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Gold Open Access, where funders or authors pay a one off article processing charge (APC), removes the need for the paywalls put in place by subscription journals, and so enables immediate and unrestricted access to research findings for everyone.

Many Gold OA publishers charge a flat fee for all articles or stratify prices by article type. We at F1000Research had taken the ‘article type’ approach but as of today this will be discontinued and replaced by a fairer APC structure based on word count bandings.

New APC structure

What counts?

The word count will be calculated at submission. Title pages, abstracts, tables, equations, figure/data legends and references do not count towards the total; only the text within the main body will be taken into account. Supplementary text also won’t be included in the calculation, though our pre-publication checks will identify any information essential to the article that will need to be reinserted back into the main text. A leeway of +10% over each band limit will be allowed for additions that may be requested during the pre-publication checks and variations between word count calculators (we will be using the one in Microsoft Word). If the inclusion of mandatory information omitted from the original submission pushes the word count over this 10% margin then the article charge will move up one band. If we can see obvious ways of cutting down the text we may advise authors on this. As before, all subsequent versions will be free of charge. Further details can be found on our APC page.

Why we are changing

 

Incentivising concise and efficient reporting

We have already posted about the benefits of publishing short articles. Scientists are under relentless time-pressure, and the publishing process contributes to this more than it should. As a rule, longer articles take up more time and intellectual resources to write, read and peer review.

In basing APCs on word count we have created a monetary incentive that should make science reporting more streamlined, and so free up valuable time for authors, readers and reviewers. There are many opportunities to cut back unnecessary length; research articles are meant to be reports, not essays. Introductions only need enough information to put the investigation into context, Results can be more succinctly expressed in tables and figures than in text, and Discussions rarely need to speculate at length on every possible explanation.

 

Objective pricing

Publishing charges should reflect the costs of publishing an article, and in our experience, concise and focused articles are quicker for us to check, typeset and have peer reviewed. A single flat fee approach creates an unfair system where those funding concise articles effectively subsidize the additional costs incurred by unnecessarily long papers.

Pricing by article type goes some way in ameliorating this inequity, but raises additional issues regarding objectivity. It is near impossible to create enough article classifications to fit every possible angle that an article can take, and a significant proportion of submissions fall into the grey areas between the types (and their different prices). Further, some classification criteria was necessarily subjective, such as the requirement for Research Notes to describe ‘preliminary’ or ‘single finding’ results, both of which are open to interpretation.

Word count is both a fairer and a more objective means of determining costs; it gives submitters a greater degree of control over how much they or their funders spend on making their research openly accessible, and as a numerical measure is far less subjective. Figures and tables are deliberately excluded from the length calculation, so authors continue to be under no pressure to cherry-pick any results.

 

Reducing costs for most authors

One of the long term goals of OA is to reduce the costs of publishing as much as possible, so that more funds can be redirected towards original research. F1000Research’s charges were already some of the lowest in life science publishing, and the effect of today’s changes is that the majority of funders and authors can now save up to $500 or pay the same as before. A small minority of authors who feel that they truly need a lot of text to convey their research are the only ones who will end up paying more, though this surcharge merely pushes the APC to be more in line with those requested by many other OA publishers.

The waivers and discounts that we offer will not change: authors from low income HINARI/AGORA countries are still eligible for waivers/discounted APCs; other discounts such as science communication articles, submissions to Channels and pre- and post-pay institutional discount agreements still apply.

Finally, today also marks the launch of F1000Workspace, our revolutionary new suite of software and services designed specifically for biomedical scientists to write, annotate, share and discuss research articles. Through specially developed ‘one-click’ web browser and Word plug-ins, scientists can access references instantly as they write, check notes and group discussions, get smart citation recommendations and automatically format their bibliography to match the style of most life science journals. To celebrate this launch, we are offering every active F1000Workspace user the opportunity to publish one short article in F1000Research completely free of charge.