F1000 Launches Open Access Publishing for Biology and Medicine

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This week, the Faculty of 1000 (F1000), announced F1000 Research, a new fully Open Access publishing program across biology and medicine that will launch later this year [1]. F1000 Research is intended to address the major issues afflicting scientific publishing today: timely dissemination of research, peer review, and sharing of data.

Last summer, F1000 celebrated ten years highlighting the top literature in biology and medical research. Faculty of 1000 (F1000) is a unique online services that selects, rates, and evaluates important articles based on the opinions of global leaders in biology and medicine. Articles are selected by a peer-nominated global ‘Faculty’ of the world’s leading scientists and clinicians who then rate them and explain their importance.

Rather than a traditional journal, F1000 Research is a publishing program, which will offer immediate publication after an in-house editorial check similar to what is done by other publishers such as PLoS One before anything is sent for referee. Peer review will occur openly, post publication, with open revisioning of work including ongoing updates. Review will be a simple formal check by invited reviewers confirming that the work is scientifically sound, with commenting optional. An “approved” or “not approved” stamp with the invited reviewers’ name(s) and comments will then accompany the article. Following review, any registered reader can comment on the work and authors can respond.

F1000 Research will also encourage raw data deposition and publication. Standardized templates are being developed to permit the data and associated information to be indexed and mined, potentially for further publication credit.

The new publishing program will accept a broad range of article formats and will encourage content types that are now routinely rejected (or not even regarded as publishable by other science publishers) such as negative results, case studies, thought experiments, preliminary analyses, and incomplete datasets. Publication fees (i.e. author costs for submission) have not been announced.

The move by F1000 is timely. Recently, researchers have been boycotting one traditional publisher, Elsevier, who has been actively supporting a bill in Congress, the Research Works Act (RWA), which seeks to roll back legislation passed less than five years ago that expanded public access to taxpayer funded research by requiring all research funded by the NIH to be freely available to the public within 12 months of publication.

Commenting on the launch of F1000 Research, Vitek Tracz, Chairman and Founder of Faculty of 1000 said [2]:

The Open Access model has addressed effectively the issue of inadequate access to research findings. It did not address the major issues around communicating the research finding: the delays in access, the inadequacies of peer review, and the complexities of data publishing. It is up to collaboration between researchers and publishers to come up with a solution, and we are determined to be a part of it.

Many questions remain as F1000 Research is readied for launch. Rebecca Lawrence, F1000 Director of New Product Development, invites those working in the bioresearch community, institutions, funders, data centres and repositories, and data mining and informatics groups to join in open discussion and debate about the outstanding issues via the F1000 Resarch RSS feed or Twitter @F1000Research.