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There has been a lot of discussion about speed to publication in the blogosphere recently, so we thought we would share some initial insights into our stats (and remind you that our speed isn’t the only thing that makes F1000Research different).

Fast? How fast?

We have analyzed our first few months of publishing and can tell you that, on average, our articles go live within seven days of acceptance, with 35% published within four days or less.

Of course we manage this because of the way we publish: all accepted articles are published immediately and are then reviewed, openly, by named referees. This system puts science into the public domain without unnecessary delay and encourages fair, honest and fast peer review, with most articles receiving two referee reports within two weeks.

Some of our authors have been publicly commenting on our speed. Sam Gandy, an Alzheimer’s disease researcher in New York whose research group has discovered that air pollution is linked to the development of Alzheimer’s disease in a mouse model, said:

Science is more competitive than ever, and I often take speed of publication into account when I choose where to submit my lab’s papers. I opted to publish in F1000Research and it took only 32 hours from submission to publication.

Hajime Takizawa of the University of Tokyo, who published what referee Dr Bruce Rubin (Children’s Hospital of Richmond), called “an extremely well conducted study from a top research group” on the role of histone acetylation in airway epithelial cell signal transduction after exposure to bacterial endotoxin, said:

After my article was published, the open post-publication peer review process was extremely quick. My article received two reviews in the space of just five days, which is a refreshing change from the traditional reviewing system. I believe this type of review system will become a new standard for scientific publications in the near future.

We’re open…

Of course we are not only about speed, we’re also about openness and transparency, both in the refereeing approach we use, and in requiring publication of complete data sets for all papers (obviously with the exception of where it could jeopardize privacy or security), with data to be made freely available for sharing and reuse.

…and we want all good science

We are dedicated to encouraging scientists to publish null and negative studies, replications, and other results not normally accepted by standard journals, in the belief that all research should be communicated because doing so helps prevent redundant work and ultimately saves time and valuable funding. And we’re not only interested in classic research papers – we believe that science can and should be communicated in all kinds of other ways, so we publish case studies, single findings, protocols, data-only papers, posters, commentaries, opinion pieces, reviews and other information that is valid and useful for other scientists.

Dr Donald Cooper of the University of Colorado, Boulder has published a number of data papers with us, such as this study to investigate the effect of ion channels on reward behavior in mice. The reason he gave for publishing with F1000Research was that he wanted to:

quickly share some of our ongoing behavioral data sets in order to encourage collaboration with others in the field.

And Dr Lawrence Kane of the University of Pittsburgh found this is exactly what happened for his paper that suggested some novel mechanisms by which Tim-1 modulates T cell activity:

After having our paper online for about six weeks, the results have exceeded my expectations. We have had several scientists in academia and biotech contact us regarding reagents or possible collaborations. Certainly, people are noticing F1000Research!

We’re at Experimental Biology: Come by and say hello if you’re here in Boston

If you happen to be at the FASEB Experimental Biology conference in Boston (April 20-24) then please drop by our stand #534 and pick up a free submission voucher and a really nice goodie bag.

And then join us for a glass of wine

We would also love to see you at our celebration of Open Science publishing later on today at 5.30 – 8.30pm at the Boston Convention Center, Room #52A, where we have a renowned panel of speakers from the scientific community, plus Vitek Tracz – our chairman and a founding supporter of the Open Access publishing movement – talking about the principles of Open Science publishing. If you can’t make it, then watch this space as we will be putting a video of the talks and Q&A up on our site in the next few days.