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We announce a new publishing partnership with the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) to launch a gateway supporting the implementation of the ISF’s upcoming open access policy. In this blog, Michael Markie, Publishing Director of F1000Research, introduces the ISF Gateway and its first publications.

Today we are happy to launch the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) gateway which gives all researchers funded by the ISF the opportunity to rapidly publish their scientific and scholarly work in a format that supports research integrity, reproducibility and transparency.

The ISF gateway is a significant step towards implementing the ISF’s open access policy, which is currently being established. It is hoped that the gateway will provide a dedicated publication venue to support all the principles of open research to maximize the impact of their work.

The gateway launches with publications from two renowned labs in receipt of ISF funding. The first is a method article from Noam Ziv’s Lab based at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, and the second is a research article from Benny Geiger’s Lab based at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

To understand a little more about the experience of publishing in the gateway, we asked Noam about his labs work on identifying a reliable and inexpensive non-fluorescent ligand for improving the assessment of protein-of-interest metabolism in live cells using HaloTag technology.

Q. Hi Noam, please can you tell us the focus of your method article?

A. Our group has long been interested in imaging the molecular dynamics and turnover of synaptic proteins. One exciting technology for studying such topics, that emerged alongside fluorescent proteins, is the use of genetically encoded proteins (such as HaloTag) that can be labeled rapidly with membrane permeable fluorescent ligands. Like many others, we realized that this could be a powerful technique for carrying out ‘pulse-chase’ imaging experiments in living cells. We quickly realized, however, that the method is not entirely ‘clean’ and that a non-fluorescent, non-toxic and inexpensive ligand would be needed take care of residual, and potentially misleading labeling. To our surprise, we found no such commercially available ligands. We therefore looked through catalogues of chemical compounds, finding one that seemed perfect for our purposes. The compound was procured and tested, and the experiments Laurie and Ayub did suggested that it indeed worked as expected.

Q. Why did you choose the ISF gateway to publish your work?

A. We felt that the ligand we identified could be useful to many other groups around the world, so Laurie and Ayub summarized their findings, which we wanted to publish rapidly and make open access so the wider scientific community could benefit from our results.

Q. What was your experience publishing in the ISF Gateway?

A. The manuscript went ‘live’ within three weeks, after a straightforward and professional submission, quality assurance and typesetting process. Peer review was complete within four weeks and thus, within approximately 8 weeks from submission, a peer-reviewed, revised version of the manuscript was freely accessible to anyone worldwide. Altogether, it was a very positive experience which fully met our expectations!

The ISF gateway enables its grantees to publish all their research, increasing the sharing of the grants’ outcomes, funded by the foundation. All ISF researchers that has received a grant over the past ~10 years can publish any research outputs they wish to share. The scope of the gateway covers all the ISF’s funded disciplines; the exact sciences, life sciences and medicine, social sciences and the humanities and welcomes positive, negative or null studies, replication studies and refutation studies equally.

The ISF will be covering the publication fees for the first thirty papers published in the gateway. Early career researchers, who do not hold an ISF grant themselves, are also eligible to publish with the endorsement of an ISF grant holder.

If you are interested in learning more about the gateway then contact us at research@f1000.com.