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After a successful beta phase F1000Journal Clubs launches today, with a variety of options for accessing and trialling the service. Read the press release here.

F1000Prime is, amongst other things, about saving researchers’ valuable time. Scientists can spend hours each month critically evaluating published research in their journal clubs, and a well-organized journal club can be an integral part of clinicians’ training. But valuable discussions at journal clubs are often not archived or shared effectively. Also, our Faculty Members tell us that they often identify articles to recommend for F1000Prime through their journal club meetings. And anecdotally some users of F1000Prime have likened the service to the “world’s biggest journal club” – presumably because they can access many expert second opinions on published papers.

F1000Journal Clubs aims to make literature evaluation, and its subsequent relationship with F1000Prime, more efficient, more open – and therefore more online. Another reason we’ve built this tool is because, through facilitating sharing and collaboration around journals clubs, we can help scientists get credit for more of their contributions to science that aren’t based on being the author of a paper.  Like contributing to, presenting at, and writing up journal clubs. F1000Journal Clubs and their conclusions (journal club meeting reports) can be shared with – and discovered by – others (this is an optional feature).

Dr Ann Walker, University College London, was one of many testers of earlier versions of F1000Journal Clubs and she finds it to be a powerful resource. “The figure extraction tool, which provides a template journal club presentation at the click of a mouse, works well and is very popular.  I’m sure it will save us valuable time and be a good resource for teaching literature evaluation,” she said.

We’re excited to see how researchers will use F1000Journal Clubs and to know what they think about it. With users’ feedback we will continue refining and improving. This launch of F1000Journal Clubs sees F1000Prime continue to evolve, into a collection of tools for researchers to organize, share and discuss articles.

If a researcher’s organization does not subscribe to F1000Prime yet, a free personal trial is available and we are providing extended free (sponsored) access on request to journal clubs that provide regular feedback to help us further develop the software. Please contact F1000 to find out more. Also, if an existing subscriber invites someone to join an F1000Journal Club who does not have a subscription to F1000Prime, the new user will receive three months free access to the club and to all features of F1000Prime when they register.

Updates since the beta release of F1000Journal Clubs include:

•    Improvements to journal club administrator dashboard
•    List of invitees and their status available to moderators
•    Better support for supplementary articles
•    Multiple meetings on the same day now supported

Planned for future releases of F1000Journal Clubs:

•    Video conferencing to better support virtual journal clubs
•    Ability to browse and search public journal clubs and reports
•    User tutorials and guides
•    You tell us – contact F1000 to give feedback or submit a feature request