Faculty of 1000 (F1000) today announces F1000 Research, a new fully Open Access publishing program across biology and medicine that will launch later this year. It is intended to address the major issues afflicting scientific publishing today: timely dissemination of research, peer review, and sharing of data.
Diverging from traditional journal publishing, F1000 Research will offer immediate publication; open, post-publication peer review; open revisioning of work including ongoing updates; and will encourage raw data deposition and publication. In addition, F1000 Research will accept a broad range of article formats and will encourage content types that are now routinely rejected such as negative results, case studies, thought experiments, preliminary analyses, and incomplete datasets.
The problems with current approaches to publishing novel scientific research are well documented. It no longer makes sense to wait months or years to read, comment, or build upon another lab’s work, and the standard closed, pre-publication peer review process has been extensively criticized. Furthermore,there is a growing recognition that the raw data behind novel findings need to be shared (barring any privacy concerns) to enable re-use and ensure reproducibility. F1000 Research will work with the community to address all of these issues, and the initial platform will be a forum to do this.
Commenting on the launch of F1000 Research, Vitek Tracz, Chairman and Founder of Faculty of 1000 Ltd said: “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 inaccess, 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.”Dr Rebecca Lawrence, who is leading the project at F1000 said: “Many questions remain as we fine-tune F1000 Research to break new ground in scholarly publishing. We therefore invite those working in the bioresearch community, institutions, funders, data centres and repositories, and data mining and informatics groups to join us in open discussion and debate about these many outstanding issues – via the RSS feed or by Twitter: @F1000Research.”
