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“Talk to your librarian.” It’s remarkable how often I have to use this sentence, considering I don’t work with books, don’t work in academia anymore, and rarely set foot in a library myself.

But whenever I visit universities to talk about the work that F1000 does (from F1000Prime article recommendations to the open science platform F1000Research) people inevitably ask me questions that they should be asking their librarian.

 

• Q: Why does my university not have a subscription to F1000?
  A: Because your librarian doesn’t know that you want it. Talk to your librarian, and let them know that researchers at your institute are interested in F1000. Help them reach out to your colleagues to try out a trial subscription.

• Q: What if I don’t have funds to pay for F1000Research article processing charges?
  A: Your university might have funds available for open access publishing. Talk to your librarian. They’re the ones who usually manage this.

• Q: Can I use my institutional repository to host the data for my F1000Research article?
  A: That depends on the repository. Talk to your librarian to check if they currently host data, and if the repository meets our requirements. Ask them to contact us if the repository should be on our list.

• Q: I’m an F1000 Specialist and I want to give a talk about F1000 but I don’t know who can help me with this at my institute.
  A: If you haven’t had any luck with your graduate student society or postdoc society, talk to your librarian! Librarians regularly organise talks about tools that are useful to the research community and they might have been looking for a talk just like yours.

 

Librarians no longer just archive books or buy journal subscriptions. They often have a broad knowledge about new publishing tools. They are on top of your institute’s and country’s requirements for research dissemination, or know where to find this information. Some universities even have specialised open access library staff to help with open access and open science publishing.

A big part of a librarian’s job is to help you write and publish. That’s also what we want to help you with, but some of your questions will be very specific to your institute, and your librarian is the best person to contact.

So talk to your librarian. The website for your institute’s science or medical library should have their contact details.