Metacheck

Metacheck screens scientific manuscripts to identify potential issues or areas for improvement and guide researchers in adopting best practices. It is a module based open source tool. For information on the available modules, see the manual. Upload a paper or a folder below and you will receive a report with automated checks within minutes. Everything runs on SURF Research Cloud in the Netherlands, with an open source language model. This tool is GDPR compliant.

Run Metacheck on a Paper

Upload a paper as a PDF or bibr JSON file and receive Metacheck's report as a web page.

Choose a PDF, or drop it here

Checks

The default checks need no other service and are quick. The others contact services such as Crossref, PubPeer, the Retraction Watch database, OSF or GitHub, and can take several minutes.

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Look up the references at Crossref (sends the paper's reference list to Crossref in the USA) Also run the code in the paper's repository (found through the links in the paper; the data and code are fetched, the R and Python code is run in a closed sandbox without internet access, and its results are compared with the paper; this can take several minutes)

Run Metacheck on a Repository

Choose a folder with data and code, or paste a link to an online repository, and receive a report that checks for FAIR principles.

Drop a folder or a .zip file here Choose a folder Choose a .zip

Your browser packs the folder into a .zip before uploading it, at most 500 MB (1000 MB unpacked).

Or paste a link to an online repository

For a link, the server fetches the public files itself (GitHub, OSF, Zenodo, Dataverse, Dryad, ...): files over 100 MB are skipped, and at most 500 MB is fetched.

Also run the R and Python code (in a closed sandbox without internet access; this can take several minutes)

Convert a Paper with bibr

Turn a PDF into a structured JSON file with bibr.

Choose a PDF, or drop it here Look up the references at Crossref (sends the paper's reference list to Crossref in the USA)

What happens to your files

Uploaded files are deleted as soon as they have been read. Reports are kept for one hour. A report can only be fetched with its random job number, which only your browser knows. Nothing is sent to external services, the tool is fully GDPR compliant.

Use it from your own code

Every tool on this page is also a web interface you can call from R, Python, PowerShell or the command line, for example:

curl -F file=@paper.pdf https://this-server/api/report -o report.html

See the interactive documentation and the examples.