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Today marks a very exciting milestone for F1000Research: we have just published the 1,000^th article!

What’s more, the 9,000^th poster will be published this week, and 700 of the 1,000 published papers have passed peer review and are indexed in PubMed. The 1,000 articles published in F1000Research were contributed by 3,798 authors, openly peer-reviewed by 2,061 non-anonymous experts and have been viewed over 1,150,000 times.

The 1,000^th paper, entitled ‘MinION Analysis and Reference Consortium: Phase 1 data release and analysis‘, is by Ip et al. Several leading groups have formed a consortium tasked with the assessment of inter-lab variability of the MinION, which is driven by nanopore technology and has been heralded to revolutionise DNA sequencing and other molecular analyses.

The paper details the sequencing and analysis of E. coli K-12 across 5 laboratories using the MinION, a miniaturized DNA sequencing device from Oxford Nanopore. The results, intended as a snapshot of the MinION technology in April 2015, represent nearly a year of MinION analyses and show evidence of reproducibility. It is anticipated that this dataset, the largest replicate nanopore sequencing of its kind to date, will inspire the development of new software and algorithms for the MinION platform.

And while this may be F1000Research’s 1,000^th article, it is the 1^st article in the new Nanopore Analysis Channel. In collaboration with the MinION Analysis and References Consortium (MARC), this channel will publish peer-reviewed articles capturing nanopore sequencing data, analysis and benchmarking results immediately as they are ready to be shared and as the technology evolves. In their editorial, the channel guest editors, Sara Goodwin, Nick Loman, Hans Jansen, and Matt Loose, raise the problems with keeping pace with research when using traditional scientific publishing routes and explain how the F1000Research publishing model accommodates developing technology:

“F1000Research seeks to fill that gap – providing an intriguing mash-up of Science 2.0 functionality including key features expected of traditional journals such as permanent Digital Object Identifiers and PubMed indexing. It also functions something akin to a preprint server – articles, including the MinION Analysis Consortium (MARC) paper, are posted prior to peer review. The community can post comments on the articles, and peer reviews come in as they are ready. It’s a disruptive model and seems perfectly suited to nanopore.”

Publishing 1,000 articles seems a good excuse to also look back at some of the highlights that have brought us to this point:

Conceived by Open-Access pioneer Vitek Tracz in early 2012, F1000Research was set up specifically to tackle the problems endemic to traditional life science publishing, by championing Open Access, Open Data, and a transparent post-publication peer-review and comment system. In addition, F1000Research recently incorporated F1000Posters, allowing researchers and educators to upload posters and slides and share their work widely. With this, F1000Research is closing in on another landmark: it will soon have published 10,000 academic posters and slides. Today we have published a total of 8,992 posters and slides.

F1000Research’s novel mode of scientific publication, which is based on publishing in versions, has allowed it to play host to exciting new presentations of experimental results. Colomb and Brembs’s 2014 paper ‘Sub-strains of Drosophila Canton-S differ markedly in their locomotor behavior’ saw the first ‘living figure’ – where the figure is updated live as more results are logged – become a reality. Blinded data analysis in experimental replication also saw its debut in May 2015, when Morland et al. published an article with a ‘before-and-after-blinding’ dataset to facilitate unbiased reproduction of their animal study results.

The ‘Single-Figure Publication’, which brings us a step closer to ‘nanopublications’, will allow scientists to publish findings in increments, reducing delay, and has been championed and put into practice by William Mobley and colleagues at UC San Diego.

F1000Research’s Open Data policy promotes the creation and sharing of highly valuable datasets, such as that described in Nazneen Rahman’s recent paper, ‘The ICR1000 UK exome series: a resource of gene variation in an outbred population’. The authors share exome sequence data from 1,000 individuals of the general UK population where the samples have been taken from the 1958 Birth Cohort study, a population-based collection of all individuals born in the UK in one week in 1958. The database has widespread utility for genomics researchers the world over, facilitating rapid further analysis of the data and reproducibility studies.

Finally, three years after its launch, F1000Research is boasting channels dedicated to collating articles, posters and slides from almost 80 research communities, a number of which represent collaborations with large science and data collectives, such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), and the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF).

We hope that these examples will encourage more scientists to explore new ways of publishing that go far beyond the traditional journal format and to embrace the possibilities the F1000Research platform and its author- and community-driven publishing model offers them.