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There is a sense amongst a select group of individuals that the tide is turning with respect to how and when research should be made available. Last month our founder Vitek Tracz joined a mix of academics, publishers and funders who all convened at the well-publicised ASAPBio meeting to discuss the best ways in which to remove the barriers for the use of preprints in biology.

As the chairman of our International Advisory Board, Harold Varmus put it in a recent Nature News post: “There’s no doubt that preprints are happening”. This can only be viewed as a good thing. Here at F1000 we support the use of preprints; they enable rapid dissemination of ideas, provide immediate visibility of research outputs, provide a chance to receive open community feedback and provide a fair way to establish precedence. All of this can only benefit science in a positive way.

F1000Research and preprints: what’s the difference?

The benefits described above are also a major part of our post-publication peer review model; however, the major difference is that preprints are an additional step before/during when an author publishes through the traditional journal route, whilst F1000Research is an alternative one-step publishing system that is more efficient and cost effective than how research is published today. You don’t have to still go through the long-winded and journal-based publishing model to try and gain the Impact Factor ‘badge of prestige’ that is so problematic, and is in fact what causes the current delays in the traditional publishing system in the first place.

So how does a one-step publishing model work?

After passing a prepublication check, articles published on F1000Research are published immediately and then become in some ways like a preprint; that is, publicly visible and open for comments. The key difference with F1000Research compared with preprint servers is that once an article is published, it automatically enters an invited peer review process that is facilitated by us on the authors behalf. Articles are clearly labelled “awaiting peer review” and over the following days and weeks, open and signed peer review reports are published alongside the article.

We have agreed with major bibliographic indexers (PubMed, Scopus etc.) at which point of positive peer review the article can then be indexed. Hence the article is already formally published, i.e. there is no need to go through the journal process at all (and indeed it would be duplicate publication). As discussed in the recently open peer reviewed “Towards an open science publishing platform”, we feel preprints alone are merely a step in the right direction, as early access to research is not the only significant problem with the current journal system that needs to be addressed (see also “The five deadly sins of publishing”).

Articles on preprints and a place to publish them

We have recently published two articles that provide some further interesting thoughts and discussion around the use of preprints. The first is an opinion piece providing the perspective of Gary McDowell, a postdoc who explains the value of using preprints as a junior scientist and how it can be a worthwhile endeavour. We also published an editorial from Sir Iain Chalmers and Paul Glasziou who, in the context of their clinical background, suggest that research is needed both to understand why biomedical scientists have been slow to take up preprint options, and to assess the relative merits of this and other alternatives to journal publishing.

Both pieces are well worth reading. Given the continuing growth we are seeing in papers that explore changes to the publication system, we have created a dedicated space for these topics in the Future of Scholarly Publishing channel. The channel covers topics such as peer review, the use of impact metrics in research assessment, reproducibility, scientific culture, and the mechanisms by which scientific knowledge is disseminated and assessed; of course, the channel is open to new submissions!

Our final thoughts on the preprint movement

On a final note, whilst preprints can bring significant benefits in removing delay and selection, we want to make it clear that we think it should be complemented with formal, invited, and transparent post-publication peer review. It seems that the preprint movement is gathering some steam due to its compatibility with the existing journal system, but this actually doesn’t resolve the other arguably more important issues around open data, improving peer review, providing better metrics to support decision-making in promotion/tenure and grant applications, and reducing costs. We believe that by using preprints alone is just dipping a toe in the water, and that really we need to embrace a much more substantial innovation that moves us away from the existing journal system to an approach much better suited to the needs of science today.