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Andy Neale (F1000Research) sat down with Gateway user, Damien Chaussabel, Executive Director of the Translational Medicine Department at Sidra Medicine (Doha, Qatar), to discuss the unique opportunity Gateways offer his lab’s new initiative.

Here, we share extracts from their discussion about the Sidra Medicine Gateway on F1000Research.

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Andy Neale (AN): Could you tell me how you use the Gateway?

Damien Chaussabel (DC): “We have announced a new initiative focused on capacity building and training individuals using or reusing -omics data, which has encouraged us to restart discussions about increasing activity on the Gateway.

Part of my lab is focused on clinical projects, and we’re running clinical studies generating data, while another part is focused on data reuse, reanalysis and capacity building based on that. The Gateway, or at least some of the channels in the Gateway, are going to be used to collect the output from these training activities on data reuse.

We also now have a paper we are currently revising for publication describing training workshops, the outputs of which we feel would be best placed on the Gateway or channel.”

AN: “F1000Research strongly supports data reuse. We strongly promote data sharing and advance open data practices and policies. We encourage data sharing, collaboration, and reuse among the research community in an effort to help open data principles gain more traction. The key pillars of Open Science – Open Access, Open Code & Data and Open Peer Review – are core to the F1000 model and are key reasons why so many researchers chose F1000Research!“

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AN: How have your researchers responded to the Gateway? What is the general sense of the publishing model from your researchers?

DC: “I think there are two different groups of people who could use the Gateway at Sidra Medicine. The first are people who take part in the workshop training activities and data reuse activities, who form a bit of a captive audience as we encourage them to publish in that Gateway.

Then there are the rest of the researchers at Sidra Medicine who are freer to do what they want. I’m not sure I speak for the whole community here, but to me, one of the main benefits is seeing the paper that you have worked hard on become available and visible so quickly. In fact, this could be the thing you need to motivate you to write it up in the first place – perhaps more so for more junior investigators.

People in younger generations are used to the internet and everything is very fast-paced, so working hard on something and then only seeing it published maybe a year later can sometimes be hard for them. I think to be able to see at least something released and published quickly and then working on the peer review and indexing process can be a real benefit to them. Others may not see that or think too much about that, but I think as we do a lot of capacity building (at least in my group), it is the kind of thing we’re interested in – what motivates people and what drives people.

I also think that open peer review is another key benefit, especially for more junior researchers when exposing them to the peer review process, as it is usually more friendly. The other, more traditional models can be a little too much to stomach for our younger investigators, so the open model is actually quite useful in that sense.”

AN: “Many of our customers find that our open peer review model supports early career researchers because it allows for rapid publication and the ability for researchers to gain recognition and impact on their research at the point of publication.”

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AN: What has your experience been with working with the F1000Research?

DC: I think it’s been a different experience from working with other publishers. F1000Research has a focus on innovation in publishing and there’s a lot more dialogue, whereas with other publishers, the discussion wouldn’t really be about asking themselves questions at that level. I think the more open format for peer review would be the main attraction at this point. I think overall it has always been a very good experience, with a lot of interesting ideas regarding sharing the underlying data (open data) as well. I think there are a lot of reasons to go for it!

“We value researcher feedback. One of the key areas is the ease of the submission process and the communication with our editorial team. There’s a great sense of community, and this helps put researchers at ease with the whole process.”

Explore the Sidra Gateway on F1000Research now

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this feature are those of the interviewee and do not represent the practice or opinions of Sidra Medicine.