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Behind everything at Faculty of 1000 (F1000) is the F1000 Faculty, comprising over 6,600 world-leading experts across more than 40 disciplines in the life sciences and medicine. The Faculty includes 10 Nobel Laureates, 16 Lasker Award winners, over 150 members of the National Academy of Sciences, and many others who have received prestigious awards for their outstanding contributions to science.

Together with 5000 more junior colleagues working as Associate Faculty Members, Faculty Members monitor the scientific literature and identify those papers they think are particularly important; their short evaluations and associated ratings are available in our article recommendation service, F1000Prime.

Additionally, the Faculty provides a core source of referees for papers published in F1000Research and a large proportion are members of the F1000Research Advisory Board. They also advise us on new developments such as the F1000Workspace that we just launched, that comprises a set of tools aiming to revolutionise how researchers discover new literature, annotate and discuss it, and write new research papers and grants.

For the past few years, many members of the Faculty have also authored concise, high-profile reviews on emerging concepts and recent advances in the life sciences, commissioned on behalf of senior members (Section Heads) of the Faculty. These have been published until now in the journal F1000Prime Reports. To streamline our publishing efforts and to enable these articles to benefit from the unique publishing machinery behind F1000Research, from now on these reviews will be published in a dedicated channel called F1000 Faculty Reviews on the F1000Research publishing platform.

Past authors for F1000Prime Reports include the likes of Bruce McEwen, Jean-Pierre Changeux, Chris Somerville, Gretchen Daily, Norbert Perrimon, Andrew Lumsden, Scott Kopetz, Patrick Duffy, Bruce Cronstein, Peter Tonellato, Mark Boguski, Eugene Koonin and Julian Davies. The first of the new set of reviews on the F1000 Faculty Reviews channel have been published today. James Russell (Professor and Associate Head of the Department of Medicine at the University of British Columbia, and Section Head for Critical Care for F1000) has written a timely piece on the breakthroughs in sepsis. Meanwhile, Vijay Kuchroo (F1000 Faculty Member) and Youjin Lee (both from Harvard Medical School) have written a review defining the functional states of Th17 cells. Authors of these reviews are encouraged to include a mix of speculation and skepticism where appropriate and personal perspective is encouraged. Somewhat unusually for a review, these articles are all published open access, thereby making them freely accessible.

These reviews are specifically commissioned and edited as a service to our readers. So as to give readers a comprehensive and useful resource when the reviews are published, we seek input from expert reviewers before publication. All referees’ names, any additional comments they may have, and the final referee status they choose for the article are then published alongside the article as usual on F1000Research.

The last few reviews in F1000Prime Reports will be published during May, and then that journal will formally close and all new content will be published in the F1000 Faculty Reviews channel (while the archive of previously published reviews will remain fully accessible).

We thank all of our Faculty for their continued support of the many aspects of the F1000 services they contribute to, and we hope that our readers will particularly enjoy and benefit from the insights offered by our Faculty Members with these reviews.