F1000Research is Successfully Transforming the Way Science is Shared

London, United Kingdom, January 10, 2015 --(PR.com)-- Since its launch in January 2013, F1000Research has published almost 700 articles across the life sciences, written by over 2000 authors. These articles have all been published according to F1000Research’s open science philosophy: publication first, followed by open invited peer review, with all referee reports and referees’ names published alongside the article. Data sharing is mandatory, the data being accessible from within the article.

After just two years, this radically different way of publishing has already received an overwhelmingly positive response from across the scientific community. F1000Research authors and referees come from some of the worlds’ most outstanding institutes: all Ivy League universities, and more than 90% of the top research organisations in the UK, Canada and Australia. Johns Hopkins University tops the list as the largest source of authors. Articles include research supported by grants from the top funders, with the majority coming from the NIH, NSF, EU, NSERC and Wellcome Trust.

F1000Research's publishing platform has been especially popular with the bioinformatics community, because the article can be linked to a permanent and citable instance of the relevant software code, and a new version of the article can be published when the software itself is updated. Bioinformatics articles now comprise almost one quarter of published articles.

F1000Research has also pushed the boundaries of data availability ensuring that all articles contain either the underlying data itself, or a link to the data within an approved repository. Last year, an article by Bjoern Brembs (Universitat Regensburg in Germany) drew attention for having interactive figures that are generated on-the-fly from source data: an important milestone on the path to real-time science.

The platform has been garnering worldwide attention, with coverage in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Popular Science, Scientific American, Fox News and many other places. With over 800,000 article views and growing, F1000Research is clearly making an impact.

"It has been an exciting two years developing revolutionary new processes and technologies," said Managing Director, Dr Rebecca Lawrence. "We will continue our ground-breaking work with several exciting announcements planned for the first half of 2015. There continue to be many difficult challenges in science publishing and we look forward to developing solutions together with the research community."

To find out more, download an infographic PDF of statistics from the past two years here: http://f1000.com/resources/F1000R_infographics.pdf.

F1000Research is an Open Science publishing platform for life scientists, offering immediate publication and transparent refereeing, avoiding editorial bias and ensuring the inclusion of all source data.