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F1000Prime celebrates its 15^th birthday and so, to celebrate this auspicious occasion, Steven Lokwan, Director of Operations, takes a nostalgic trip down memory lane to reminisce on how we got to where we are today.

My, how quickly time passes! It’s hard to believe, but there was a time before F1000Prime or, as we knew it in the early days – Faculty of 1000 Biology. For those too young to remember, it was when a 56k dial-up internet connection was considered cutting edge and the humble fax machine still had pride of place in the office, but more on that later…

The aim of Faculty of 1000 Biology was, as it still is today in our current form as F1000Prime, to sing the praises of research by systematically and comprehensively highlighting the best articles based on the opinion of a peer-nominated Faculty comprising 1000 of the world’s most prestigious scientists — see, the name did make sense back then — though it quickly became apparent that, even for launch, we’d need a few more than a ‘mere’ 1000 Faculty Members to fully cover all fields.

It now seems incredible to believe that when I joined F1000 in the year 2000, our website didn’t exist! Nevertheless, we still signed up our first Faculty Members, who we fondly called our Prototype Team, to help us shape the F1000 service. I chuckle to myself now, but in those early days the fax machine I mentioned earlier, was my best friend as we received our first article recommendations through it.  Whilst to many that screeching and whirring sound was an annoyance, to me it signalled the arrival of another valued recommendation akin to a glorious fanfare!

So, with our Prototype Team on board, and a few recommendations in hand, we were able to invite the rest of the Faculty, who are ultimately the heroes of this tale. The strong positive sentiment for Faculty of 1000 Biology was testament to the strength of its premise, and certainly helped us to build such a prestigious inaugural Faculty, the high calibre of which is still maintained today.

Faculty of 1000 Biology logo

In the summer of 2001, Faculty of 1000 Biology officially launched with a glorious purple website and a Faculty of just over 1,200 Members. Alain Ghysen’s recommendation of Kamal Sharma’s  paper on how genetic and epigenetic mechanisms contribute to motor neuron pathfinding marked the first ever to be published. However, even then we knew that we needed to add further important fields to comprehensively cover all of biology, so in 2004, 2005 and 2006 we launched our Ecology, Physiology and Pharmacology & Drug Discovery Faculties respectively, which grew our family of Members to just over 1,800.

Faculty of 1000 Medicine logo

Based on the success of Faculty of 1000 Biology, we launched a separate sister service in 2005 — Faculty of 1000 Medicine — to cover the clinically relevant literature with a complement of over 2,000 clinicians and clinical researchers from all the major fields in medicine. This website was a delightful clinical blue, with Dominique Langin’s recommendation of Gema Medina-Gomez’s paper on the link between nutritional status and insulin sensitivity being the first to be published.

F1000Prime Logo

In 2008, we strengthened the F1000 service by combining our biology and medicine Faculties into one single, comprehensive site and adopted the familiar red livery we all know and love. Our newest Faculties, Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology launched in 2011.

In 2015, we continued our rich heritage of providing innovate ways to search and manage the literature with F1000Workspace as an adjunct to F1000Prime. This revolutionary online suite of reference management and citation tools enables you to instantly collect, store and annotate papers, which can then be shared to facilitate collaboration with colleagues and your scientific writing. If any of these articles have been recommended by an F1000Prime Faculty Member, they are flagged in your library of articles with a special badge, so you’ll instantly know they are worth reading and citing.

F1000Workspace

And so concludes our brief history of F1000Prime, but as I mentioned earlier, the real heroes of this tale are the Members of the Faculty, without whom we wouldn’t exist. First, let’s give a special shout out to our Heads of Faculty and Section Heads who, over the past 15 years, have worked tirelessly to ensure the scope of their respective Faculties and Sections is maintained and kept up-to-date to reflect the changing landscape of their fields. With this in mind, I am excited to announce the upcoming launch of a new Faculty covering Bioinformatics, Biomedical Informatics & Computational Biology, along with new Sections for Epigenetics and Exercise Physiology later this year.

15th Birthday Candles

Ultimately, however, all of the content we have ever published has come from our Faculty Members who, together with their Associate Faculty Members, have, for the past 15 years, not only helped us navigate the literature to find those hidden gems we might otherwise have missed but also supported the best and brightest in their fields by raising their profiles and recognizing the quality of their work by way of their recommendations. So a special and heartfelt thank you goes out to all of our Members for their support and contributions.

As serendipity would have it, as I write this piece, we’ve actually reached not one, but two notable milestones. Of course, our 15^th birthday is certainly something to sing about, but we’ve also just published our 175,000^th article recommendation by Darryl Knight, in which he describes Mark G. Jones’ article on the three-dimensional characterization of fibroblast foci in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis to be of exceptional interest. So here’s to another 15 years (at least), and onwards and upwards to our 200,000^th recommendation and beyond!

On behalf of all of us here at F1000, and the countless members of the community who have benefitted from the insights F1000Prime recommendations provide, many thanks to our Faculty for making the service what it is today!

F1000Prime Editorial Team