blog

F1000Research, one of a number of major open access journal launches in 2012, has been fortunate to have support from the life science community – for submitting papers and reviewing them. We’ve been thinking about the best ways to show our appreciation to the early adopters of F1000Research’s Open Science approach to publishing papers, data, and conducting peer review. The first peer reviewers – who seem equally committed to speed, transparency and innovation – have helped demonstrate that being different works. So, as further recognition to peer reviewers, we’ve added a free subscription to F1000Prime to the collection of incentives we offer peer reviewers for F1000Research. Incentivizing – if, and how – peer reviewers is an area of continued debate. The carrot-and-stick metaphor is probably one of the most over-used in discussions about scholarly communication, but it seems worth replicating, here, once more.

A ‘stick’ approach has been proposed to improve the timeliness of reviews, where authors who fail to review papers or are late with their reviews have delays added to the publication of their papers. But this approach – as well as being a somewhat blunt instrument – does not really fit with the globalized and competitive publishing and peer review system. And arguably the whole research community, as well as the authors, are punished as the availability of research is intentionally delayed. Speed is important – F1000Research publishes within a few days of submission – and authors now often have several journals and publishers competing for their scientifically sound work. A journal intentionally delaying publication might soon be struggling to find authors.

Although peer reviewers remain divided over the need for incentives (carrots) to peer review a survey conducted by Sense About Science, and completed by more than 4000 researchers, found that non-cash incentives are preferred. In reality few journals offer, or are in the position to offer, cash incentives to their peer reviewers. Flat fees for peer reviewing are problematic in themselves. It typically takes several hours to peer review a paper making fixed cash offerings mostly insufficient compensation for a senior scientist’s time.

F1000Research conducts open, post-publication peer review – and positively reviewed articles indexing in PubMed – and gives reviewers credit for their contributions by the inclusion of their reviews with the published article. Open peer review is another area that divides researchers but there is evidence that open peer reviews are of equivalent quality to closed reviews. And credit is a cornerstone of science.

With the rate of scholarly publication increasing, more opportunities for increased transparency in research, and a rapidly growing corpus of literature (all of these are good things), it’s not surprising that peer reviewers may be feeling an increased workload. In Sense About Science’s fascinating article about peer review, formally published in December 2012, free access to content in return for peer reviewing was popular amongst reviewers who favored incentives.

Faculty of 1000 is a strong supporter of open access to original research. More than a million open access articles have been published, and the number of open access journals is growing faster than subscription journals. As open access publishers already make all their content freely accessible, there are rarely content-based incentives they can offer their peer reviewers. However, Faculty of 1000 is a collection of publishing services and tools for life scientists and clinicians, some of which require a subscription to access. So, we’re pleased to be able to offer a 6-month subscription to F1000Prime to all scientists who conduct peer review for F1000Research. F1000Prime is our most established service, which provides recommendations of the best research in biology and medicine from a faculty of global experts.

Adding complimentary access to F1000Prime to the credit F1000Research gives peer reviewers in published articles; plus the 50% discount F1000Research offers on article processing charges to peer reviewers, we believe equals a healthy bunch of incentives to contribute to Open Science publishing.