blog

We’ve been busy over the summer, so we thought we’d give you a summary of some of our recent activities and current events:

Negative results:

We extended the very popular negative results campaign until the end of September, so if you have a paper with negative results, you can submit that for free before then. Negative results papers received after that date will be subject to our usual fees.

Current fields of focus:

We can’t meet all life science communities at once, so we’re alternating our focus between different fields. At the moment we’re focussing heavily on ecology, software, and clinical case studies – and have attended conferences in these areas. (Papers in those areas of research are currently free, so do tell your colleagues!)

Observation articles:

As part of the ecology focus, we also launched a new type of article at F1000Research, called “Observation article”. These types of papers describe unexpected observations made during the course of another study. Even though our first Observation Articles have been in ecology, this article type is also applicable to other areas, such as microscopy, where you might spot cellular phenotypes that aren’t part of your analysis.

Updated articles:

As part of our software focus, we highlighted the opportunity to update software papers with every new release. This way, the paper accompanying the software development will always be up to date.

WriteLaTex collaboration:

To facilitate the submission of papers, we are working together with WriteLaTex, which allows researchers to collaborate on a paper written in LaTex using a specific F1000Research template, which can then be submitted directly to us from there.

Email alerts for new articles:

If you’d like regular emails letting you know which papers are newly published or newly indexed in F1000Research, sign up for our table of contents alerts. These are sent out on a weekly or monthly basis (you choose the frequency).

Track articles:

We also introduced a “track article” feature, which will notify you when an article you’re interested in receives new referee reports or comments, is updated, or passes peer review.

F1000 Specialists:

F1000 launched an initiative this summer that allows regular users of F1000 products (such as F1000Research) to talk about F1000 to their colleagues and friends in return for some rewards. The top reward is a free submission to F1000Research (worth up to $1000), which F1000 Specialists receive when they have given a presentation in their department. We cover the cost of coffee and snacks at these talks. If you’d like to be involved in this outreach initiative, feel free to register right away, or ask Eva for more details in a comment below.

Highlighted features of F1000Research:

We focussed our attention on some specific features of F1000Research, such as the benefit of rapid publication in competitive fields, or the ins and outs of data articles. Keep an eye on our blog for more details of our publishing process.

FAQ, glossary, and other website updates:

We also updated our site with an FAQ page and glossary this summer, as well as a new contacts page, and a list of incentives for referees.

Credit for refereeing:

Finally, we’re asking for your feedback: considering that all F1000Research referee reports are public, and the reviewers are named, how can we use that to ensure that referees are properly credited and rewarded for their hard work? We’ve received some suggestions already, but keep sharing your thoughts. We’re taking all of your comments into consideration.