blog

Publication of research takes months going through peer review before it sees the light of day. And only a tiny proportion of the work that goes into any project is ever made visible and published, as traditional journals are selective and only accept new or novel findings.

Too much work is shut away in notebooks, in drawers and cupboards that would benefit other researchers to know it had been done, and save funders from spending money on duplicate efforts.

For over three years at F1000Research we’ve worked to prove that this doesn’t have to be the only way. We believe we’ve demonstrated a model that truly speeds up the sharing of new findings, enables researchers to publish anything they think is worth sharing, and uses a transparent and constructive system of peer review.

Today we are delighted to announce the first funder publishing platform that follows this model. Wellcome Open Research will use services we developed and will enable Wellcome grantees, who already passed stringent review to get funded in the first place, to publish any outputs they think are worth sharing – articles, data, software etc.

Wellcome Open Research is scheduled to launch later this year and we hope that other funders and institutions will follow; in time, we expect that these platforms will merge into a single international platform open to all researchers.

Our ultimate aim is to support researchers and to help ease the stranglehold that the traditional publishing system has on them. Pressure to publish, particularly in high impact factor journals, puts undue burden on academics to communicate only certain results from their experiments. This is to the detriment of both them and their communities.

Researchers should be valued for the outputs of their work, not for the journals in which they publish. Researchers and editors have signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, which calls for an end to the misuse of the impact factor. Some funders, including Wellcome, have stated that they will not judge researchers on the impact factor of journals in which they publish, but researchers still lack evidence that this is really happening.

In addition, there remain scant options for publishing outputs that don’t fit into conventional papers. This is increasingly highlighted as a cause of many of the problems underlying the lack of replication of much published research. Some specialist journals accept negative or null findings, or focus on data sets, but for the most part the status quo remains.

Because this new platform is supported by a funder, because it requires that all data must be published, and because of the speed of publication and the transparency of peer review, we believe this model is the future. We hope that Wellcome Open Research is a success, and that other funders follow suit. The current system must change.

The publishing process used by F1000Research will also be used for Wellcome Open Research