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(This is the final installment of a series of posts featuring speakers from “Challenging the Science Publishing Status Quo”, an evening of talks about peer review, data sharing, and open access. Previously: Lawrence Kane on rapid publication, Keith Flaherty on publishing negative results , Steven Hyman on sharing datasets, Sue Griffin on transparent peer review, Gary Borisy on the move towards open access by governments and funders)

To close our evening of talks about new models of peer review and open science, F1000 Founder Vitek Tracz took the stage. Tracz previously founded BioMedCentral, and has been at the forefront of the open access movement. He started his talk by expressing concern at realizing the damage that the publishing industry has done to sharing of information in the sciences. Rather than help science, publishers have slowed down science, and made it more difficult.

Open access was a response to this realization, and initially consciously focussed only on access to the literature. When the first open access publishers started, there was a lot of resistance from large publisher. But now open access is well established, and it’s time to address the remaining closed areas, beyond access to papers. This is where F1000Research comes in.

In the remainder of his talk, Tracz describes the concepts behind F1000Research: immediate publication, transparent peer review, the ability to update the paper with newer versions, and the inclusion of all data:

After his talk, the floor was opened to questions from the audience to any of the panel members.

The first question “With new legal requirements, will funding agencies encourage researchers to publish open access?“  is answered in the video below. The remaining questions are listed below that, and are linked to the video with the answer.

Other questions:
Was there a process in choosing how the open peer review system of F1000Research would work?

Is it obligatory to make endless revisions if there is a critique attached to an article?

How does F1000Reseach assess if something should be published?

Would it be possible to publish a clinical trial construct before the trial is conducted?

 

Thanks to all speakers and guests for a great evening of discussion!