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I am delighted to announce today that F1000 Research Ltd has been acquired by Taylor & Francis Group (part of Informa plc). This is a hugely exciting opportunity for us. For a start, it will expedite our growth through the greater financial support and resources of a very large established organisation with extensive geographical and disciplinary reach. But most exciting to me, it will give us the opportunity to directly influence one of the ‘Big 4’ publishers to support the transition towards more open and collaborative ways of working, enabled though new approaches to scholarly publishing.   

It will be no surprise to many that F1000 Research is now transferring to a new owner. Our founder, Vitek Tracz has an impressive track record of nurturing ideas through start-up companies, and taking them to a level where they are ready to fly the nest. We will be following in the footsteps of many of his companies that have gone on to exciting and successful onward lives in the hands of others including BioMed Central (where Vitek initiated the Open Access movement in collaboration with PubMed Central), Current Opinions series, Current Biology, Current Drugs, Current Patents, IDdb3, Telmap, The Scientist, and many more.

Since F1000 Research’s conception, Vitek has been adamant that he would only ever sell F1000 Research to an organisation that he is convinced is fully committed to not only maintaining our vision and supporting us to scale up but also to ultimately transform the whole industry over time. Both Vitek and I feel confident that we have found such an organisation in Taylor & Francis, its CEO Annie Callanan and her executive leadership team, and I am very excited to continue to lead F1000 Research in this next phase.

Challenging the status quo

Through his vision and his significant personal investment, Vitek enabled the launch of F1000Research in 2013, presenting to the world a completely new model of publication, combining the benefits of ‘pre-printing’ (providing rapid publication without editorial bias) with quality and transparency (rigorous editorial checks, open data support and invited open peer review) whilst providing authors with autonomy throughout the publishing process. F1000Research originally focused on supporting the publication of life sciences research but, following researcher demand, we increasingly support a broadening range of disciplines and research communities.   

In 2016, we witnessed a step-change in awareness and uptake of open research publishing following our partnership with Wellcome who contracted F1000 Research to provide a publishing platform for their grantees using our model of publication (Wellcome Open Research). This was swiftly followed in 2017 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Gates Open Research), and subsequently by many others (see Open Research Central for a full list).

Life as a fledgling: changing mindsets

Over this past seven years, attitudes to publishing have changed dramatically. When we beta launched F1000Research in June 2012, as far as we are aware, no other publication operated a mandatory open data sharing policy. Additionally, F1000Research has been a trail blazer in the shift to a fully open and transparent peer review system (invited expert reviewers; signed and published peer review reports).

Furthermore, our model of publication puts researchers in control of what they share (as long as the article passes a set of rigorous technical checks) by essentially combining a preprint with formal invited peer review by experts, post-publication. While preprints had become established in much of physics and maths through arXiv, they were rarely used in biology (bioRxiv wasn’t launched until November 2013) nor in medicine.  

All three areas (open data, transparent peer review, and preprints) were bold shifts away from traditional publishing approaches, and encountered significant resistance at the time from much of the research community. But our view was that if we are going to rethink the model for communicating research, we should do it fully rather than step by step. As Vitek would say, if you’re going to fall off a horse, make sure you choose a big one!

We combined this with our own custom-built publishing system that has enabled us to bring true versioning to publishing to better align with how research is conducted, and to bring speed and flexibility to the platforms, for ourselves and our partners.

Of course roll forward to 2020, and none of this seems quite so radical anymore. There are now many major publications with open data sharing policies of varying stringencies. Preprint servers have been launched across many fields, and uptake is growing at pace, especially in biology. There are an ever-increasing list of publications using various forms of open peer review (although few that are as fully open as F1000Research); there’s even a new service to track them all – see ReImagineReview. There are many new forms of publications being launched on a regular basis, most of them using the preprint as the initial basis of publication, overlaid with various forms of peer review (e.g. PreReview, preLights, PeerCommunity In, SciPost, Review Commons).

Since launching F1000Research, while the key pillars of the publishing model remain the same, we have stayed true to Vitek’s innovative and experimental vision in continuing to develop and innovate to serve the best interests of researchers and research. Our data sharing guidelines are now the first amongst scholarly publishers (we believe) to be fully FAIR-compliant; we continually fine-tune our peer review guidelines with the aim of maximising rigor and transparency; and we will continue to modernise standard publishing practices to better meet today’s needs for the communication of a much broader range of scholarly outputs.

Now we fly: continuing the transformation

The next phase of our life will continue to see innovation and experimentation, and build on our close collaborations with researchers, funders, research performing organisations, scholarly societies, other publishers, and beyond in providing services to support the ever-evolving needs of research. As we expand further beyond life sciences into the physical sciences and arts & humanities and social sciences (AHSS), we will continue to adapt the model to ensure it best meets the needs of the communities that we serve. The significant history and experience of Taylor & Francis (and Routledge, as one of their key brands) in AHSS will help us to get this right.

Importantly, our priority will remain to ensure that the efficient and effective communication of research findings is an integral and essential part of the research workflow and system. We are very grateful to the many early adopters (researchers and partners) who really took a risk and supported us in trying to change the publishing system for the better by submitting their articles and partnering with us on the platforms.  Our acquisition by Taylor & Francis provides us with the opportunity to build on what we started but work at a much faster pace, with more resources to experiment, and in partnership with a broader set of stakeholders. 

We will continue to expand our focus to better support those who can, and should, play a more important role in influencing research and who ultimately benefit from the impact of new discoveries such as policymakers, commissioners, patients and the broader public. We truly believe that Taylor & Francis’s keenness to work with and learn from F1000 Research will be a major catalyst for change and transformation across the whole scholarly publishing system, and will be pivotal in creating a research system that maximises reach, utility and ultimately impact of new discoveries for all.