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Key points

• F1000Research: Ebola article collection launched to enable all Ebola-related knowledge to be made available on a single platform within days of submission. All articles submitted to this collection will be prioritized and those accepted will be published free of charge.
• F1000Research has set up a dedicated phone line (+442071931030) to enable those working in affected areas to dictate their reports directly to our office.
• F1000Prime makes all existing and upcoming Ebola and Marburg virus Article Recommendations free to access.

Sharing critical information faster                                         

Peter Piot (Director the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and co-discoverer of the Ebola virus) has published an Editorial in F1000Research appealing for everyone working on the current epidemic to publish all their findings and experiences rapidly and openly.

Since the onset of this year’s West African outbreak* there have been over 13,250 suspected cases and 4,960 deaths, the majority of these in the last two months. Depending on how effective control efforts are over the next few weeks the number of cases will likely swell to between 16,500 and 30,000 by December.

Speed is required at all levels if this epidemic is to be successfully controlled; identification and isolation of cases, clinic construction, and community action campaigns must all be carried out rapidly and on a large scale. Speed is just as vital to Ebola research; we need knowledge to spread faster than the virus if Ebola’s impact is to be mitigated. For this to happen, the whole research cycle has to start spinning faster.

Some major funders have responded quickly by releasing emergency research grants, such as the NSF’s RAPID awards and the Wellcome Trust’s Emergency Ebola Initiative. Science publishing needs to be just as nimble, but in the current system it can take several months for findings to be made publically available; with Ebola cases doubling every 20 days or so, such delays are unacceptable.

F1000Research’s unique model of peer-reviewing after publication means that it can make scientific and medical reports publically available within just a few days of submission, enabling experts to put this freshly collected information to immediate good use. Articles can be tracked, so all readers, expert and non-expert alike, can be notified when expert referee reports are made available.

Help us spread life-saving knowledge

It’s not just the publishing process that can be slow: writing and preparing a fully comprehensive manuscript takes considerable time, and the process of reading and comprehending long scholarly tracts can be equally arduous. This would normally be fine, but controlling this epidemic is a matter of extreme urgency and time is particularly precious to those experts involved with the current outbreak.

We want to help make writing and literature searching easier for all involved, and plan to do so in the following ways:

F1000Research: Ebola is encouraging submissions of small articles, so that findings can be made available shortly after they have been discovered (related articles can be linked together after publication to present a more complete picture). These could take the form of data notes, ‘single figure’ research notes, statistical projections (which can be updated as new versions), case reports and observations to name a few possibilities (see Prof. Piot’s Editorial for others). We will not only consider original research – outbreaks of this scale are rare events and so documented personal experiences can have as much utility as data to present and future stakeholders.

We also appreciate that those working in affected areas often do not have the time or energy to sit down and write up their findings. To help, F1000Research has setup a dedicated phone line (+442071931030^†) so that researchers and medics in the field can dictate their reports directly to our office. We will draft and typeset these field reports on the author’s behalf, and publish once the author has approved the proof.

Finally, to help bring attention to the top Ebola papers F1000Prime is making all of its existing and upcoming Ebola and Marburg virus Article Recommendations free-to-view. These recommended articles are selected and rated by the F1000Prime Faculty, the world’s largest group of leading scientists and clinicians.

Spread your knowledge

We join Prof. Piot in urging all those working on either the outbreak or the virus itself, to make all knowledge rapidly available, openly accessible and properly preserved to aid in tackling the current and any future outbreak. As Gregory Petsko (Weill Cornell Medical College) puts it in his interview on the need for rapid publication:

“Where curing disease is the objective, the quicker you get information out to other researchers, the quicker other people have a chance to make a breakthrough…every day you delay is a day that people die.”

 

Notes

*Numbers reported are based on time of writing (November 12^th 2014). See the Ebola HealthMap project by Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital (https://healthmap.org/ebola/#timeline) for a visualization of current cases (based on WHO reports) and for projection details (including details of modeling method and parameters used).

^†When calling this number you will be prompted to record your findings as a voice message. You will be asked to state your name, affiliation, email address, location and your key findings or observations, including context where appropriate. We will ask you to check the transcribed text so it is important that we have an accurate e-mail address. There is no time restriction on voice messages, though please note that you will be charged at your local rate.