Building the Foundation for PubMed Central Indexing

Establish a Clear Plan for Long-Term Digital Preservation: The journal's plan for electronic backup and long-term digital preservation of its content should be clearly indicated. PMC is explicitly mentioned as an example of a database for archiving, along with those listed in the Keepers Registry. Taking immediate steps to arrange or state this plan is directly supported by the sources.

Adhere to and Publish Transparency and Best Practice Principles: The sources repeatedly emphasize the importance of complying with principles of transparency and best practice in scholarly publishing. These principles are fundamental for establishing credibility, which would be assessed by any major archive or database. Immediate actions include:

• Ensuring the journal has a unique name that cannot be easily confused with another.
• Having a professional website that protects users and includes essential information like the aims and scope, target readership, and types of manuscripts considered (e.g., stating policies against multiple or redundant publication).
• Clearly displaying the ISSN (separate for print and electronic versions).
• Providing valid contact methods for the publisher.
• Clearly describing editorial, ethics, copyright, and fee policies on the website.
• Clearly stating authorship criteria.
• Utilising functioning DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) for published papers.

Develop and Publish Strong Ethical Policies and Peer Review Processes: Commitment to publication ethics and a transparent quality control process are essential. While the effectiveness is assessed over time, the presence and transparency of these policies are immediate requirements.

• Develop processes to help identify ethical concerns. This includes having policies on data availability and encouraging the use of reporting guidelines and registration where standard practice. Processes are needed for issues like data fabrication and falsification.
• Develop guidelines for promptly responding to suspected ethical breaches by authors, reviewers, and editors.
• Have a clearly described process for handling complaints and appeals against the journal, its staff, editorial board, or publisher.
• Ensure a peer review policy is clearly indicated [implied by evaluation criteria which include peer review]. While not explicitly detailed in the sources how to describe the peer review process in detail for PMC, having and stating that one exists is a basic requirement.

By focusing on these immediate actions related to transparency, ethical publishing, and crucially, stating the plan for long-term digital preservation (mentioning PMC as a possibility), an academic journal can address some fundamental requirements for inclusion in archives like PubMed Central, as supported by the sources provided. The sources indicate that adherence to best practices like those of COPE is researched during evaluations (e.g., for COPE membership, which implies credibility).