Many scientists were miffed by the introduction of the Research Works Act, which would roll back the US government's open access policy for research it funds. Some of that annoyance was directed toward the commercial publishers that were supporting the bill. That, combined with a series of grievances about the pricing policies of one publisher, Elsevier, has now led a number of scientists to start a boycott—they won't publish in or review for journals from that publisher.
At the moment, the site where the academics are organizing the boycott is down, but the signatories were heavily biased towards math and the physical sciences.
This wasn't the only news from the publishing world, however. The Faculty of 1000 is a site that organizes what's been termed "post-publication peer review." Instead of reviewing publications prior to their being published, the Faculty of 1000 comments on papers in their areas of research after they've been published, adding an additional layer of quality and sanity checking (something that, unfortunately, is often needed).
Now, Faculty of 1000 is launching F1000 research, which is a different twist on academic publishing. When a manuscript is submitted to F1000R, an editor will provide a basic sanity check and, if it passes, the paper will immediately be published under a Creative Commons license. Only after it's online will the journal arrange for reviewers to perform peer review on it. Reviewers' scope will be limited to the scientific validity of the results and won't include an evaluation of the paper's significance. Other researchers will be able to attach comments to the paper that will act a bit like informal reviews. F1000R will also host any large datasets associated with the publications.
This approach could run into trouble, given some of F1000R's other goals for the service. For example, they're apparently willing to accept preliminary work, negative results, and thought experiments. Will all of these end up being reviewed? Does anyone even think having their preliminary work formally reviewed is a good idea? There's time to sort out details like that before the service launches later this year, but details like this could be essential for determining how it ends up being used (if it's used at all) by the research community.
A number of people commenting online have compared this service to the arXiv, which hosts works-in-progress for the physics and math communities. Some of the works on the archive are clearly from the fringes of science, and a number of them don't survive peer review. Nevertheless, the arXiv has enhanced the communication among scientists in the fields that use it. If F1000R manages to provide a similar platform for other fields, there are definitely researchers interested in embracing it.
Listing image by Photograph by Anna Creech
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