Q1. How quickly can one get published on F1000Research?

A1. 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.

Q2. How do you categorize F1000Research—a preprint or a journal?

A2. 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.

Q3. Do you have editors who decide if a paper is accepted or rejected?

A3. 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.

Q4. How does open peer-review work?

A4. 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.

Q5. Can any organization create a space on F1000Research like the University of Tsukuba has?

A6. 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.

Organizations can partner with F1000Research to create their own open research publication. They can opt for a co-branded gateway or a white-labelled version like Wellcome Open Research. Source: wellcomeopenresearch.org

Q6. What kind of output is published on F1000Research?

A6. 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.

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