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I promised in my last post to follow up on some recurring themes in many of the discussions that have been ongoing around the plans for F1000 Research. One of the other major issues relates to the idea that our plans will increase dissemination of poor quality science and the subsequent impact of this.

Will F1000 Research enhance dissemination of ‘pseudoscience’? No.

The argument here has been that due to the use of immediate publication, followed by post-publication peer review on F1000 Research, poor-quality content will be used to provide scientific evidence to further political and other inappropriate agendas.  To counteract this, we will be very clearly labelling when an article is still awaiting peer review and will display (at a glance) the essence of the reviews it has received, i.e. whether or not it was approved by the referees.  Consequently, if someone then quotes the work, it will be obvious to all that the majority think the work is of poor quality.  Contrary to the current system therefore, where a paper can be rejected by numerous reviewers for a whole host of journals before finally being accepted in a small but ‘peer reviewed’ journal and the reader is none the wiser, with our system it will be immediately obvious that most reviewers did not feel the research was scientifically sound.

Others have suggested we should still have someone providing a final judgement on whether the article successfully passed review or not (e.g. like the approach taken by the Copernicus Publications ESSD and ESSDD journals).  This judgement is invariably not clear-cut e.g. 2 reviewers may have said ‘approve’, 2 may have said ‘do not approve’. We would therefore end up back in the situation where a single individual has been given the authority to judge the outcome of that article and this is exactly what we want to get away from.

An important point was raised about how funders and institutions should judge papers from F1000 Research and how they will know if it has been refereed or not – this is an important point and something we do need to discuss further with the relevant groups to work through the best way of tackling this issue.

Will submitted work be poor quality? Unlikely.

Unlike with traditional journals where you often hear of researchers submitting papers in half-baked form in the hope that the reviewers will improve it for them, here the whole process is out in the open.  Putting out a poor paper which then gets openly ridiculed by your peers is unlikely to help your career prospects.

As I mentioned above, most papers eventually do get published in the current system so this new model is unlikely to lower the barriers. The key is separating review of scientific quality from the judgement of impact. Our established F1000 evaluation service can provide that additional filter for those articles that our Faculty believe to be particularly important developments.

We should of course remember, poor science aside, that what is unimportant to one may be crucially important to someone working very specifically in that field. The key will be good search tools and post-publication impact measures.