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

“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

“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

“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….”

Uttaranchal University launches open access Gateway that allows faculty to increase the reach of their research – F1000

“Today (20 July), the Uttaranchal University (UU) launched a Gateway that gives all UU faculty members the opportunity to publish their research as open access articles using the trailblazing F1000 publishing model.

Uttaranchal University Gateway will help increase the number of quality open access research outputs from within, and beyond, research networks. The Gateway targets outputs across UU’s multi-disciplinary research portfolio and looks forward to contributions from various fields including Engineering, Science, Law, Liberal Arts, Management, Agriculture, Pharmacy, Medical Sciences, Journalism and Mass Communication, Hotel & Hospitality Management, and Computing….”

The growth of open peer review – Leiden Madtrics

“To what extent have ideas on open peer review developed by Godlee and others been realized over the past two decades? There is no straightforward answer to this question, since the availability of systematic data on peer review practices is limited. In this blog post, we use data from Crossref to offer some partial insights into the growing popularity of open peer review…..

As shown in Figure 2, Publons is by far the largest contributor of peer review records in Crossref, accounting for two-third of all records. A large majority of these records are linked to journal articles published by Wiley. Indeed, Wiley has made a considerable effort to promote open peer review (referred to as transparent peer review by Wiley). Other important contributors of peer review records in Crossref are PeerJ and eLife….

Copernicus and F1000 are special cases. Copernicus offers an integrated platform that publishes both journal articles and preprints as well as the associated review reports. Likewise, F1000 provides a platform that publishes multiple versions of an article, including the review reports for each version. Because of their special nature, we present statistics for Copernicus and F1000 separately from the statistics reported above. Peer review records for Copernicus and F1000 aren’t included in Figures 1, 2, and 3….”

F1000 launches its first open access publishing hub in Latin America | STM Publishing News

“GDC Difusión Científica has partnered with open research publisher F1000 to create a dedicated open research publishing hub, GDC Open Research in Latin America. This Gateway will enable researchers to amplify the impact of their work and promote the principles of open research throughout Latin America and beyond.

GDC Difusión Científica has more than 30 years of experience serving the academic institutions of Latin America, providing software, eBook and journal collections, drug information systems and more. They operate throughout Latin America and have developed a deep knowledge of the needs and interests of the academic communities of the region.

GDC Open Research in Latin America is the first publishing Gateway of its kind in the region, providing the Latin American scholarly community with a dedicated forum to publish research with international impact and visibility. The Gateway is situated on F1000’s own publishing platform F1000Research, and it aims to support and accelerate research by providing rapid, open access publication with links to all underlying data….”

Data sharing in the humanities: translating policies into practice

“Do standard data sharing policies work for humanities authors? Here, Dr. Rebecca Grant, Head of Data and Software Publishing at F1000, questions how we can adapt current policies to reflect the working practices of humanities scholars. Plus, she shares how a group of academic publishers is coming together to tackle this challenge….”

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

“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….”

F1000 working on ‘digital twin’ platform launches | Research Information

“F1000 is collaborating with two Chinese customers to develop open research publishing platforms dedicated to the research and application of collaborative robots and ‘digital twin’ technologies. Both will be the world’s first open publishing platforms in their fields and will launch for submission in July 2021. 

The platforms will utilise F1000’s open research publishing model, enabling all research outputs to be published open access, as well as combining the benefits of pre-printing (providing rapid publication with no editorial bias) with mechanisms to assure quality and transparency (invited and open peer review, archiving and indexing). They also offer researchers an open and transparent peer review process and have a mandatory FAIR data policy to provide full and easy access to the source data underlying the results….”

F1000 working on ‘digital twin’ platform launches | Research Information

“F1000 is collaborating with two Chinese customers to develop open research publishing platforms dedicated to the research and application of collaborative robots and ‘digital twin’ technologies. Both will be the world’s first open publishing platforms in their fields and will launch for submission in July 2021. 

The platforms will utilise F1000’s open research publishing model, enabling all research outputs to be published open access, as well as combining the benefits of pre-printing (providing rapid publication with no editorial bias) with mechanisms to assure quality and transparency (invited and open peer review, archiving and indexing). They also offer researchers an open and transparent peer review process and have a mandatory FAIR data policy to provide full and easy access to the source data underlying the results….”

The Emergence of Threat Infrastructures: Plan S and Behavioral Change | Martin Paul Eve | Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing

“‘Threat infrastructures’ are platforms that are established or promised to be established solely or primarily in order to change the behavior of incumbent initiatives through fear. In recent years, such platforms have featured heavily in the scholarly communications landscape and have been driven primarily by funders pushing for open access. Examples include The Wellcome Trust’s Wellcome Open Research, the Gates Foundation’s Gates Open Research, and the European Commission’s Open Research Europe. Threat infrastructures are also a core mechanisms within cOAlition S’s ‘Plan S’ document (cOAlition S, 2018).

Such threat infrastructures are part of an encroaching structure of ‘platformization’, as Penny C. Andrews has it (2020) in the field of platform studies (Bogost & Montfort, 2009; Schweizer, 2010; van Dijck, 2013), in which the control of underlying infrastructures is becoming ever more important in the scholarly communications world. In this piece I outline why this framing of threat infrastructures is helpful; I document some recent cases of the development and use of threat infrastructures; I show the challenges of infrastructural governance and corporate ownership of such platforms; and I close with some remarks on the efficacy of a theory of change driven by such threats….”

European Commission awards contract for setting up an open access publishing platform | European Commission

The European Commission has awarded a contract for the setting up of an open access publishing platform for scientific articles as a free service for Horizon 2020 beneficiaries. The launch of the ambitious EU open access initiative is planned for early 2021.  

The platform will be a peer-reviewed publishing service to support Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe beneficiaries to publish their research in open access free of charge (i.e. without article fees), if they so wish, during their project or after it has ended. The platform will support beneficiaries to meet the open access requirements of  Horizon 2020, the EU research and innovation programme, and of its successor Horizon Europe. It will also support open access publishing as the main mode for publication of research in the years to come.

The platform will operate under the highest scientific and publishing standards and will have a Scientific Advisory Board to steer the publishing of research of the highest quality. It will manage the entire publication process, from submission to publication, comprising open peer-review, post-publication curation and preservation.

[…]

F1000Research flies the nest – F1000 Blogs

“I am delighted to announce today that F1000 Research Ltd has been acquired by Taylor & Francis Group (part of Informa plc). This is a hugely exciting opportunity for us. For a start, it will expedite our growth through the greater financial support and resources of a very large established organisation with extensive geographical and disciplinary reach. But most exciting to me, it will give us the opportunity to directly influence one of the ‘Big 4’ publishers to support the transition towards more open and collaborative ways of working, enabled though new approaches to scholarly publishing.   

It will be no surprise to many that F1000 Research is now transferring to a new owner. Our founder, Vitek Tracz has an impressive track record of nurturing ideas through start-up companies, and taking them to a level where they are ready to fly the nest. We will be following in the footsteps of many of his companies that have gone on to exciting and successful onward lives in the hands of others including BioMed Central (where Vitek initiated the Open Access movement in collaboration with PubMed Central), Current Opinions series, Current Biology, Current Drugs, Current Patents, IDdb3, Telmap, The Scientist, and many more.

Since F1000 Research’s conception, Vitek has been adamant that he would only ever sell F1000 Research to an organisation that he is convinced is fully committed to not only maintaining our vision and supporting us to scale up but also to ultimately transform the whole industry over time. Both Vitek and I feel confident that we have found such an organisation in Taylor & Francis, its CEO Annie Callanan and her executive leadership team, and I am very excited to continue to lead F1000 Research in this next phase….”

Taylor & Francis buys F1000 Research | The Bookseller

“Taylor & Francis has acquired open research publisher F1000 Research from its founder Vitek Tracz. The acquisition sum was not disclosed.

Tracz will remain owner of F1000Prime and F1000Workspace, which are not included in the sale.

F1000 Research launched the world’s first open research publishing platform in 2013; it also provides open research publishing services directly to research funders and institutions including Wellcome, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Emerald Publishing. The venture currently employs 40 staff; it is planned for it to remain in London, where it will continue to operate independently, while also becoming a key component of T&F’s range of open research services and Plan S-compliant platforms….”