As I posted earlier this year, I have been co-chairing the CASRAI Peer Review Services Working Group together with Laura Paglione (Technical Director, ORCID) to look at the best way to recognise referee reports as a formal output in for example an ORCID profile. This project has looked at the peer review of a wide…
Who is ultimately responsible for the content of a research paper? Most of us would point at the authors: referees can assess what’s in the paper, but we have to trust that the authors present ‘real’ (not fabricated) data and that they report all results, not a cherry-picked selection. And yet, the expectation generally is…
This is the third in a series of posts in which we go into more detail about some of the concepts that F1000Research is based on. In previous installments, we looked at open access and open peer review. Here, we turn to post-publication peer review. What are the different types of post-publication peer review and…
At F1000Research we are constantly pushing the boundary of what defines a research article. Authors can submit descriptions of unexpected, novel, and possibly unexplained observations in the form of Observation Articles. These observations can be a phenomena that has been identified in field work, in the laboratory or through experimental analysis. We recently published Prof. Andrew Baird’s…
Authors may wish to submit Data Notes for data no longer being actively used, giving other researchers the opportunity to work on the data for novel studies. Or researchers may wish to publish a Data Note to ensure that data continues to be accessible in the future. F1000Research is currently waiving APCs for Data Notes…
A few weeks ago we published Prof. Kenneth Lee and his research group’s attempt to replicate the now infamous STAP cell work published in January of this year. Ken’s groups article has proven to be very popular with the scientific community having received over 5000 views in its first two weeks of being online, and…
This is the second in a series of posts in which we go into more detail about some of the concepts that F1000Research is based on. In the first instalment, we looked at open access. Here, we turn to open peer review. What is open peer review? What are the benefits and challenges? History of…
A key aim of the F1000Research approach to publishing is to clean up the peer review process – referees are still invited but this is done after publication (to remove the normal holdups in when the science is shared) and is done completely in the open (with names and referee reports published alongside the article).…
One of the things we’re working on behind the scenes is improving education about peer review. We’re talking to university staff and faculty involved in teaching graduate students about peer review, I’ve set up a group on Mendeley that collects good examples of open peer review reports, and we’re a partner of Sense About Science’s…
The physiological effect of a gene is not just determined by its DNA sequence alone. In recent years, researchers have discovered the important role of DNA methylation: A methyl group on cytosine is an epigenetic modification that affects development, transcription, and a range of other functions. To understand how DNA methylation affects a particular phenotype,…
