In a recent Industry Forum report by Thomson Reuters, several pertinent statements were made: The growing accumulation of data produced by academics which is not destined for publication represents an impediment to scientific progress. Conventional research assessment methods do not recognise or reward data sharing. A researcher’s overall contribution to scientific progress is greater than…
For nearly 300 years, peer review has been the main arbiter of regulating scientific quality and maintaining academic integrity. Articles have to be evaluated and satisfy appointed reviewers before they are rubber-stamped into the scientific record, so peer review is unquestionably an indispensable step of the publishing process. As we know ‘peers’ are fellow scientists:…
Over the past months, we’ve been discussing the publication of negative results, and some of the obstacles that prevent people from publishing them. While we’re happy to publish papers based on negative results, not everyone can find the time to write them up. A Dutch funding agency is now giving out grants specifically to fund…
We cover all areas of life sciences, but we know that different fields each have their own unique characteristics, and some features of our journal are of particular interest to certain disciplines. For the coming months, one area we’ll be focussing on is ecology. To encourage ecologists to try F1000Research, we’re waiving the article processing…
Mautusi Mitra’s lab recently characterized two novel Chlamydomonas mutants that are defective in chlorophyll biosynthesis. You can read both her papers on F1000Research, but in this video she provides a quick summary of the work: In the video, Mitra also outlines the main reasons for submitting these papers to F1000Research, transcribed below. Speed was an…
Releasing information in incremental steps is nothing new to software developers, who release updates and patches that add new functionality to existing programmes. The launch of a new bioinformatics tool is often accompanied by a paper describing the tool for new users. However, the paper describing the tool will be out of date as soon…
Ethan Perlstein left academia to become an independent researcher, investigating rare diseases. In this guest post, he explains how he arrived at this decision, and what his plans are. Recently I declared scientific independence and a newfound focus on rare/orphan diseases…on my blog. This decision was not planned far in advance. It’s more adaptation to…
Graham Steel has been involved in Patient Advocacy since 2001 and is a strong advocate and vocal supporter of Open Access, Open Data and Free Culture (interview). In the guest post below, Graham describes the importance of access to clinical trials, academic articles and data, as well as the personal events that led him to…
When we announced our campaign to waive the article processing fee for negative results articles until the end of August, we published a press release with a quote from Ben Goldacre, who has been fighting publication bias in medical research and clinical trials. He has talked about the issue in his book Bad Pharma and…
We recently came across The Paper Rejection Repository on the website of Niko Grigorieff’s group at Brandeis University. On this page, he showed from which journals some published papers had previously been rejected, and includes the rejection letters. We invited Niko to share some more details about this project in this guest post: My lab…
