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.

Our Chairman and founder, Vitek Tracz, 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 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.

We are still working on many questions as we fine-tune F1000 Research, and so we invite all 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 outstanding issues – at f1000research.com, via the RSS feed, Twitter: @F1000Research.

The article, entitled “Toward a new model of scientific publishing: discussion and a proposal” by Dwight Kravitz and Chris Baker of the National Institute of Mental Health at the US NIH, highlights several serious problems with the scientific publishing machine. In particular, the authors note:

• The average 221 days that it takes to get a paper published delays scientific progress as well as young scientists’ careers
• Considering reviewers’ efforts, time spent by authors on revisions, and publication fees, the cost to publish a single peer-reviewed paper in the authors’ field of neuroscience (which publishes some 2,000 papers annually) is over $4,000
• Designed to help publishers prioritize papers, the peer-review system creates an adversarial relationship between reviewers and authors instead of providing useful feedback to authors about the scientific merit of their work.

Most for-profit publishers argue that the review process chaperoned by their editors ensures high standards of scientific research. Not true, argue Kravitz and Baker. “The system is so stochastic and redundant as to be an active hindrance to the progress of research,” they say. Yet the authors are careful not to blame publishers: “This paper is an indictment of the service that we, as a field, ask them to provide.”

How do the authors propose fixing the system? Start by rethinking a publishing model based on limitations that are ancient history. With no need for physical copies of journals, the cost of paper, printing, and distribution has become irrelevant, so publishers could and should guarantee publication for any paper submitted, they say.

Gary Aston-Jones and David Moorman from the Medical University of South Carolina, Faculty Members in the Cognitive Neuroscience section, rate the paper a ‘Must Read‘, and regard the authors’ proposal as “straightforward and results in an improved experience for the entire scientific community.” Aston-Jones and Moorman summarize it this way:

“Reviewers comment and critique on submissions (reviewed in a double-blind fashion) specifically to improve them, publication is typically guaranteed, and a rating system is imposed based on comments of the reviewers and an editorial board with additional interactive reviews continuing after publication to adjust the rated value of the publication. The authors also include additional details such as ways for categorizing published literature to facilitate interaction with existing and future publications with similar subjects. Reviewers are compensated for their efforts and editors compete to attract the best research. The end result is a rapid, unbiased, and complete means of publication of results with built-in filters to assist readers in navigating the growing number of publications.”

The new publishing process that Kravitz and Baker propose “does not completely demolish the existing system, but streamlines it and optimizes it to leverage the currently available technology.” But, they acknowledge, “the process of reforming the current system of publishing will be long, arduous, and fraught with uncertainty.” Indeed.

Editor’s Note: Stay tuned for our announcement next week about F1000 Research, a repository for original research that tackles many of these issues.

Picture by Evan Bench, http://www.flickr.com/photos/austinevan/1225274637/

So how do scientists keep up with the vast number of articles published in their field? Well, unfortunately, they can’t, and that – if you’ll allow me to go off on a short tangent – is why Faculty of 1000 was created: experts in their respective fields highlight the most important papers and provide opinion on why exactly they’re important.

But I digress – knowing how hard it is to keep up with the literature, how do we know we haven’t missed something important? Could at least a fraction of what doctors think they know to be true then be factually inaccurate? The German-Swiss physician and scientist Philipus A. Paracelsus (1493-1541) once said, “Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art.” With this in mind, what part do assumptions play in medical and scientific knowledge?

Amaral questions this in his evaluation of a paper examining how 28 cancer experts differed in their understanding of the complex biological phenomenon of cancer metastasis, a process that has enormous medical importance. The authors of the study found that, despite agreeing on the individual steps of metastasis, no two expert-proposed scenarios were identical.

This led Amaral to question whether we should be so confident in what we think is factual information:

We believe that we know what others have claimed to have discovered, and that any important developments affecting our research area will eventually become known to us. In an elegant and original manner, Divoli et al. demonstrate that those beliefs are not supported by the evidence.

He goes on to explain that he has come across many an article citing his work in the wrong context, even using it support the opposite claim from the one he made. He says that Divoli’s “work supports the need to revamp the manner in which we publish our research.” We at F1000 agree, and perhaps the answer also lies in the way research is disseminated and shared.

Last year, Arif Jinha from the University of Ottawa estimated that the number of articles published since journals came into existence surpassed 50 million articles in 2009. No wonder Amaral describes biomedical literature as a library of Babel:

…too many potential sources where the nuggets we are looking for could be hidden.

This time, it’s the turn of the venerable Company of Biologists—a Cambridge-based “non-profit organization whose objectives are the advancement and promotion of research in, and the study of, all branches of biology”. They publish a number of well-respected titles, including Development, Journal of Experimental Biology and one of my all-time favourites, the Journal of Cell Science. As with most learned societies, their journals are pay-to-view. The money goes back into the activities of the Company, such as funding travel grants for PhD students.

They’ve now taken a bold step into the Open Access world, announcing Biology Open, an online-only journal launching in September and accepting manuscripts now. Biology Open “aims to provide rapid peer-reviewed publication for good-quality scientifically sound observations in these allied fields.” The strength of the new journal appears to be based on the rapidity of peer review, and, reading between the lines, acceptance of any paper that is technically sound (rather like the intentions of PLoS ONE):

The impact of each paper will be decided by the community itself through usage and discussion.

Which is interesting, to say the least. I’m wondering if they’ll take notice of F1000 evaluations of their articles… and, strikingly, “the journal also encourages the submission of useful reports of negative results.”

I’m not entirely sure how they plan to reduce “reviewer fatigue,” but we’re going to watch this one with interest. Being open access, there will be a fee for each accepted article, currently set at US$1350. This covers “peer review, journal production, and online systems employed for the purposes of submitting, trafficking, hosting and archiving articles” and can be totally or partially waived for those who can’t afford it. Editors and peer reviewers won’t know about fee payment status of the authors, which is necessary but good to see it being made explicit.

The only downside I can see is that submissions must be made as PDFs: on the one hand that’s great for portability and getting manuscripts out to review, but raises the question of how the manuscript will then be marked up and provided online. Peter Murray-Rust might have some things to say about PDFs.

We at F1000 look forward to seeing what Biology Open (also on twitter) has to offer, and wish them the very best. I’m sure our F1000 Members are equally excited.

[UPDATE: With respect to reviewer fatigue, I've just realized that the About page does touch on this. It appears that a manuscript bounced from one of CoB's other journals for not being exciting enough or otherwise appropriate, but still technically OK, can go to Biology Open together with its reviewers' reports. There's a danger that Biology Open (hmm. Must resist calling it 'BO') will thus be seen as J Cell Sci Rejects, but apart from that it's a good idea.]

Bioscience Horizons is an Oxford University Press journal which publishes research by undergraduate students studying in UK and Republic of Ireland universities. Launched in 2008, it is now in its 4th volume and has a reputation for publishing the very best undergraduate research. About 20 research papers and reviews have been published each year, covering everything from molecular medicine and pharmacology, through animal behaviour and ecology, to taxonomy and bioinformatics. Well over 50 universities, both pre-and post-1992, are represented among its authors. At least 15 Bioscience Horizons papers have been cited in mainstream science journals and one article published in the first issue of the journal has been cited 5 times. There have been over 75,000 full text downloads of Bioscience Horizons articles since its launch.

The journal was launched by a consortium of UK universities (Nottingham, Reading, Leeds and Chester) and OUP as a result of discussions about local arrangements for publicising high quality undergraduate research projects. The journal mainly publishes output from final year undergraduate projects–for many students the pinnacle of their undergraduate degree, as they are able to conduct an original piece of research in a laboratory (or other setting) and then produce a professional report from the results.

Bioscience Horizons serves a very useful role by publishing work from undergraduate projects:

1. it promotes the link between teaching and research in UK Higher Education,
2. it provides a repository of high quality undergraduate research that will be useful to other students and staff,
3. it provides a forum for students, their supervisors and universities, to showcase high quality undergraduate research work,
4. it illustrates the student skill base to prospective employers.

All work is published in Bioscience Horizons by the undergraduate author–this is recognition that they conducted the research, wrote the manuscript and dealt with revisions arising through the peer-review process. Academic supervisors are acknowledged in manuscripts. The journal believes this is an important feature as it gives a unique opportunity to get important, high quality, bioscience research published when it may not succeed in a mainstream journal. All work published in Bioscience Horizons is peer-reviewed and the publication process mirrors that for traditional science journals, providing undergraduate researchers with a professional training in submitting manuscripts and dealing with the publication process. Getting published in Bioscience Horizons is a great achievement for a graduating student. For many it is their first step into a research career and it provides evidence of their ability to conduct, write and publish scientific research.

In 2008, the journal published an article by Lisa Atkin, a graduate Biomedical Science student from the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff (UWIC). Lisa’s article on Type 2 Diabetes was entitled Rosiglitazone-induced SERCA2b inhibition: implications for monocyte cytoskeletal remodelling and diabetic microangiopathy. Lisa says, “I was very pleased to be asked to write a paper for inclusion in Bioscience Horizons. I enjoyed doing the labwork for my project, and now writing this paper has given me an extra insight into the process of reporting new scientific findings to a wider audience.” Lisa’s project supervisor Dr Richard Webb, Lecturer at UWIC’s Centre for Biomedical Sciences, said, “The beauty of the Bioscience Horizons journal is that it acknowledges and reports the work of students who are embarking on a career in scientific research and highlights the importance of the link between teaching and research in higher education”. Lisa is now pursuing a PhD on Type 2 diabetes and continues to publish her work.

Jon van Aarsten also published an article in the first issue of the journal. His article, on the role of alien genomic islands in the Enterobacterium Klebsiella pneumoniae has been cited twice, and led him to PhD study and further publications. Jon said, “the opportunity to have a real-life run through of preparing a publication and the peer review process was invaluable and provided me with skills that perfectly prepared me for my PhD and the publications I have worked on since. Additionally, the Bioscience Horizons article was elemental to applying for an obtaining a 50th Anniversary PhD Scholarship from the University of Leicester.”

For more information about publishing in Bioscience Horizons, including current and previous content, author guidelines, manuscript requirements and editorial policy, please visit the website at http://biohorizons.oxfordjournals.org/. The journal is also on Facebook and Twitter (@Bioscihor).

Neil Morris, Editor-in-Chief of Bioscience Horizons, is Senior Lecturer in Neuroscience, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Leeds. Neil teaches neuroscience to undergraduate science and medical students. His research interests are in technology enhanced learning.

The Open Access publisher BioMed Central has launched a new journal, Flavour, which is now accepting submissions. From the BMC website, the new journal will focus “on flavour generation and perception, and its influence on behaviour and nutrition”. It will publish research related to “all contexts – whether it be everyday cooking, haute cuisine or government policy on healthy eating.” Read more at the menu.

Apparently, Heston Blumenthal is “looking forward to reading exciting new scientific results on the science of taste and flavour that I can apply in my kitchen.” Claus Meyer adds, “It is possible, it might even be very smart, to combat obesity, global warming and the over-exploitation of our planet, with deliciousness as a weapon. I am sure that Flavour will give us crucial insight into the pleasure giving qualities of food.”

To drum up a bit of publicity, Flavour is giving away ten free copies of Peter Barham’s Science of Cooking. All you have to do is register for article alerts from Flavour by 1^st July to have a chance of winning (and if any of my dear readers win because they read about it here, I’ll expect dinner, OK?).

What’s your Flavour?

I look forward to reading the first, delicious evaluations in F1000.

From Ieda et al., 2010

The groups concerned (say my spies) are working together and sharing reagents and protocols. This does raise the question, however: in the era of internet and cheap data storage, why on earth isn’t it possible to share full methods along with the published paper (Journal of Neuroscience, I’m also looking at you)? One for Peter Murray-Rust to mull over, perhaps.

It’s a little bit more effort on the part of the scientist to begin with (trying to piece together methods from multiple people for a paper was never my favourite task), but in the long run, I can’t see who loses.

Pillar Coral, Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary

BP effects worse than predicted?
Although many scientists expected this year’s BP oil spill to cause major damage to the Gulf of Mexico, preliminary surveys were cautiously optimistic, causing some to hope deepwater coral “had perhaps dodged an ecological bullet,” according to the New York Times.
No such luck, suggests a submersible robot cruising the seafloor 7 miles southwest of the well, which found widespread devastation. “I have seen many individual dead coral colonies over the years, but I’ve never seen a site full of dead and dying coral colonies,” Charles Fisher, chief scientist on the gulf expedition, told the newspaper. It’s not yet clear whether the oil killed the coral, but Fisher said the circumstantial evidence points to that conclusion. This is only the first nearby coral site he’s surveyed, and he plans to visit others in December.

And the next president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center is…
…James C. Carrington, director of the Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing at Oregon State University.

RIP, brucellosis expert
Margaret Meyer, an early pioneer in brucellosis in animals, died at 87 last month from complications due to pulmonary disease, according to the Sacramento Bee. During her four-decade-long career at the University of California, Davis, she traveled the world to investigate and classify the infectious disease, which strikes cattle, bison, and other domestic and wild animals. “She was a leader in publishing information on brucellosis,” Bennie Osburn, dean of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, told the Bee. “It put her out there as one of the top experts in the world.” Meyer also worked to give women more opportunities in academia, telling stories about how her early professors used to give her twice as much work as male students to try to get her to drop out of science.

Germ-zapper bad for pregnancy?
It’s the start of flu season, causing more people to reach for antibacterial soaps, but new research suggests an ingredient could disrupt the metabolism of estrogen, potentially causing problems in pregnancy. In addition to antibacterial soaps and lotions, the chemical, triclosan, is present in hundreds of other popular products, including socks and toothpaste, but a new Environment International paper shows it can hinder estrogen sulfotransferase, which helps metabolize the hormone and transport it to the developing fetus. “We suspect that makes this substance dangerous in pregnancy if enough of the triclosan gets through to the placenta to affect the enzyme,” author Margaret James, a professor and chairwoman of medicinal chemistry in the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, said in a statement.

By metadata, I mean hidden parts of content which seek to describe that content. So metadata can be loosely defined as data which is explicitly concerned with data. In essence it tells us what we are reading. The data in question may be the name of an author, publisher information, an (e)ISSN or key words about the content. As an end user, you can’t see this, but a computer programmed to interact with the document can, and is able to extract the information and put it to use.

And yesterday, a big step forward was taken. Twitter have announced they will be allowing users to add metadata to tweets. This will go an incredibly long way to helping users extract meaning from a service that, while valuable, has sometimes resembled a sea of incoherent babble (@F1000 and @TheScientistllc aside of course).

The details are as follows (/HT Nextweb.com for kindly translating into layman)

Credit: Slate Magazine

I made the mistake of saying that an article in Slate by Nina Shen Rastogi was wrongly titled, as I believed it should be asking how we can clean up the patch, not WHETHER we should bother.

Chief scientist Miriam Goldstein from Seaplex (@seaplexscience on Twitter),  which is The Scripps Institution of Oceanography/Project Kaisei expedition to measure plastic in the North Pacific Gyre, replied:

Actually I agree w headline. Open-ocean cleanup EXTREMELY expensive/technically challenging. Need to carefully consider cost/benefit.

The humbling part wasn’t in being dissed in under 140 characters for my lack of knowledge but in seeing what the important issues are when it comes to a massive area of trash that can’t just be cleared up with a few sweeps by a barge.

Like the Slate article author, I imagined the patch as a large mound of floating rubbish, spinning endlessly whirlpool-style without the plughole to drain out of. I had read of  banking fortune heir David de Rothschild’s headline-grabbing voyage on a yacht made of reclaimed plastic bottles, taking in the North Pacific Gyre on a route from San Francisco to Sydney (a project delayed partly by the extremely ambitious task of building such a boat).

But changing the concept that the Patch really isn’t a Patch at all will take some undoing. Perhaps there’s a word in another language that would better do it justice (and one not so similar to those of cute 80s dolls would bring home the message better anyway).

As Miriam said, cost and benefit are obvious considerations when looking at possible clean-up efforts. As Rastogi said in Slate, “despite the oft-repeated claim that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is “twice the size of Texas,” we don’t really know the exact size of the Patch or how much garbage it contains.” (To Americans, Texas must seem really large: to Canadians, Australians, Russians etc it’s kind of small).

So committing x billion dollars to cleaning up an area of unknown mass and size could be essentially fruitless. Commenters on the article made the wise assertion that cutting the trash pile off at its source (drains, business waste overflows, garbage dumps, discarded material from boats etc.) was the only way to significantly reduce the Patch in the long-term.

In the way that more scientists are presenting sensible future-focused approaches to managing climate change (see original papers, later reviewed on f1000 Biology, from Lawler and Tear et al. for a solid review and another from Graham and McClanahan et al. on coral reef ecosystem stability), so Project Kaisei and other organisations are working on strategic responses to the issue, such as recycling retrieved waste and using large nets to snare bigger pieces of trash and leave marine creatures unharmed.

So arguing with an ocean scientist isn’t a good idea and hopefully government decision makers can come to that same conclusion.

This means that, in science, a finding or publication that people get very excited about at the time can be shown to be wrong—either through deliberate fraud, experimental sloppiness (although the boundary between the two can be fuzzy) or simply because we’re as scientists wiser now than we were then. This happens, and it’s normal and part of the process. We should welcome it; indeed, my friend Henry Gee has claimed that everything Nature publishes is wrong, or at least provisional.

So what we have to do is be completely open about this, no matter how embarrassing it is for the journal that published the work in the first place.

You know where I’m going with this, don’t you?

It was Derek Lowe who first alerted me to a paper published in Science last year, with the ome-heavy title Reactome Array: Forging a Link Between Metabolome and Genome. This was flagged as a ‘Must Read‘ (free link) back in November, because according to our reviewer Ben Davis

If this worked it could be marvellous, superb.

However, as Ben said in his evaluation,

this work should be read with some caveats. Try as we might, my group, as well as many colleagues, and I have tried to determine the chemistry described [...] In my opinion, this is a work that deserves a “Must Read” rating and I strongly encourage the reader to read the source material and reach their own conclusions.

And as Derek points out, Science published an ‘Editorial expression of concern‘, noting a request for  evaluation of the original data and records by officials at the authors’ institutions, as well as mentioning it on their blog. Heavy. Immediately I saw this, I let our Editorial team know we might have a problem and we published a note to warn our readers that the work described in the paper was suspect.

Today we published a dissent to the evaluation from Michael Gelb, who says

There are many reactions shown that seem unusual and controversial [...] My colleagues and I have tried to decipher the chemistry shown in Figure 1 of the main text and in the supplemental material. Many of the indicated reactions seem highly unlikely to occur, and the NMR data showing that some of the structures that were made are confusing and controversial.

We’ve also published a follow-up from Ben:

I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiments expressed in the Dissenting Opinion. The chemistry presented in this paper and in the online SI has varied in its description and content worryingly over the last 2 months.

and, rather tellingly,

as yet no chemical samples or key reagents have yet been made generally available.

(One of the usual conditions of publishing in reputable journals is that you make reagents available to other scientists, so that they can repeat your work. Failing to honour this commitment is not playing to the rules.)

It’ll be interesting to see when, not if, the original paper is retracted; and by whom.

And this, people, is the self-correcting wonder of science. Remember this, next time someone starts rabbiting about scientific conspiracies, or sends you their new theory of general relativity, or anything else that sounds crazy. It probably is.

Beloqui, A., Guazzaroni, M., Pazos, F., Vieites, J., Godoy, M., Golyshina, O., Chernikova, T., Waliczek, A., Silva-Rocha, R., Al-ramahi, Y., La Cono, V., Mendez, C., Salas, J., Solano, R., Yakimov, M., Timmis, K., Golyshin, P., & Ferrer, M. (2009). Reactome Array: Forging a Link Between Metabolome and Genome Science, 326 (5950), 252-257 DOI: 10.1126/science.1174094

The reviewer, Robie Macdonald, from the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Canada, looked at a paper in Geophysical Research Letters that discussed stratospheric geoengineering as a way to curtail greenhouse gas emissions.

MacDonald said:

MacDonald quite rightly has issues with this proposed technique, as it may on one hand help produce planet-cooling sulfate aerosols but on the negative, as Ars technica also reported, “it would also produce more droughts and worsen ozone depletion. And, crucially, it would do nothing to reverse ocean acidification”.

In a time when the media is not quite sure which side of the climate change `debate’ to be on and newspapers are running unchecked stories which deny climate change exists, alongside comment pieces from an unqualified former vice-Presidential candidate (Sarah Palin) to anti-skeptics (George Monbiot), stratospheric geoengineering could take off as the next big thing in climate change reversal (if there could ever be such a beast).

*By the way, the suggested methods of using military aircraft and artillery shells to save the planet sound a little too Armageddon for my liking.

…what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause

Thomson, in a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reckon there ain’t nowt wrong with the Journal Impact Factor:

The impact factor has had success and utility as a journal metric due to its concentration on a simple calculation based on data that are fully visible in the Web of Science. These examples based on citable (counted) items indexed in 2000 and 2005 suggest that the current approach for identification of citable items in the impact factor denominator is accurate and consistent.

Well, they would say that.

And they might well be right, and you and I and Thomson Reuters might argue the point endlessly. But there are a number of problems with any citation-based metric, and a pretty fundamental one was highlighted (coincidentally?) in the same issue of JAMA.

Looking at thre general medical journals, Abhaya Kulkarni at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto (shout out to my friend Ricardipus) and co. found that three different ways of counting citations come up with three very different numbers.

Cutting to the chase, Web of Science counted about 20% fewer citations than Scopus or Google Scholar. The reasons for this are not totally clear, but are probably due to the latter two being of wider scope (no pun intended). Scopus, for example, looks at ~15,000 journals compared with Web of Science’s ten thousand. Why? The authors say that Web of Science ‘emphasized the quality of its content coverage’: which in English means it doesn’t look at non-English publications, or those from outside the US and (possibly) Europe, or other citation sources such as books and conference proceedings. And that’s before we even start thinking about minimal citable units; or non-citable outputs; or whether blogs should count as one-fiftieth of a peer-reviewed paper.

Presumably some of the discrepancy is due to removal of self-cites, which strikes me as being just as unfair: my own output shouldn’t count for less simply because I’m building on it. It’s also difficult to know how to deal with the mobility of sciences: do you only look at the last author? or the first? I don’t know how you make that one work at all, to be honest.

That aside, I think curation of citation metrics is necessary: Kulkarni et al. report that fully two percent of citations in Google Scholar didn’t, actually, cite what they claimed to. That is a worrying statistic when you realize that people’s jobs are on the line. You have to get this right, guys.

But it’d be nice if we could all agree on the numbers to start with.

Postscript

The thought of throwing out the Journal Impact Factor is, actually, a scary one (not least, presumably, to Thomson Reuters) because we’re all familiar with it. But as the REF looms and scientists’ careers and dreams are increasingly on the line, we have to ask whether we’re doing the right thing. I’m not at all convinced by the ‘Churchill’ argument—that there’s nothing better—as there’s too much at stake. Shall we chicken out, and

… rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

But over the last few weeks we (that is F1000, not the England XI) have been getting some very flattering emails and I should drag myself away from these distractions (Katich has gone! 109 for 6!) and tell you about them.

Certain publishers have been writing to us, asking us to evaluate their journals. E.g.

…we are enquiring if any of our medical journals could be considered for selection to the Faculty of 1000 journal selection. I have written a few paragraphs describing what we as a publisher of scholarly medical journals wish to achieve. Following this I have listed a selection of our longest running journals we hope you will consider, including the descriptors you may find useful. I have also attached a spreadsheet with similar descriptors of our other journals.

We are a relatively small open access publishing company that specializes in peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals that are made freely available to researchers, academics, professionals and organizations engaged in science and medicine. We pride ourselves in only producing medical and scientific journals of the highest quality.

Now the thing is, this is double edged. On the one hand it’s great that people want to be evaluated by the Faculty of 1000, and validates what we’re doing to some extent. On the other it’s not quite how we work.

To date, at least, our Faculty (currently about five thousand in number across Biology and Medicine, with two and a half thousand assistants or ‘Associate’ Faculty) choose what they evaluate. In their own reading, they choose what is important, and write about it. They are independent. This is important, so I’m going to put it on a line all by itself:

We do not influence the Faculty members’ choice of papers.

So while it’s all right for publishers to write to us (and really, we appreciate it. We want to increase our coverage), we will not interfere with the (111-7! A follow-on looming!) independence of the Faculty.

What is happening, however, is that we have a ‘scanning’ project. Using the awesome power of yeast genetics goodwill and skill of our Associate Faculty, we email out tables of contents of around 500 different, ‘non-obvious’ journals. The AFMs then scan these eToCs for important and interesting papers, and will write evaluations (in conjunction with their Faculty Member) on anything that takes their fancy. We do not impose a quota: if there is nothing of note in a particular issue we don’t get an evaluation.

So I guess the message to publishers is, if your journal really is important in a particular community, then (a) make sure it has online ToCs and (b) get back to us later this year, when you’ll be able to propose journals to be included in the scanning project. We aim to increase the number of journals that we scan quite substantially—by about 50 every couple of months.

We’re hoping that this will completely lay to rest the rumours that we only evaluate stuff from ‘top-tier’ journals. We may not be comprehensive yet, but we’re definitely making progress on ‘systematic’.

Now, back to the cricket, and preparing for Science Online London.

This is the list of the ‘top’ twenty institutions out of just over four thousand. For some value of ‘top’, he says snarkily. Now, we know there are serious problems with citation metrics, but essentially it’s all we’ve got to go on, so it’s not a bad list.

The Most-Cited Institutions Overall, 1999-2009 (Thomson)

Or is it?

Because as you know, we give the articles evaluated at F1000 a score. And it has not escaped our notice that once you start doing such a thing, you can start asking interesting questions. Admittedly we only look at biology and medicine (so far…), but according to this Excel spreadsheet I’ve just opened we have over five thousand unique institutions in our database. Hmm… I wonder if we might be doing anything with that?

And talking of authors I’d like to take this opportunity to shout out to my friend Åsa, whose recent work on inhibiting protein synthesis in secondary pneumonia was evaluated on F1000 Medicine (and who might one day get a nonymous blog cough).