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Online publication should make publishing faster, but it still takes months to get a paper published. In competitive fields, it’s not unlikely that the credit for the first published paper on a new discovery doesn’t necessarily go to the researcher who was the first to complete the work, but to the one who happened to go through peer review the fastest. The duration of the peer review process doesn’t entirely depend on the content of the paper itself or the industriousness of the authors, but also to a large extent on the schedules and workload of the reviewers and editors. That’s an unfair delay, especially when you’re at risk of being scooped by a competitor.

At F1000Research, we’ve removed the rate-limiting factor of referees and editors by publishing the article before the peer review process starts. Each submission is subject to an in-house editorial check, but if the paper is complete and ready to be sent to referees, it takes no more than a week to publish it online and you can claim your deserved priority stake on the work.

When an F1000Research article is published online, it’s already fully formatted and can be viewed and cited by others. It’s clearly marked as “awaiting peer review” at this stage. Once the referee reports come in, these will be made public on the same page as the paper, and with the name of the referees. When an article receives either two “approved” referee reports from two independent reviewers, or one “approved” and two “approved with reservations” between three referees, the article is considered to have passed peer review, and will be indexed in external databases.

Earlier this week, WIRED science blogger Jeffrey Marlow wrote that “the most important benefit that F1000Research brings to the table is its quick turnaround.” Indeed, several researchers have chosen F1000Research to publish their time-sensitive work. Margaret Katz, of the University of New England in Australia, knew that she wasn’t the only one studying the nutrient stress response in the Aspergillus nidulans fungus.

 “With other labs carrying out similar research, it was essential that I published the work first”, Katz told us. “F1000Research enabled me to publish the article and make my research publicly available very rapidly.”

Mautusi Mitra, of the University of West Georgia, has now published two papers with F1000Research about her work on chlorophyll defects in the micro-alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.

“Once I found these novel results in my research, I had to publish them as quickly as possible to avoid being scooped”, Mitra said. “F1000Research was the ideal place; the publication process was rapid and my work was a part of the scientific literature in a matter of days!”

Because peer review reports appear with the paper as they come in, a published article can also very quickly turn into an indexed article. When Adrian Pini’s group at the MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology, King’s College London, discovered that histone H1 plays an important role in the progression of brain damage upon neurodegenerative disease or stroke, they also chose to submit their paper to F1000Research to get it published quickly. The referees were impressed, and within a week the paper had three “approved” referee reports. From the press release:

 Jan-Marino Ramirez, of the University of Washington, called the work “a very important contribution to our understanding of neurodegenerative disease and the response of the brain to injury” in his public referee report. He also noted that he is “confident that this study will be a much cited contribution to the field of traumatic brain injury”.

In addition, we’ve had several papers pass peer review in less than 24 hours of being published online, including this hypothesis about the origin of arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy by Ben Paylor and Fabio Rossi of the University of British Columbia.

If you submitted your paper to F1000Research with the purpose of publishing it quickly, we would love to hear from you! And if you think you’re in danger of being scooped, here’s how to avoid it by submitting through our simple submission form. Finally, if you’d like more information about publishing with F1000Research, please see our FAQ.