F1000 Research – join us and shape the future of scholarly communication
| 30 January, 2012 | Rebecca Lawrence |
28
|
|
We are delighted to announce our plans to launch F1000 Research (from Faculty of 1000), a novel, fully Open Access publishing program. The project, which will begin publishing later this year, is intended to address three major issues afflicting scientific publishing today: timely dissemination of research, peer review and sharing of data.
F1000 Research will diverge from traditional journal publishing as follows:
- Immediate publication (beyond an initial sanity check) upon submitting to the repository. It no longer makes sense to wait months or years to read, comment, or build upon another lab’s work, and similarly to hold back your own data and insights until the archival version is released, without the benefit of wider peer feedback. All work at pre-review stage will be very clearly indicated as such.
- Open, post-publication peer review. This means no closed editorial decisions based on personal biases or subjective views of possible impact. Review will be a simple formal check by invited reviewers confirming that the work is scientifically sound, with commenting optional. At this and any stage following deposition of the work, any registered reader can also comment on the work and authors can respond. An “approved” or “not approved” stamp with the invited reviewers’ name(s) and comments will then accompany the article.
- Revisioning of work. Authors are encouraged, and tools are provided, to engage in dialog and to revise their work with either small amendments using versioning, or through bigger updates to their work in separate but linked articles.
- Raw data repository. Authors are strongly encouraged to publish accompanying data either separately or with the associated analytical narrative; if separate, different (or additional) authors can be credited and two publications will be citable. Datasets can also be published without any associated analysis and conclusions, simply with basic protocol information. Standardized templates are being developed with industry leaders to permit the data and associated information to be indexed and mined, potentially for further publication credit.
- “Article” format is not predefined. A range of formats will be acceptable, from the standard research article, to discursive speculation based on preliminary results, to data tables and protocols, to posters and slides (as currently viewable in F1000 Posters). We will encourage whatever format is appropriate to describe the work in a succinct format; this can later be expanded upon or supplemented in the repository, or published elsewhere, but serves as the author’s stake in the subject, with a timestamp, reviewer comments, and call for feedback.
- “Article” content is not predefined. Types of content that are currently routinely rejected or not even conceived of as publishable material will be encouraged for submission: e.g. negative results, case studies, thought experiments, preliminary analyses and incomplete datasets, all of which are important for the public record.
The default will be to use the most open of the Creative Commons licences, CC-BY for articles and, although we will not be hosting the data ourselves, we will be encouraging use of the CC0 licence for the data. In some instances however, there may be strong reasons not to use these licences in which case we will consider such requests on a case-by-case basis.
Please join us!
Many questions remain as F1000 Research is fine-tuned to break new ground in scholarly publishing.
- How much formal refereeing is required?
- What is an article amendment versus an update?
- What incentives are required to encourage post-publication refereeing, author response and revisions, and sharing of raw but template data?
- What author fees are appropriate for the different types of content?
It is essential to build this new model with open discussion and debate that includes the bioresearch community, institutions, funders, data centres and repositories, and data mining and informatics groups. Thus, prior to launching the actual journal in the coming months, this blog will serve as a meeting place to moderate the discussion. We hope you’ll join us here, via the RSS feed, Twitter: @F1000Research, and other social networking venues to tackle how we practically implement the vision that has brought us this far.
UPDATE: See the extensive discussions about this post on Retraction Watch, ArsTechnica and Times Higher Education.
|
|
previous post
A quick comment: If the data includes source code, the source license should (must, really) subsume whatever data license you otherwise would apply. Creative Commons themselves acknowledge that their licenses are not appropriate for things like source code, design blueprints and the like, and many open source tools depend on or use OSS-licensed code whose licenses can’t be changed.
Good job,
This is what I was looking for and what I suggested to Royal Society in response to a BBC documentary, Science under attack!
Below is my few cents;
CC BY 3.0 may be insufficient to protect the writers, CC BY-SA 3.0 may be more appropriate. As for raw data itself attribution should be mandatory a lot of work goes in converting real life data to a table, no modification (no derivatives) may be allowed.
This new system of scientific publication would allow fast and free expression. Prevent cherry picking and undeserved copyright to publishing groups.
As for the submission process:
It should prevent, forgery, allowing transparency, public and peer review/rating and evaluating of submitted materials for key components such as ethics, authenticity of authors, conflicts of interest, etc. validity of methods and findings.
Authenticity of authors & reviewers.
The review should consist of multiple steps. Each completed step can appear next to article.
* Real name and identity of submitter(s) should be verified √ by some system. This is hard I know! But this is one of the steps forgery occurs or may occur. If identity is not verified. a (?) may appear near identity box. Identity may be peer reviewed too: I personally know this researcher. √
* A consent about accuracy of data and writings, conflicts of interest should be signed by submitter.
* Real name and identity of reviewers (s) should be verified √ too.
* Reviewers should somehow be categorized: No publication/not a scientist, certified in his/her country but no publication, first name publication on same topic, other name publication on same topic, expert on topic, publication on other topics.
* Reviewers should examine the material for key presented aspects. Upon finalization a √ check-box should show finalization of exam. A rating of 1-5 or 1-10 should be used for each aspect. Unexamined aspects should remain unchecked.
* Does the reviewer have any conflict of interest (+ or -) with author.
* Is the reviewer an expert on topic?
* Does the data appear authentic?
* Does data contain scientifically new information?
* Does data contain contradictory information to current knowledge?
* Is the method valid?
* Is the method ethical?
* Are the calculations valid?
* Are the findings valid?
* Are drawed conclusions valid?
* Is material presented easy to understand?
* Do writings show good command of language?
* Do you recommend reading to peers?
* Do you recommend reading to public?
* Overall evaluation: Pass/Fail (1-5 fail) (6-10 pass)
The review process should also allow communication by notes in sides of document as in popular word processing apps and google docs.
The versioning throughout review should be visible as in Wikipedia articles. Major and minor versions can be marked too.
Raw data should be stored on author’s web site, publisher’s site and distributed by torrent. This would prevent punishing of publisher for bandwidth usage by distributing large data and safeguard availability of data.
Authors should have the choice to withdraw (reason), revise, remain published with approval by peers, published despite disapproval by peers, published controversial (approvals and disapproval’s), unreviewed, unfinished reviews.
A Wikipedia type of categorization and tagging may be more than appropriate for this site. Where tags can be added when appropriate and removed. With no predefined set of tags allowing dynamic creation of categories for new hormones, new species and more…
I have more to say but tired for now…
Congrats and hope you success…
Thank you all for the really supportive comments!
@Janne – yes, you make a good point here and we will be encouraging the inclusion of source code. LIke the data, it will make sense for this to hosted somewhere appropriate elsewhere – it seems to make little sense to further fragment the storage of data and code making cross-searching and cross-linking even harder, when there are perfectly sensible places to store these already. Hence for these two types of content, we can’t dictate the licensing but can certainly strongly encourage it to be the most appropriate licence for the type of data and code, always leaning towards openness as much as possible.
@Nevit – there are some great suggestions here, thank you. With the licensing of the article, our default will be CC-BY. There may be specific instances where this is not always appropriate, but I think it is important that we encourage the use of CC-BY where at all possible. Data is obviously more tricky and as you say, although CC0 doesn’t require attribution, the cultural norms of citing work that you are building upon still need to stand. By enabling the data to stand as its own article (but potentially closely linked to a related analysis/conclusions article), it enables the specific individuals who created the data to be fully credited as named authors, as they may well be different individuals to those who analyse the work.
You make some good suggestions about the peer reviewing. There will be invited referees (just as with standard publications now) and so we will be clear who they are, but anyone else who wishes to comment will need to first register with us so we know their identity. Of course a system like Orcid will help greatly with this issue (both for authors and referees). Authors will then be encouraged to improve their article and all versions clearly marked and stored. I will be asking some more questions about peer review in the coming weeks on this site so will welcome your thoughts.
In terms of the data, as I mention to Janne above, we want to avoid storing it ourselves, and we also don’t want to link to data stored on an author’s site as these pages are notoriously unrealiable in terms of still being there in several years time. Our plan is that the data will be stored in the appropriate repository if there is one e.g. GenBank, PDB, etc or if there is nowhere appropriate for that specific data type, in somewhere like Dryad, FigShare, etc
Very sound initiative!
As for the fee schedule — it would be great if you keep the doors open for the countries where researchers do not have financial support thus fees.
Best of luck!
Congratulations on a good initiative!! The devil, of course, is in the detail. There was mention by Nevit of versioning as in Wikipedia. This would mean authoring in, or converting to, a cloud-based system. Any thoughts on this? I am thinking of something like .
… links seem not to be working, and comment is not editable. I meant something like “Annotum”:
http://annotum.org/
@ Kaveh, Thank you! We are still finalising the best system to build this on, whether it be an external one or to expand on our existing in-house system. Wikipedia clearly has a well established way of dealing with versioning so I am sure there is much we can learn from that – the difference is that we will need to make clear the difference between a minor amendment versus a new version with a new DOI.
This all sounds really great, but I get the sense that this is catering to one sector of scientific research. Will you all be expanding into psychology? Where topics range from pharmacology and animal behavior and cognition to clinical and social psychology?
We will be covering all of biology and medicine which is our core strength and matches our coverage within the main F1000 evaluation service. As you say, many of the fields we cover also touch other related fields such as psychology, chemistry, earth sciences etc. Hence some of our content will include some element of these related fields but we will be primairly sticking to the biology and medicine side.