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As of this week, we have merged our repository of conference posters and slides, F1000Posters, into our open science publishing platform, F1000Research. We think that all scientific findings should be shared, regardless of perceived impact or format. It therefore makes much more sense to have all our content, whether it be articles, posters or slides, in a single location. The posters and slides will not be peer reviewed, unlike the articles which of course go through our invited and transparent peer review process, post-publication.

With the inclusion of posters and slides, it is now much more obvious that F1000Research is not a “journal” in the traditional sense, but truly a publishing platform. Being a platform means the journal Impact Factor is a particularly unsuitable measure for our way of publishing, not to mention a highly misleading metric for research assessment (see this editorial from our founder, Vitek Tracz, on why we think it is so problematic). We believe that only article-level metrics have relevance.

We therefore have no plans to obtain or use an Impact Factor. However, we do provide a range of article-level metrics, such as the recommendation of important articles by members of the F1000 Faculty, and the number of views or PDF downloads, to help you assess the impact of individual papers. Over the next few months we will be adding even more useful metrics and features to the platform that will hopefully show that the IF is not the be all and end all. It means that we can focus our attention on providing the scientific community with a service to help researchers with what is truly important for scientific progress: the sharing and discussion of new findings, ALL new findings.

We have therefore restructured and redesigned the site to incorporate the more than 8000 posters and slides that we have published since the launch of F1000Posters in 2010, making sure it is clear whether the content being viewed has been peer reviewed. Posters and slides will continue to be free to publish, while articles will be charged as normal according to their word length, as we announced in May.

It’s now easier to find articles, posters and slides in your field of interest, through our new subject pages.

One of our eighteen subject pages, with separate tabs for articles, posters and slides

Or you can find them through our 50+ channels, or by performing a search across the site.

Our new submission form for posters and slides on F1000Research is incredibly quick and easy – it should take no longer than 2 minutes to upload your file, and it will now be published instantly. Once we’ve done a quick check on the file, we’ll also then issue a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), making them all citable too. You can find the relevant submission form depending on whether you want your work peer reviewed or not via the ‘Submit your Research’ button on the site.

A poster on F1000Research. This one is part of a channel, which is clearly shown on the page.

Have a look around the new site, and why not find out for yourself just how quick and simple it is to share your findings by uploading the latest posters and slide presentations that you’ve been presenting!