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This is a cross-post from F1000Research, written by Eva Amsen.

For the past few weeks, the F1000 Outreach Directors have looked at lists of all of your past activities to figure out who deserved to be crowned this year’s F1000 Specialist of the Year.

The decision was much harder than last year because so many of you have done so much this past year! You gave talks at your institutes, brought flyers to conferences, talked to your labmates, sent emails, gave us feedback, tweeted, blogged, and found your own unique ways to spread the word about F1000 and help us develop our products. All our Specialists are amazing, but we wanted to award those that went above and beyond.

We noticed early on that two of our specialists were really excelling, but we couldn’t narrow it down to one final winner. That’s why we decided to ward the 2015 F1000 Specialist of the Year title to two people!

Congratulations to Fiona Russell (King’s College London) and Brandt Wiskur (University of Oklahoma HSC)

Fiona regularly promotes F1000 and F1000Research at King’s College and around London. She hosted and presented talks about F1000 products, and helped us sponsor and speak at a scientific conference with international attendees. She is also currently beta-testing a new F1000 tool that you will hear much more about next year and she submitted a video to our summer contest – and won that as well!

Brandt has given several one-on-one training sessions on F1000 to grad students and postdocs, and gave a talk at his institutional postdoc symposium. He has helped us organise and sponsor poster awards and he is currently working with his institute librarian and the VP of research to ensure that scientists have access to F1000. Like Fiona, Brandt is also helping us test our beta tool and providing feedback.

Fiona and Brandt will both receive an Amazon gift certificate, worth £100 ($150), and a bag of F1000 goodies.

Responding to his win, Brandt said, “Being an F1000 Specialist has provided me numerous opportunities to work with other scientists and help them identify an excellent resource for both research and professional development. I’m especially happy to represent F1000 because it delivers such a broad-range of user-friendly research tools, is represented by knowledgeable and helpful leaders, and has a cutting-edge product development team.”

Fiona added, “I really respect F1000 in the way they are working to change science publishing and communication, so I’ve been very happy to be a F1000 Specialist and spread awareness. One of my favourite things about F1000 is how they genuinely listen to real scientists and take on board their opinions. I’ve learnt a lot from F1000 and with the F1000 Specialists I have joined a really useful network of enthusiastic and motivated people”.

In our selection process, we also identified three runners-up, who will each receive a gift bag.
• Srinivas Vinod Saladi (Harvard University) for arranging and managing the F1000 stand at the Young Investigator’s meeting in Boston, preparing an article collection for F1000Research and testing our new tool.
• Sylvia Samaniego (Stony Brook University) for regularly helping out F1000 Outreach Directors with event organisation or conference setup, and being one of our very first #F1000Talks tweetchat guests.
• Kate Stafford (UCSF) for her regular interaction and engagement on social media and for setting a great example by having a research article in F1000Research and a poster in F1000Posters.

There were many other F1000 Specialists who put in a lot of work at various points throughout the year, or who included F1000 mentions as part of their ongoing outreach activities (especially our Specialists in the wider Open Science community), but Fiona, Brandt, Sylvia, Vinod and Kate all stood out for using several of our services as part of their work, and having engaged other researchers with F1000 quite consistently throughout the year.

How to win next year!

We’re already seeing a lot of F1000 Specialists preparing activities for next year, and there is a very good chance that next year’s winners will be based outside of Europe or North America, as we’re starting to grow our network in Latin America and China in particular. Over the last few months, our Chinese outreach liaison Jia Shen has set up several dozen F1000 Specialists in China, who are all keen to start outreach at their local universities.

Next year we’ll be launching some exciting new things at F1000, and we’re counting on our F1000 Specialists to share those with their colleagues, and to let us know of any feedback. But the first step in getting involved and having the chance to win next year is, of course, joining the F1000 Specialists programme! You can fill out the form on our website, or jump right in and join the LinkedIn group, our major outlet for discussing Specialists’ activities.

Congratulations to our F1000 Specialist of the Year winners, and we hope everyone has a great holiday season coming up, with a bit of time away from the lab, field, lecture hall or clinic!

From Kinga Hosszu, Cesar Berrios-Otero, and Eva Amsen