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Today, we are pleased to announce the arrival of F1000Research Article Collections, which launches with 14 new articles based upon open source biological visualisation components, and comprises the start of the BioJS collection, guest edited by F1000Research editorial board member Manuel Corpas from The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC), UK. The articles that comprise the BioJS collection were all submitted, edited and checked prior to publication using a new collaborative authoring tool, Overleaf, developed by writeLaTeX. The integration of Overleaf into the F1000Research submission process provided authors with a simple article template, rich text editing features, the benefits of LaTeX composition and rapid submission with just a couple of clicks. The collaborative features of Overleaf also streamlined the editorial workflow and enabled fast pre-publication checking and processing of manuscripts in line with F1000Research’s goal of swift publication.

So why an F1000Research Article Collection?

Article collections are a familiar feature in online journals and are used by publishers to assemble subject-specific material into one searchable domain. Our article collections will be offering societies, organisations, conferences organisers, research communities and others the opportunity to collate their related published material. In addition, they can of course benefit from our unique publication model, in particular our approach towards open data, complete openness and transparency, speed, range of article types, and the option to regularly update and follow up articles.

There are plenty of other reasons to start an an F1000Research Article Collection:

Cost effective:
Cost is always a sticking point and so we have tried to keep our publishing fees affordable. An F1000Research article collection will publish the ‘editorial’ article of the collection for free and then introduce a 20% discount across the board on our APCs; this amounts to $800 for a large article and $400 for a small article.

An Article Collection that caters for all:

An F1000Research article collection can be utilised by many potential users:

1. Conference and workshop organisers wanting to publish any accompanying proceedings or special issues; these could be published to coincide with the event or just after it finishes as our rapid publication process allows us to arrange and publish a collection in a timely fashion.

2. Individuals or groups collating emerging themes and topics in a specific field that may not have a central location for publication. These collections can then expand over time with further articles on the topic and benefit from being openly peer reviewed, which will help encourage further discussion, ideas and collaboration.

3. Research groups and labs can start a collection to pool together their research outputs beyond the traditional research article; they can publish little and often and put out all of their single experiments, replication studies, null results and datasets, thus getting full credit for all the time and effort they put into their research.

4. Software developers and open source initiatives can publish new applications, tools and software as soon as they are created. Because the nature of these outputs is to constantly develop them, the published content can be updated incrementally to keep pace with their research. Whenever a small new update is made that doesn’t warrant a whole new article, the authors can easily update their article which will be neatly threaded with the previous work.

An article collection how you want it:
Each collection will have a personalised and searchable landing page which will come with its own citation. Each article in a collection will be individually citable and will also be automatically integrated into the main body of the journals’ content. All of the articles published will be openly peer-reviewed and once this has been passed, the articles will be indexed in PubMed and other significant bibliographic databases.

We will also encourage active participation and involvement from a collection owner or group of owners, whom we would be more than happy to work closely with to assist in helping to promote, shape and grow the collection. In a sense, an F1000Research article collection could be seen as a dedicated ‘micro-journal’ of content with F1000Research being the accommodating custodian.

For more information, or if you are interested in starting a new Article Collection, please feel free to get in touch.