Journal submission and web hosting – journal of replication and reproducibility

The National Institutes of Health seeks journal submission and web hosting services for the Journal of Replication and Reproducibility, with quotations due August 31 at 10:00 AM ET. This procurement is structured as a firm-fixed-price purchase order (Solicitation 75N98026Q00992), issued under FAR Part 12 as a combined synopsis and solicitation.

Place of performance is Bethesda, Maryland. The contract period runs September 28, 2026 through September 27, 2027, with a production launch deadline of September 1, 2027. The contractor must provide a fully integrated third-party hosted platform supporting manuscript submission, open peer review, preprint and final publication, single-source JATS XML 1.4 publishing with MathML 3.0 display, code repositories with Git-style version control, containerized compute environments for reproducibility, continuous article-by-article publication, full-text search with MeSH taxonomy, and DOI and ORCID integration. The platform must guarantee 99.95% annual uptime with redundant U.S. datacenters, achieve WCAG 2.2 Level AA accessibility compliance, and support 20–40 articles in year one with 100,000+ monthly page views. Mobile responsiveness requires 90% of samples achieving First Byte Time under 0.5 seconds and Time to Interact under 4 seconds for North America and Europe desktop tests.

NAICS 513120 (Periodical Publishers); PSC 7630 (Newspapers and Periodicals). The solicitation is unrestricted with no small business set-aside. Quoters must submit intent to quote by August 14, limit clarification requests to ten questions by August 19, and provide three volumes: Volume I (40-page technical submission addressing management, technical approach, personnel qualifications, and quality control), Volume II (10-page past performance with three references from the past three years), and Volume III (15-page price submission with fully burdened labor rates and pricing methodology). Evaluation uses a best-value tradeoff prioritizing Technical Capability (High/Some/Low Confidence), Past Performance (High/Some/Low Confidence), and Price (fair and reasonable determination). A Low Confidence technical rating is technically unacceptable and ineligible for award. Quoters must have active SAM.gov registration at submission and award. Contractors must obtain NIST SP 800-18, FIPS 200, and NIST SP 800-53 security compliance; submit an Information System Security Plan within 60 days; achieve a complete NIH Leveraged Authority to Operate package within 120 days and signed ATO within 180 days. Personnel security requires Tier 2 (Non-Sensitive/Moderate Risk Public Trust) background investigations. Cloud data locations, data at rest, and backups must remain within CONUS. No AI use is authorized unless disclosed in the quote and approved in writing by the Contracting Officer. A six-month phase-out period is required at contract completion with full data export in portable, documented formats. Amendment 0001 extended the deadline from August 27 to August 31 at 10:00 AM ET effective August 24; quoters must acknowledge this amendment prior to submission.