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Today we announce the arrival of the Science Policy Research (SPR) publishing gateway on F1000’s open research publishing platform. Following a notable increase in science policy-related articles submitted for publication to F1000Research, we have built the gateway to bring together articles and research outputs that we have published on all aspects of what is effectively research on research.

Discoverability

We have chosen to make a splash about the gateway during open access week because there remains a dearth of easily discoverable and openly accessible research on research available for scrutiny and use.  And importantly, there has of late been renewed interest in the field of ‘meta-research’ (see for example the Methods in Research on Research (MiRoR) initiative) – and new funding opportunities for a field that has traditionally been poorly supported. How we fund, support and publish research dictates what we can know and discover, therefore it is essential that research on research is both robust and shared.

We invite submission of a wide range of articles for peer review, from methods and data notes, to more traditional research articles and reviews. Alongside that the gateway will support publication of research outputs that do not require peer review but are nonetheless important sources of evidence in this field, such as policy briefs, technical reports, meeting and workshop reports.

All content – including those not peer reviewed – are assigned a digital object identifier (DOI), are accompanied by attention, reach, use and re-use indicators, and is immediately (gold) open access and licenced by the authors under Creative Commons licenses (CC-BY for articles, CC0 for research data) for others to view and use.

For those who aren’t familiar with F1000’s publishing model, we offer post-publication, open peer review which in a nutshell, combines the benefits of pre-printing (providing rapid publication) with expert, invited peer review (providing quality assurance).

A broad collection

To date we have published research on a variety of topics, including recently: a systematic review of open peer review; a review of data sharing in observational studies; and a study of whether disagreement among reviewers of funding applications might correlate with subsequent article impact. We also provide authors with the option to include interactive features; for example this study of gender bias in applications for faculty position at the Karolinska Institute contains Principal Component Analysis (PCA) plots that enable readers to immerse themselves in the data presented in the article.

There is no shortage of criticism about research metrics, peer review, publishing models, the tenure and promotion culture across academia, among many other things that we think affect (mostly detrimentally) how science is delivered today. F1000Research was itself designed to remedy many of the problems associated with increasingly outdated modes of publishing research and to facilitate a transition to more open, collaborative ways of doing research and delivering impact for the communities that research serves (essentially ‘open science’). The rapidly increasing number of signatories to DORA signals a demand for change in how research is valued. Plan S provides a further push for change in the ways scholarly publishers can best serve science and society.

Supporting science and research

To move beyond the criticism, and to develop ways to support science and research that takes advantage of emerging technologies and the policy context for science, requires robust evidence. The range of academic approaches required to explore how research works is necessarily diverse, however much of the output from the field has traditionally been locked up in policy reports with limited dissemination.

We want our gateway to provide a place to build the evidence base around what works and what doesn’t in science policy and research practices across all its dimensions – and we want to improve the cross talk between academia and policy and practice. And importantly, we want models of scholarly publishing – and that includes the approaches developed by F1000 – to be subject to scrutiny and studied as part of the discourse.

Our advisors

To support the gateway we have recruited the services of 3 expert advisors: Gemma Derrick is Director of the Centre for Higher Education Research and Evaluation, and a Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University; Ismael Rafols is a Research Fellow at Ingenio (CSIC-UPV), Universitat Politècnica de València, a Visiting Professor at CWTS at the University of Leiden and is Associate Faculty at SPRU (Science Policy Research Unit) at the University of Sussex; and Steven Wooding is a Senior Research Fellow in the Research Strategy Office at the University of Cambridge.

Gemma said: “This exciting area of research is innately interdisciplinary and utilises different methods, approaches, styles and theoretical underpinnings. As such it is spread across different journals, and it rarely brought together. F1000 for the first time provides a platform where all this research, despite its disciplinary boundaries, can be brought together in one place.”

Steven said: “I’m particularly excited by the opportunity to bring together the academic and policy discussions on research on research. Rather than changes driven by dissatisfaction with the status quo we need robust evidence of what works and when, to help improve how we support science.”

Check out the Science Policy Research gateway and how it all works. The gateway is entirely open for you to browse and we encourage commenting and dialogue around all the content and insights published.