PBCS — Pre-Registered Biomedical and Clinical Science. A public registry that lets you record a study’s plan before you run it, seal it with a cryptographic timestamp, and receive a permanent, citable record. Pre-registration is what separates a confirmatory result from a story told after the data came in — PBCS gives you tamper-evident proof of what you committed to, and when.
What you need
- A current IPAK-EDU membership, signed in at https://ipakedu.online
- A modern web browser
- Your study plan: title, hypothesis, design, population, outcomes, and analysis approach
That’s all. You don’t install anything and you don’t manage any keys — the sealing happens on the server.
How to pre-register
- Sign in, then open the registration form: https://ipakedu.online/preregisteralpha/
- Give your study a short ID (your own label, e.g. HBOT-ANOXIA-2026) and a title.
- Fill in the plan: hypotheses, design, population and inclusion/exclusion, primary/secondary/exploratory outcomes, power justification (effect size, alpha, power, planned N), analysis and multiplicity plan, interim looks, stopping rules, and safety monitoring. Only the Study ID and title are strictly required to lock.
- Save a draft as often as you like. Drafts are private and are not sealed.
- Choose a mode — Public (the full plan is visible) or Embargo (only the commitment and receipt are public until you disclose).
- Click Lock. This is irreversible: the system seals your record, timestamps it against independent time sources, writes it to the registry, reads it back to verify, and only then confirms.
- You receive a Registry ID, a DOI-style identifier, a public receipt, and a link to your permanent public record page.
What "locked" means
A locked pre-registration cannot be edited or deleted — that is its entire value. It carries a SHA3-256 commitment, a signature, and live time attestations, so anyone can confirm it existed in that exact form on that date. Lock before you collect or look at outcome data.
Verifying a record
Every public record page shows the commitment and the material needed to recompute it, so any reviewer, editor, or reader can independently confirm the record without trusting IPAK. Records are also search-indexable.
- A record’s JSON: https://ipakedu.online/wp-json/ipak/v1/prereg/record/{RegistryID}
- The public index: https://ipakedu.online/wp-json/ipak/v1/prereg/records
Updating after publication
A locked pre-registration is never altered — but you can connect it to the finished paper. Once your study is published, link the publication to your record by entering the journal URL, the PMID, or both. This is recorded as a dated update chained to your original: the sealed plan stays exactly as it was, and a verifiable two-way link now points readers between the pre-registration and the published result. You can add it at any time; there is no deadline, and it does not re-seal the original.
Storage and retention
- Every locked record is stored and publicly citable for 2 years at no charge.
- To keep a record hosted and resolvable beyond 2 years, a storage fee of $0.99 / month applies (most registrants opt in at registration).
- If a subscription lapses, you receive a 3-month warning before the record is removed from public hosting, and removal is a soft delete — re-subscribing restores it.
- The seal, timestamp, and receipt are permanent regardless; the fee covers continued public hosting of the full record page.
A storage fee is a service charge, not a contribution to IPAK; it is not tax-deductible.