Aimed specifically at life scientists, this talk is organised by F1000Research, independently of other QMUL open access week events.

What happens when you submit a paper to a scientific journal? Although this process can be different between publications, the main concept of peer review has remained generally unchanged for the last few decades: papers are sent to reviewers, and not published until it has passed peer review. With papers being sent back for revision, this process often takes months – sometimes years. Refinements have been made in recent years to try and open up the process, including naming of reviewers and, sometimes, publication of referee reports online.

F1000Research is taking a radically different approach by publishing papers online, together with the full underlying data sets, as soon as they are accepted for peer review. The entire review process is public, and only papers with sufficient positive reviews are indexed in external literature databases.  (In addition, QMUL covers publication costs in F1000Research for their researchers funded by RCUK or the Wellcome Trust)

This talk will outline the increased transparency in peer review among life science journals, demonstrate the F1000Research process, and discuss other ways science publishing is becoming more open and transparent – e.g. via open data and article level metrics.

Speaker: Eva Amsen, F1000Research Outreach Director