Category Archives: oa.f1000research

Guest Post – Why Interoperability Matters for Open Research – And More than Ever – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“We all know that the pressures on researchers’ time are increasing; requirements that can enable open research (e.g., depositing research data in open repositories; publishing research open access) can run the risk of adding to those time pressures despite best intentions. Funders, research institutions, and publishers are increasingly bringing in their own specific policies around open research, but we have a duty to make the ability to comply with those policies as easy and simple as possible. Furthermore, without proper incentives and support for researchers to understand why those polices are there, and then how to adhere to them, any extra burden is seen simply as a detractor from the time that could be spent doing research in the first place. One way to improve this is to facilitate better connectivity across the research ecosystem: between researchers, their institutions, their funders, and with the myriad of research inputs and outputs. This is why unique and persistent digital identifiers (PIDs) and associated research descriptors and metadata, are so fundamental to making open research effective….

Open research is not a threat to the scholarly publishing industry, it is the opportunity to refine, evolve, and reinvent what we do so well in order to validate, curate, and deliver research in the best possible way to help maximize its impact, which is what our industry is about….”

HEAL1000 | Research Gateways | F1000Research

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“HEAL-Link, the consortium of Greek academic libraries, is committed to bring about the much-needed change in the publication of the research outputs of Greek institutions to match the contemporary scholarly communication standards for openness.

As part of its mission to support Open Science, HEAL-Link has launched the HEAL1000 Gateway on the highly acclaimed platform of F1000Research, to provide a publication venue for its members in a form that implements Open Access, Open Peer Review and Open Data.

HEAL-Link will centrally pay the publication fee (Article Processing Charge) to F1000Research for any articles where the corresponding author is based at a HEAL-Link member institution. Only corresponding authors affiliated with an institution-member of HEAL-Link are regarded as eligible to publish free of charge in the HEAL1000 Gateway. The authors must use their institutional email address and clearly state their institutional affiliation in the submission form. A full list of participating member institutions can be found here….”

HEAL-Link launches open research publishing hub with F1000 | STM Publishing News

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“HEAL-Link has partnered with open research publisher F1000 to launch HEAL1000, an open research publishing hub in Greece for all researchers affiliated with its 43 member institutions. 

HEAL1000 is hosted on F1000’s own pioneering open research publishing platform, F1000Research, and enables all HEAL-Link affiliated authors the opportunity to rapidly share any sound research output, thereby accelerating the dissemination of knowledge and the pace of new discoveries. HEAL-Link joins other prominent supporters of open research, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the European Commission and Wellcome in adopting this innovative publishing model….”

F1000 Research Platforms Lurch On – by Kent Anderson

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“The most common platform provider has been F1000 Research, which started in 2012 and was acquired by Taylor & Francis in 2020. F1000 Research has been promulgating a debatable form of open peer review for nearly a decade now, with PubMed a willing participant in its confusing scheme.

F1000 Research began “powering” various platforms for societies, funding bodies, universities, and coalitions not long after it debuted.

As a reminder, a paper posted within the F1000 Research scheme has to receive two positive reviews recommending it (in general — there are other ways to get approved) before it can be indexed in PubMed.

For authors posting to the platform, attracting peer reviewers is an uncertain proposition, causing many papers to linger without review. Conflicts of interest aren’t scrupulously managed, so the percentage of friendly reviews is unknown. And reviews generally are shorter and less rigorous than those generated via traditional methods….

There are four institutional collections — as F1000 Research refers to them — and they appear to be fairly moribund. For example, the Max Planck Society collection (launced in 2018) has 24 papers posted, with 15 (63%) indexed in PubMed. Across the four collections, there are currently 104 articles, with 77 (74%) having passed the F1000/PubMed bar….

Facing competition from branded preprint servers and mega-journals, it remains an open question whether the decade-long practice of community peer review at F1000 Research is valid or is actually a factor causing people to shy away. Will the powers that be ever reconsider it, and make it more rigorous and process-oriented? Will PubMed ever extricate itself from what may be a detrimental situation? Or has the cronyism that started the F1000/PubMed relationship been forgotten and forgiven? …”

David Worlock | Developing digital strategies for the information marketplace | Supporting the migration of information providers and content players into the networked services world of the future.

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“If STM publishers were successful in going [to fee-based gold] Open Access , and supporting a creator-pays business model , how will they cope with the next migration , if that is towards Open Platform , and funder pays in a context that does not really seem to require publishers in quite the same way at all…

But the really interesting part of the [Octopus] proposal is the break-up of the article itself . Dr Freeman sees it as dividing into eight different segments , each of them appearing on the platform as soon as they are ready , and thus each element being susceptible to review at that point . Her eight sections are :  Problem ; Hypothesis; Methodology/Protocol ; Data/Results ;Analysis; Interpretation : Real-world Implications ; Peer Review. It will be seen that the thinking leans towards the Open Science insistence in separating the publication of the first three elements in time prior to results being available . It also encompasses another strand of funder thinking – all the work that has been accepted and funded , through increasingly expensive selection processes , should subsequently appear on a platform and be peer-reviewed. The process of publisher/editor selection may not now be wanted on board ….”

The National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research partners with F1000 to launch OA publishing hub in India

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“The National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER-Kolkata) launched its own open access publishing hub with F1000, Taylor & Francis Group’s open research publishing arm. This will be hosted on the F1000Research site, adopting its pioneering approach to open science publishing.

NIPER-Kolkata, founded in 2007 as a centre of excellence for higher education, research and development in Pharmaceutical Sciences, will be adopting F1000’s open science practices to increase the reproducibility and accessibility of their published research. This means the research is free for anyone to read and will use the innovative F1000Research publishing model that combines the benefits of rapid publication with mechanisms to assure quality and transparency, thereby accelerating research impact.

The NIPER-Kolkata gateway provides a home for their conference-linked outputs, enabling their scientific outcomes to be published open access. This gateway welcomes submissions from the fields of, drug discovery, process chemistry, pharmacological studies, natural products, pharmaceutical formulation, computational studies, and medical devices, published in all forms, from traditional research articles, to a protocols, registered report, data notes, case studies, and much more….”

Determining the informativeness of comments: a natural language study of F1000Research open peer review reports | Emerald Insight

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Abstract:  Purpose

Social comments are rich in information and useful in evaluating, ranking or retrieving different kinds of materials. However, their merits in representing or providing added values to scientific articles have not yet been studied. Therefore, the present study investigates the informativeness of open review reports as a kind of social comments in a scholarly setting.

Design/methodology/approach

A test collection was built consisting of 100 randomly selected queries, 1,962 reviewed documents and their reviewers’ open reports from F1000Research. They were analyzed using natural language techniques. The comments’ salient words were compared to the documents’ and also to the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) salient words. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to test the accuracy of the comments in representing their related articles.

Findings

The papers’ contents and comments have a considerable number of salient words in common. The comments’ salient words are also largely found in the MeSH, signifying their consistency with the knowledge tree and their potential to add some complementary features to their related items. The ROC curves confirm the accuracy of the comments in retrieving their related papers.

Originality/value

This research is the first to reveal the merits of open review reports on scientific papers, in terms of their relatedness to their mother articles, in specific, and to the knowledge tree, in general. They are found informative in not only representing the reviewed papers but also in adding values to the contents of the papers.

Price Transparency on Gates Open Research -Gates Open Research Blog

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“Last month, F1000 Research rolled out a new pricing structure complete with price transparency for its platform. As the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a cOAlition S signatory, we knew that Gates Open Research (GOR) would need to make its pricing structure transparent, so that it meets the criteria of a fully Plan S compliant publishing platform. So, we are announcing our new pricing and service framework for GOR, which ensures a fairer and more representative pricing across all academic subject areas funded by the foundation while providing full transparency on what those prices comprise of. 

2020 marks three years of publication for GOR, and over this time the platform has grown in popularity and size, along with publishing research across the full range of academic subject areas the foundation supports. F1000 Research have analysed the publications on GOR to determine if the word count pricing structure is representative for all the published content to date. We particularly wanted to see if there was a bias towards the cost of articles in different subject areas that the foundation fund. Subject areas like education and social science research typically produce articles that are longer, so we also wanted to see if the editorial service we were providing aligned with the cost of publishing article in these areas. The results of this analysis showed that there was room for improvement, and we think the new pricing structure described below better accommodates for a fairer approach to pricing that works across all academic subjects and better represents the editorial service that is required.  

We have subsequently combined this work with the article processing charge (APC) transparency requirements necessary for Plan S compliance….”

Publish your Registered Report on F1000Research

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“We believe that the value of science is in the rigor of the method, not the appeal of the results – an ethos at the heart of our publishing model. Choosing to publish your research as a Registered Report puts this into practice, by shifting the focus away from the results and back to the research question. Registered Reports can be used for research in almost any field of study, from psychology and neuroscience, to medicine or ecology.

 

Registered Reports on F1000Research follow a two-stage process: firstly, the Study Protocol (Stage 1) is published and peer-reviewed by subject experts before data collection begins. Then, once the research has been completed, the Research Article (Stage 2) is published, peer reviewed, and awarded a Registered Report badge.

 

F1000Research is the first publisher to combine the Registered Reports format with an open, post-publication peer review model. Alongside our open data policy, this format enhances credibility, and takes transparency and reproducibility in research to the next level….”

Open Research Europe

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“Open Research Europe will be a scholarly publishing platform providing a full open access peer reviewed publishing service for Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe beneficiaries at no cost to them, during and after the end of their grants. The platform will enable rapid publication times and publication outputs that support research integrity, reproducibility and transparency and enable open science practices….”

Open Research Europe

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“Open Research Europe will be a scholarly publishing platform providing a full open access peer reviewed publishing service for Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe beneficiaries at no cost to them, during and after the end of their grants. The platform will enable rapid publication times and publication outputs that support research integrity, reproducibility and transparency and enable open science practices….”

Could this be the start of a new era in scholarly communication? – F1000 Blogs

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“There are in fact a number of research publishing models in widespread use that are designed precisely to enable rapid publication of new findings (as a preprint does) while assuring expert and transparent peer review to support trust in, and decision-making around, an article’s potential use. F1000Research [13] developed such a publishing model for the life sciences in 2013, with a mandatory requirement that the underlying data and code are made FAIR (Finable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) to support reproducibility of the findings and their use and reuse.  In addition, publications can be updated as new data comes in or new understanding is developed, thereby enabling the publication to track the ongoing research workflow – like a ‘living article’.

This model is now being extended out to all research disciplines, and major funders around the world also now have their own publishing platforms for their grantees utilising this same rapid and transparent publishing model, including Wellcome [14], the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [15], the Irish Health Research Board [16], and later this year, the European Commission [17]. Indeed these platforms have seen a big upsurge in submissions on COVID-19 during this time due to the obvious benefits of this approach during such an emergency [for examples see 18, 19 and 20]. Furthermore, this model can bring considerable cost and efficiency gains: average article processing charges on Wellcome Open Research are 67% cheaper than the average Wellcome pays to other venues for Open Access [21], and the model enables the publication of a much broader range of outputs, helping to reduce research waste….”

Eurodoc Survey on Publishing in Open Science for Early Career Researchers

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“Later this year, the European Commission will launch ‘Open Research Europe’ (ORE), an open access Publishing Platform for Horizon 2020 beneficiaries. ORE will offer rapid publication of a wide range of article types without editorial bias. All articles will benefit from transparent peer review and will be published under an open license. ORE is a significant step towards Open Science in Europe. Eurodoc, as an expert partner in the project, will ensure that the voice of early-career researchers is heard.

This survey aims to provide the ORE project team with insights related to awareness, perception and experience with open practices and tools, from the perspective of doctoral candidates and junior researchers. Let’s make an impact together!”

Our response to the UKRI OA Review – F1000 Blogs

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“To add precision to the requirements of the UKRI’s OA policy, it would be helpful for the UKRI to make clear that all types of research-based articles that are submitted for peer review at publication outlets that meet the UKRI’s qualifying standards/criteria (and for which some sort of payment is required to secure OA – predominantly though an ‘Article Processing Charge’ (APC)) are covered by the policy….

The UKRI also needs to be clear about when it will ‘pay’ to enable OA.  For example:

would the policy apply if ‘at least one author’ has UKRI HE funding? 
if there are multi-funded authors listed on an article, and one or more of the authors have access to funds to support OA, what is the role of each funder? (i.e. do they split the costs? Is there a lead? Etc) …

UKRI should require an author or their institution to retain copyright AND specific reuse rights, including rights to deposit the author’s accepted manuscript in a repository in line with the deposit and licensing requirements of UKRI’s OA policy….

 

UKRI OA funds should not be permitted to support OA publication in hybrid journals…

 

While there are some benefits around transformative agreements – not least in terms of the simplicity of achieving OA for authors! – we do worry that such ‘big deals’ can effectively reduce author choice around publishing venue, effectively lock out OA-born and smaller publishers and have the potential to create and exacerbate inequalities in access to research across the globe; this does not therefore represent good value to the public (nor does it guarantee any kind of a sustainable model of publishing).

We would advise UKRI to consider how and where transformative deals can have unintended consequences in terms of lock-ins (and potential cost tie-ins) with specific publishers (often those operating at scale) while effectively making OA-born publishers work harder to engage and access researchers. …”

Our response to the UKRI OA Review – F1000 Blogs

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“To add precision to the requirements of the UKRI’s OA policy, it would be helpful for the UKRI to make clear that all types of research-based articles that are submitted for peer review at publication outlets that meet the UKRI’s qualifying standards/criteria (and for which some sort of payment is required to secure OA – predominantly though an ‘Article Processing Charge’ (APC)) are covered by the policy….

The UKRI also needs to be clear about when it will ‘pay’ to enable OA.  For example:

would the policy apply if ‘at least one author’ has UKRI HE funding? 
if there are multi-funded authors listed on an article, and one or more of the authors have access to funds to support OA, what is the role of each funder? (i.e. do they split the costs? Is there a lead? Etc) …

UKRI should require an author or their institution to retain copyright AND specific reuse rights, including rights to deposit the author’s accepted manuscript in a repository in line with the deposit and licensing requirements of UKRI’s OA policy….

 

UKRI OA funds should not be permitted to support OA publication in hybrid journals…

 

While there are some benefits around transformative agreements – not least in terms of the simplicity of achieving OA for authors! – we do worry that such ‘big deals’ can effectively reduce author choice around publishing venue, effectively lock out OA-born and smaller publishers and have the potential to create and exacerbate inequalities in access to research across the globe; this does not therefore represent good value to the public (nor does it guarantee any kind of a sustainable model of publishing).

We would advise UKRI to consider how and where transformative deals can have unintended consequences in terms of lock-ins (and potential cost tie-ins) with specific publishers (often those operating at scale) while effectively making OA-born publishers work harder to engage and access researchers. …”