Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Publish and let your peers be the judges
9 February 2012
Open-access online journal will speed release of data and encourage feedback. Paul Jump writes
A radical open-access journal is to be launched that will rely entirely on post-publication peer review.
F1000 Research is the latest initiative by the Faculty of 1000, whose large existing network of senior scientists select and evaluate top published papers in biomedicine.
The new life sciences journal will also publish non-standard research outputs such as incomplete data sets, negative results, preliminary analyses and "thought experiments", which are typically rejected by standard journals.
Submissions deemed to have passed a basic in-house "sanity check" will be posted immediately, and the journal, which will be funded by article fees, will then invite specific experts to post a review. Other readers will also be able to comment on the paper or the reviews, and authors will be encouraged to amend their papers in the light of that feedback.
Rebecca Lawrence, director of new product development at F1000, said many operational details still had to be decided, and the journal would test its approaches by posting trial articles before launching more formally later this year.
"It is crucial to have discussions out in the open so that people know who said what and can then make up their own minds," she said, adding that F1000 Research would also try to link papers to any discussion about them elsewhere on the web.
She said the journal would have to think about what limits it would set on the kinds of material it would accept, but it did not want to be overly restrictive, particularly at the beginning.
Retractions would be contemplated only in the event of misconduct or "dangerous" inaccuracies such as inaccurate drug doses.
But the journal would clearly display whether an article had been peer reviewed and, if so, whether it had been "approved". She expected researchers to self-police their submissions for quality because "if everybody said [a submission of theirs] was a load of rubbish it wouldn't do their career much good".
This view was echoed by Cameron Neylon, a senior scientist at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and a member of the journal's advisory group.
Dr Neylon even wondered whether fear of bad reviews would discourage researchers from submitting non-standard outputs.
He said the journal was an important experiment and the "next logical step" in the wake of PLoS ONE's demonstration of researchers' appetite for rapid, simplified peer review.
He said post-publication peer review would overcome the "binary" judgements about an output's value imposed by traditional peer review, the onerous nature of which also discouraged researchers from publishing all their results.
But Dr Neylon was unsure how long it would be before the new approach gained widespread acceptance.
Paul Groth, an assistant professor in the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Group at VU University Amsterdam, said the biggest challenge for F1000 Research would be to attract good-quality reviews, which "will be key in establishing the full scientific quality of the posted work". But, as an advocate of "alternative metrics" in science publishing, he said the journal was a "good starting point".
paul.jump@tsleducation.com.
Readers' comments
One major concern I have with F1000 is that it is a for-profit company. Quite aside from what it decides to charge for its services to start with, what guarantees do we have that if successful it won't change its charging practices in the future?
This is a very real concern. If a large scale open access service becomes very successful and therefore influential and then decides to "cash in" on that success, it can be very difficult for the academic community to shift to an alternative model or service. We see this with the current difficulties in shifting away from traditional, very expensive but high reputation journals.
I believe that F1000 is owned by Science Navigation Group, which previously started a number of other journals and services including BioMed Central, Current Biology and others. They have sold these and similar journals/services to the likes of Thomson Reuters, Springer and Elsevier. What guarantees do we have that they won't do the same with F1000 Research?
Why would academic researchers take the risk of investing in such a for-profit exercise if in the future it could be sold to exactly the type of publishing companies that we're trying so desperately to escape?
I don't whether the F1000 Research approach is a good idea.
But I am very glad it's being tried. It's increasingly obvious that we need something different from, and much more agile and open than, the current journal system. At the very least, experiments like this one will help us to figure out exactly what we do need.
Tom, I think your concern is a good one, particularly in the current context but there are two important points in favor of the F1000 approach. First, they are actually doing this. As Mike says this is a valuable experiment being done by a serious organization that has a track record in this space. Someone has to take a lead.
But I agree we need to ensure that the work and effort of researchers that goes into this isn't just lost. That's why I am glad that F1000 has committed to a proper Open Access approach to this effort. All the data and content will be available under a CC-BY or ccZero license which means that we can make separate archives, collect it into institutional repositories or do whatever else is needed to ensure that access to the content remains. That's the value of true Open Access, rather than the limited flavored provided by some other publishers I won't mention.
Now maybe there remains a risk that the platform could be taken private or this could be a play to gain a big market share and then exploit it. But at some level I'm not sure that that risk is any less with other groups. I would be very glad if F1000 use an open source approach for the framwework here. I think that would be good for the community and also makes good business sense actually. But at bottom this is a service business, not a content, or even a server business. F1000 will do well if they provide a good service, and badly if they don't. If they do what you suggest, screwing the customer, it will be bad for business.
Overall I am much happier with a private company providing a service that makes content open than I am with a private company taking my content and making it private. And like I say, if they turn around later then we still have all the content. I'd love to see public and nonprofits competing in this same space as well. But the one thing I am not worried about is losing control over the content. That's what OA is for.
Interesting idea. To counter the worry about privatisation of open data, perhaps authors should insist on retaining copyright ownership.
Disclaimer: All user contributions posted on this site are those of the user ONLY and NOT those of TSL Education Ltd or its associated trademarks, websites and services. TSL Education Ltd does not necessarily endorse, support, sanction, encourage, verify or agree with any comments, opinions or statements or other content provided by users.