Enabling an Evolving Publication Ecosystem

When we spoke to the faculty members of the University of Tsukuba about its partnership with F1000Research, they were all praise for its Managing Director, Rebecca Lawrence. “She has the vision and a great smile that made us believe that the future is bright!” is how most people described her. They gave her credit for understanding the needs of the university and realizing this partnership. In this interview, Rebecca Lawrence, the driving force behind F1000 Research Ltd., talks about how she wants to change the traditional publishing model and her vision for the future of research publication, the partnership with the University of Tsukuba, the acquisition by Taylor & Francis, and more.

F1000 and its philosophy

F1000 was founded in 2002 by Vitek Tracz. It was originally called Faculty of 1000, a reference to the group of 1000 biomedical researchers whose recommendations were used to identify papers of note. Vitek is widely considered the “father of open access.” He founded the Current Opinion journals and the publisher BioMed Central. Current Opinion journals provided short annual reviews of key topics and asked authors to also flag those citations that were seminal contributions, while BioMed Central pioneered open access publishing. Both initiatives were at the forefront of scholarly publishing in their time and aimed to change the scholarly system for the better.

F1000 was founded with the same vision. By 2000, with the volume of publications skyrocketing, it became difficult for readers to wade through articles to find those of most relevance. Also, the journal impact factor was increasingly considered the sole indicator of the quality of research output. F1000 provided an alternative to the journal impact factor; it aimed to highlight high-quality research that was not necessarily published in the top impact factor journals.

Inspired by Vitek’s vision, I joined F1000 in 2009. In my former line of work focusing on publishing solutions for the pharmaceutical industry, the latest new research is typically first presented as posters at major conferences. The pharmaceutical industry is especially keen to know the latest discoveries and so they often invest significant time and funds in scanning research conferences looking at posters. In addition, a large proportion of this research is never published, so you will never be able to access it again after a conference if you weren’t able to attend at the time.

In response, in 2010, Vitek and I launched F1000Posters to enable researchers to openly and freely share their conference posters and slides. In 2013, this evolved into F1000Research, the innovative open research publishing arm of F1000 that offers immediate publication and transparent peer review.

Tackling issues beyond open access

At F1000Research, we are trying to tackle five main issues plaguing research dissemination in traditional publications.

The first is the time taken from submission to publication. It takes months, sometimes years, from the time a researcher has discovered something to when others get to see it.

Then there’s usually a lack of access to the research data that underpin the findings. The data is the core of the research. It just seems crazy to me that you publish a summary of your output and that reviewers are expected to peer review your work without access to the core of the work.

Lack of transparency in the peer review process is another significant issue. In traditional journals, the peer review process is often closed. Most journals follow the single blind peer review process, where you don’t know who the reviewers are or why the decision to publish (or reject) was made. That leads to a number of biases in the system.

We’re also trying to address the lack of visibility of the peer reviewer’s contribution. Peer review is voluntary work and, in most cases, the names of peer reviewers are not disclosed. As a result, they do not get credit for their contribution. Often reviewers co-author their reviews with more junior colleagues for training, and I feel that those junior researchers should also get credit for their work.

Then there’s publication bias and research waste. Many journals only publish certain types of articles or articles they think are interesting or will ultimately bring citations, and because of this, many findings don’t get communicated.Negative and null research findings and replication/ refutation studies are rarely published. Even though the results in each of these studies may be small, together they might be really significant and need to be published. Such publication bias leads to a huge amount of research waste. Sir Iain Chalmers suggested that in clinical research, about 85% of research is wasted one way or another, which is an enormous waste of money, time, and effort.

The solution to these problems is to put control in the hands of researchers at every stage of the publication process and that’s what we are trying to do at F1000 Research. We combine the benefits of the preprint server with those of the traditional journal—thus creating an author-driven model. We want to allow researchers to share any aspect of their research straightaway and make their research available quickly, and ensure that the underpinning data is made findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR).

Let me break down this model for you: We don’t have external editors who decide whether to accept or reject a paper – we simply conduct a rigorous but objective set of checks for things such as plagiarism, ethics, meeting community reporting guidelines, and making the data FAIR. We encourage the publication of a wide range of research papers, from traditional narrative papers to software tools, data notes, method articles, and more. Peer reviews are then openly shared with everyone and reviewers are named, and then the authors get to decide when and how they want to respond to reviewers and if they want to update their article to provide a new version. Getting a paper published should not be the last step. Authors can keep improving their paper until they are ready to stop, but they can always come back later to update it again if they wish. It is an evolving, living publication.

We are trying to bring about a paradigm shift in the way research is published and evaluated: we want to give readers access to all the important information, including the expert assessment, and let them take an informed decision on whether the paper is valuable to them.

Partnering with the University of Tsukuba

When I met Professor Jun Ikeda from the University of Tsukuba’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and his team, it was clear that they share the same vision as we do at F1000 Research. They are very keen on changing the research evaluation system and, in particular, how to bring open research concepts to the humanities and social sciences, which is also an area we are now focusing on, having started in the life sciences. We realized that we could work together to help them achieve their goals.

The contemporary research ecosystem is very complex. Everything is interrelated— researcher assessment, promotion, tenure, and university rankings. We can’t just change one aspect without changing the whole system. I believe that institutions, along with funders, have the strongest influence in this area. But frustratingly, everyone seems to be waiting for the others to make a move.

This is why we have been partnering recently with a number of leading research funders around the world, providing them with open research publishing solutions for their grantees. These include Wellcome Open Research, Gates Open Research, and most recently, Open Research Europe for EC Horizon 2020 grantees. The University of Tsukuba is the first research institution that has taken this bold first step. We want to see if this partnership and any initiative that comes out of it will encourage other universities in Japan and beyond to join in the movement toward open science.

A unique feature of the platform that we have developed for the University of Tsukuba is that it will enable researchers to publish their research in Japanese. Providing multi-language support was not part of our vision initially, but it was a need highlighted by the university’s humanities researchers. They wanted to publish humanities and social sciences in Japanese, have them indexed in global research databases, and make them accessible to anyone. It’s a big ask from the perspective of coordination and quality control, so this is probably why no other big publisher offers this. It’s quite complex and not technically straightforward. But we are a small team and we can make decisions faster. We thought, if it is so important to them, why not try and make it work?

What we’re doing with the University of Tsukuba has garnered a lot of interest in Asia and beyond and so multilanguage publication is something we’re now looking at much more broadly. This also fits well with our ethos of ensuring that scholarly publishing really meets the needs of the research community.

I think that initiatives like this will give institutions, research funders, and other players more of a say in the publishing process. We want to collaborate with these key actors in the scholarly ecosystem to support them and their researchers in a transition to open research practices, and work together to observe, understand, and then address the challenges.

Acquisition by Taylor & Francis and synergy

We started to reach a point where a small team simply couldn’t make the kind of impact Vitek and I had envisioned. But with Taylor & Francis acquiring F1000 Research Ltd. at the start of 2020, we now have the support, resource, and expertise to really drive our vision.

Taylor & Francis’s CEO Annie Callanan and her executive leadership team are committed to open research and changing the system. They also have a very strong humanities and social sciences base through Routledge, which we are already starting to leverage.

It’s been some 11 months since we joined Taylor & Francis and it’s been very exciting to be part of such a big organization that really sees open research as the direction the industry should take.

We are helping Taylor & Francis explore more in the avenue of open research publishing and we hope this will encourage other publishing companies to follow suit. Together, we can change the system much faster. At F1000Research, we’ve demonstrated that this model works, and have shown how major funders are shifting, and reaping the rewards of this model. Now we need publishers and research institutions to come together to make the real shift.

Looking ahead—more solutions in the offing

Another crucial area we are working on with the broader community is around addressing issues with research assessment. We’re trying to deviate from the traditional model where the authors have to select one journal to publish in. We also don’t want to replace this with many platforms. Since many studies are funded by multiple entities, authors will have to choose between platforms and we want to avoid that. So we’re trying to create a middle ground where authors can publish on an open platform and still get peer review, recognition, and citations.

Together with representatives of a broad group of stakeholders, we’re working toward creating a central platform (Open Research Central) where the venue of publication will not matter. This platform will connect publishers, funders, research communities, and societies in one place where authors will be able to choose from a range of services to get their research outputs published and then openly peer reviewed.

We think crucial to the success of this approach is separating the process of publication and technical peer review from the curation and evaluation of a findings’ potential impact. Imagine if a researcher submits his/her paper to a central publishing platform and it undergoes technical peer review from one of the available services. After that, multiple groups (could be journal editors or through scholarly societies) assess the paper to see if it meets their minimum criteria for perceived importance or impact, and give a badge that endorses the quality of the paper—a bit like the different star ratings for restaurants. Papers can then gain greater standing as time progresses rather than be published in a single venue and therefore only be assigned the reflected value of that venue.

At the same time, we are starting to publish types of output, not just research papers. We’ve always said that researchers should be able to publish articles in whatever format is most relevant, whatever that output is. There are many outputs of research that don’t warrant peer review (or may need a different type of peer review) that are also valuable to the community but are typically hard to share and make citable and to track impact. These might be whitepapers, technical reports, teaching materials, etc., as well as conference posters and slides. By publishing these outputs, we will be able to track their performance and enable their citation. If it is trackable, any research output could be reflected in a researcher’s assessment.

How F1000Research works

How quickly can one get published on F1000Research?

You can see your article published in as few as 14 days. There’s no editorial selection or pre-publication peer review that will delay or stop publication. When you submit your article to us, we run some rigorous objective checks for plagiarism, ethical requirements, readability, affiliation, etc. We help authors with collating data and formatting. When everything is ready, we publish the article online and invite peer reviewers to conduct open peer-reviews on the platform.

How do you categorize F1000Research—as a preprint or a journal?

It is a lot like both, but also different. We call it an open research platform. The concept of preprint is to put your article on a server before you submit it to a journal. But once your article is published on F1000Research, it is considered an official publication. This means you cannot send it to another journal. On the other hand, unlike a journal, your publication on F1000Research triggers open invited peer review. Once your article is peer-reviewed, it is indexed in many bibliographic databases such as Scopus, PubMed, and MEDLINE.

Do you have editors who decide if a paper is accepted or rejected?

We don’t have editors; it is completely author-driven. This is an important difference from traditional publication. All articles that pass the initial objective checks get published. After peer review, we don’t rely on one individual making a decision on behalf of the community on whether to publish an article or if it has “passed” peer review. Authors decide if, when, and how they want to respond to reviewers or if they want to reflect on the reviewers’ comments to publish an updated version at their own convenience.

How does open peer-review work?

We invite peer reviewers after an article is published. We then publicly share peer-review reports on the platform and state if the article is “approved.” Unlike the traditional model, we make the peer reviewers’ names and comments public, so their work is recognized and citable, and the process is transparent. Since the paper is already published, peer reviewers are not helping decide whether the paper should be accepted or rejected, but simply helping the authors improve the quality of the article. So, the peer-review comments tend to be much more constructive.

Can any organization create a space on F1000Research like the University of Tsukuba has?

Yes. Any organization—universities and institutions, funders, learned societies and research communities—can create their own gateway on F1000Research. We provide a number of options where they can pull together their research outputs in one place and support their researchers to publish rapidly and openly. They can choose to either do this through a co-branded gateway with F1000Research or they can opt for their own white-label platform. An example of the latter is Wellcome Open Research, an open research platform where Wellcome-funded research is published.

What kind of output is published on F1000Research?

F1000Research publishes research output in any format—traditional research articles, negative/null findings, method articles, software tools, data notes, and much more. We also support the publication of research outputs that don’t need peer review, such as whitepapers, technical reports, training materials, and posters. These materials are typically not published in traditional journals, and thus not citable. On F1000Research, all outputs receive unique identifiers, we track citations and other metrics, and encourage comments and discussion from the research community.

REBECCA LAWRENCE

Rebecca is the Managing Director of F1000 Research Ltd. After acquiring a degree in Pharmacy from the University of Wales, Cardiff, and a Ph.D. in Cardiovascular Pharmacology from the University of Nottingham, Rebecca joined Elsevier where she oversaw publications and new products in the Drug Discovery Today group. She then served as the Editorial Director of Current BioData Ltd. In 2009, she joined F1000 where she launched F1000 Posters (an Open Access repository of posters and slides) and was responsible for building and managing external partnerships. She launched the open research publishing platform F1000Research in 2013. Rebecca has been an active member of the Open Science Policy Platform, a group that advises the European Commission on open research policies, and a member of the Advisory Board of DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment).

This article is a part of ScienceTalks Magazine issue Welcome to the New Era of Open Publication.