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Faculty of 1000 Chairman Vitek Tracz reveals in an interview published today in Science Magazine much of what is driving the development of F1000’s services for life scientists and clinicians. In short, it’s solutions – solutions to long-established problems in scholarly communication, which, with better more efficient use of web technology, are solvable:

1. Better ways to discover and assess individual papers and pieces of research
The interview alludes to user research at PubMed which found that scientists seek papers that answer questions rather than papers in specific journals. We also know that alternatives to the Journal Impact Factor for assessing individual papers and individual scientists and their grant applications must be more widely adopted. F1000Prime article rankings are an established and distinctly scholarly part of the “alternative” metrics field for assessing published papers. Initiatives such as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, of which F1000 was a launch signatory, are also helping to increase awareness of the importance of using alternatives to Impact Factors to assess the quality of individual articles. As Vitek says in the interview, “Nobody reads journals. People read papers.”

2. Open access to original research – and data
Sustainable open access publishing began with the creation of BioMed Central, which, like F1000 currently, was formerly part of the Science Navigation Group. The open access movement has been driven by the paradox of tax-payer funded research being inaccessible to those who ultimately have funded it. These principles of openness in original research were embraced in the early days of open access publishing by BioMed Central and hold true for F1000 with F1000Research and F1000Posters, with research funding agencies now routinely providing funds to cover article-processing charges. Lack of access to data underlying publications mean research is often not reproducible – when reproducibility and validation of results are tenets of science. F1000Research requires availability of underlying data as a condition of submission.

3. Open, post-publication peer review
Arguably the most important parts of peer review – where we can see if science is adopted, built upon, revered or refuted by a large audience – happen post-publication. Traditional, largely anonymous, pre-publication peer review may be the “least worst option” for science publishing but evidence tells us it is inefficient, costly, subject to bias, and often inconsistent and poor at identifying errors. F1000 champions open, post-publication peer review (for original submissions to F1000Research) and assessment of papers published elsewhere in F1000Prime and F1000Trials.

4. Credit for more of scientists’ contributions
Scientists contribute numerous vital services to science which are not always comprehensively measured, recorded or quantified – and for which they can be properly acknowledged. Publishing papers is undoubtedly important but F1000’s tools also help scientists be recognized for other activities – whether depositing posters, conducting (open) peer review, assessing published papers (and having their papers recommended by their peers), and, in the near future, participating in journal clubs.

Read the full interview with Vitek – part of a Special Issue on ‘Communication in Science: Pressures and Predators’ – in Science.