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Rebecca Lawrence announces the first open research publishing platform operated by F1000 on behalf of a publisher. By providing F1000’s technology and editorial services to Emerald Publishing and running Emerald Open Research for them, F1000 is taking steps to enable as many authors as possible to publish on an open research platform.

We don’t like to stand still at F1000 and are always looking for the next opportunity to expand on the services we provide. We initially broadened out by operating platforms on behalf of various funders and research organisations. In less than two years, we have launched five successful platforms, including Wellcome Open Research and Gates Open Research, and several others are waiting in the wings to make their debut – see Open Research Central for a list of those currently announced.

In order to increase the impact of open research publishing further, we have now partnered with Emerald Publishing to create the first publisher-owned open research platform. Emerald Open Research, which will publish research studies that address the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, will be an extension of Emerald’s current open access programme, which Emerald launched last September. Emerald Open Research will use the same post-publication peer review model that we have pioneered with our own platform, F1000Research, which has been adopted by the funder platforms we operate.

This is an exciting opportunity for F1000 and we’re delighted that Emerald will be the first publisher to use our services. By choosing to adopt our highly innovative open research publishing model, Emerald will be able to give authors greater choice, reach and flexibility. This will also help academics, practitioners and policy makers to publish and disseminate a much broader range of outputs and much more quickly and transparently, helping them to make a real impact.

This is a significant step in furthering our aim of offering as many authors as possible the option to publish on an open research platform and broadening our reach into the humanities, given that the platform will primarily address six interdisciplinary research themes, namely Sustainable Food Systems; Healthy Lives; Responsible Management; Sustainable Cities; 21^st Century Education; and the Digital World.

By joining the group of open research publishing platforms, Emerald Open Research will help our aim of moving research and researcher assessment away from the traditional journal-based measures towards an assessment of the output itself. As with all the other platforms we operate, the editorial team at F1000 will be the ones carrying out pre-publication checks of the submitted manuscripts to ensure they meet all policy requirements stipulated by Emerald and other publishing standards, which will be clearly laid out in author guidelines and policies.

F1000 will also provide all production-associated services, including publishing multiple versions of each article (if the authors wish to do this) and disseminating metadata to external providers. The F1000 team will manage the open peer review process, which takes place after publication, and provide hands-on support to both authors and peer reviewers, as well as other users.

We are dedicated to serving authors and their associated research communities, bringing many benefits to researchers and institutions, as well as to society more broadly. So, we look forward to the road ahead and hope that other publishers will join us in our venture!