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Following recent discussion and comments on the F1000Research publication criteria, we want to explain our reasoning for why we have developed them. We want to engage the scientific community in discussing these criteria and hear of alternative suggestions.

Introduction

Research articles published in traditional journals go through an opaque and often secretive process of selection by editors, who choose what they want to publish in their journal. As most editors work hard to keep their journals’ impact factors as high as they can, their decision to reject is often partly based on the likelihood of the articles getting significant number of citations. This scheme produces many unwanted effects, including publication delay and publishing bias against certain types of articles.

Because we believe that the research community is best placed to judge for itself which findings should be shared and how, we have set up the F1000Research publishing platform as an alternative to journals and without such editorial selection.

However, we still need some set of rules that will exclude articles which, for one reason or another, do not belong on a platform devoted to scholarly publishing of biomedical research. Those rules need to be simple and clearly understood, and effective in keeping the publication activity ethical and clearly relevant to science.

We are doing something very new and important. No one has done anything like this before, and so we realise that we will be learning as we go along.

Why do we have authorship-based criteria?

Unlike almost all research journals, we publish first (where the article becomes citable but clearly labelled ‘awaiting peer review’) before invited (not crowdsourced) peer review. Prior to publication, we run a number of checks, which we try to make as objective as we can to avoid us making subjective judgements on the content itself and consequently biasing the types of studies that are published. Everything that we publish is then sent to invited experts. In order to ensure thorough peer review, referees must meet criteria of expertise and experience.

We feel that it is very important that active scientists can share any research findings they wish on F1000Research, without editorial selection.

Equally, we believe we have a duty to the research community to ensure that we are not wasting their valuable time as referees on assessing work submitted by non-researchers who may not have had the training and education required to conduct research by established standards (e.g. using recognised scientific methods).

So, how can we ensure constructive scholarly peer-to-peer debate between researchers on F1000Research without editorial censorship? We think it is important to have transparent and impartial criteria that do not require a subjective call on whether specific research outputs are worth publishing; they should instead allow us to verify via yes/no checks whether an author is sufficiently experienced to conduct a research study and analysis, present a scholarly article about their research and engage constructively with referees who are dedicating time to helping the authors improve their publication until it is fully scientifically sound.

It is for the above reasons that we have tried to develop some criteria that minimise subjective decisions on our part whilst maximising the opportunity to share real research findings with the research community.

What are our current criteria and why?

We focussed our criteria on ensuring that at least one of the authors is an ‘active researcher’ from a ‘recognised institution’:

Recognised institution. By requiring that an author is based at a recognised (accredited) institution or organisation we can be sure that a group of scientists in the field have assessed the researcher’s abilities and outputs and judged that they have enough scientific knowledge and integrity to be employed at their institution.  It also ensures that the research is conducted in a regulated research environment (e.g. with ethics approval committees for clinical and animal research). If a researcher comes from an institution with no obvious research program, we ask F1000 Faculty Members in the area if they are familiar with the organisation and/or check for publications in PubMed by researchers based at that institution.

Active researcher. We need some criteria to assess if the author is an active scientist who has enough training and experience to engage in the peer review process, which is of course open and author-driven on F1000Research. This means the focus of their training needs to be on active research; in the life sciences at least, this tends to mean they have completed postgraduate training typically a PhD, MD, DPhil or similar qualification.

In the vast majority of cases in the life sciences, these criteria work well. Typically, those who are still in training are working closely with their supervisors, and so in most cases when a student submits a paper, their supervisor is recognised on the publication. We also often hear from supervisors of postgraduate students that they want to ensure that students in their care don’t inadvertently cause themselves harm to their career by publishing without the guidance of a more experienced researcher.

Outside of life sciences

We are becoming increasingly aware from our limited but growing experience of publishing articles in our Publishing, Education & Communication section that the authorship criteria we have evolved over time in response to feedback from the life science community do not appropriately meet the needs of the social sciences research community. In practice, we have already adjusted our criteria for this area and acknowledge that a Masters qualification is enough evidence of research training. This, combined with evidence of an author’s research activity – usually a publication record, which can be quantified objectively – would suggest the researcher has enough experience to engage in the open peer review process; this practice is not currently clearly reflected in our public authorship criteria and we will update this as soon as possible.

We do though recognise that this may still inappropriately penalise authors of articles in social sciences where the norms of publication are different from life sciences and we welcome suggestions from the community how to define the limitations differently, bearing in mind that we cannot open F1000Research (and add the burden on the peer review system) to non-researchers. The criteria must also be broadly applicable, to, for example, academic research systems worldwide.

For now, we are planning to implement the following change. We will enable anyone who wishes to share research findings in the Publishing, Education and Communication area but is not formally qualified and does not have a publication record, to get a more experienced researcher to endorse them, such as their supervisor, a mentor, a member of the F1000 Faculty etc. This individual would then be listed in the Acknowledgements section, assuming they do not meet the requirements for full authorship. This would allow early-career researchers with an appointment at a recognised institution to start a publication record with F1000Research.

It is perhaps worth noting that even preprint servers such as BioRxiv and Arxiv have some checks in place that limit what can be published or who can post preprints. On Arxiv, authors submitting for the first time require an endorsement from another Arxiv author who has already previously posted a preprint.

We welcome your feedback

The perception by some of the critical voices on Twitter was that our criteria are elitist and unethical and that we actively try to stop young researchers from publishing. This is definitely not what we set out to do. We are keen to open up the publication of new scientific findings – to make it faster, more transparent and to remove the barriers and censorship on the publication of research outputs, regardless of their scientific view or perceived level of interest of the content, and for F1000Research to evolve with the needs of the research community.

We feel as publishers that it is inappropriate for us to be making judgements on the content beyond standard checks such as whether international standards have been met with regards to appropriate ethical guidelines etc.  At the same time, as a scholarly publication that publishes and then invites experts to review everything we publish, we have to safeguard – as much as possible – referees from being overloaded with requests to review poor quality content, and readers with non-scientific content.

As we try to work out the best way to deal with this challenging balance, we have tried to come up with criteria that are as objective and transparent as possible.  However, we are aware that there are some situations, especially outside of life sciences, where these criteria may not fit with community cultural norms of research and publication. We are therefore keen to hear your thoughts on the proposed adjusted criteria and of course also keen to hear other ways you might suggest how we can strike a sensible and appropriate balance to meet the needs of the community at large.

Please do get involved in this discussion and leave your suggestions in the comments section below – all of the research community and their thoughts on this issue really do matter to us and any insights and suggestions you may have will always be listened to and taken seriously.