF is treated as the full text: it is the file named in the record's citation metadata and the one academic search engines will index.
Accepted formats are PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, CSV, plain text, Markdown, LaTeX, BibTeX, ZIP, PNG and JPEG. For datasets, a ZIP of the data plus a README describing variables, units and methods is far more reusable than a bare spreadsheet. For software, deposit a ZIP of the tagged release with its LICENSE and README files.
For papers, preprints, theses and reports you will see a warning straight after publishing if the main PDF is larger than about 5 MB or looks like a scanned image without searchable text, because either problem stops Google Scholar from indexing the full text. Replace the file from Edit to fix it.
Step 5: Publish and check the record page
Press Publish record and the work is public at once. There is no review queue. The record page shows:
- a permanent link that names the type, such as
lifeofresearch.com/articles/42; - a stable identifier, such as
LOR-00042, that is never reused; - ready-made citations in APA and BibTeX with copy buttons;
- view and download counts, the license and every file.
Check that the title, authors and abstract read correctly, then share the permanent link rather than a file link: the record page stays valid when files change.
Can you edit or withdraw a record after publishing?
Yes. From My records you can edit the description and files at any time. Changing the files increases the record's version number; correcting the description alone does not. The type cannot change, because it is part of the permanent address. If the type was wrong, deposit a new record and withdraw the old one.
Withdrawing removes the record from public view, search, the API and harvesting feeds. Its identifier is never given to other work, so old links never point at something else.
What happens behind the scenes?
Publishing makes the record discoverable through several channels at once:
- The record page carries Highwire Press citation tags, Dublin Core tags and schema.org structured data, which search engines and reference managers such as Zotero and Mendeley read.
- The record joins the sitemap, the Atom feed, the date archive and the OAI-PMH endpoint that academic aggregators harvest.
- Search engines that support IndexNow are notified of the new address.
Indexing by any outside service takes time and is never guaranteed. The Google Scholar guide explains what you can do to help.