blog

Just before we broke up for the holidays at the end of last year we were lucky enough to have editorial board member and F1000Research author Professor Ali Mobasheri visit us in our London office.

During the visit (and after the obligatory tea and biscuits!) we managed to capture on camera a brief overview of the work in Ali’s F1000Research article: curcumin reduces prostaglandin E2, matrix metalloproteinase-3 and proteoglycan release in the secretome of interleukin 1β-treated articular cartilage. As Ali is a prolific open access author we also asked him how he found the experience of publishing in F1000Research and about his views towards open peer review, in particular if he feels it is an improvement from the often criticized traditional peer review model employed by other journals. By prompting this question we were pleased to learn that Ali has now adopted open reviewing as his benchmark whilst acting as a reviewer, his reason being “if you have a genuine intention to help authors improve their papers, why not put your name on the review?”

On the whole, Ali’s article is a perfect example of how the F1000Research publication model works and during the interview he mentions how he found the publication process to ultimately be “rapid, efficient and fair“.

To put that into context, there was just 3 days between the final submission of the article and its eventual publication on F1000Research. The article was then openly peer reviewed by two referees just 11 days after publication. In both the reviewers reports, there were suggested revisions to improve the article and several questions for the author(s) that required the author(s) response. Using the F1000Research commenting tool, Ali was able to start an open, scientific dialogue with the reviewers to answer their queries and was then able to satisfy their main concerns by creating a second version of the article complete with their suggested revisions. The new version clearly summarized the changes that were made from the original version and with these amendments both the reviewers were content that the paper had been improved to a high standard and required no more revisions.

In Ali’s words we have “set a very good standard for this type of publication.”

To find out more about the paper and Ali’s experience of publishing with us please watch the short video below: