How to submit to an F1000 Platform

Hello. Thank you for joining this pre-recorded webinar titled How to Submit to an F1000 Platform. My name is George Cooper. I'm the senior associate publisher here at F1000. And I'm going to talk you through the process of selecting an appropriate F1000 venue for your research and the submission and peer review process that follows. On this first slide, I just like to summarize the material that we're going to cover in this presentation. I'll start by introducing F-1000. We'll talk about open research principles and how the F-1000 model reflects those principles. Next, I'll talk about how you can go about finding an appropriate F-1000 venue for your research. We'll look at the submission checklist that you'll typically see for an F1000 platform, the different requirements you'll need to meet. We'll talk a bit about data availability, submission guidelines for the different platforms and article types. Um the open peerreview process that follows publication. You'll get to see a published article and the typical peerreview reports that are posted alongside a published article. Then I'll close by sharing some useful links for you to refer back to after this presentation. So I'd like to start this presentation by giving a brief introduction to F1000. So we are a scholarly publisher offering an open research publishing model. So an open research model involves open access to all outputs that we publish. So they can all be freely um accessed, viewed, downloaded and they will in most cases be published under a creative common license. So a creative common uh CC buy license um in almost all cases. um we require posting of data where that is possible in a open repository. So we're trying to advance open data practices which again supports greater transparency and reproducibility of research. We offer a transparent peerreview process which happens post publication. So we publish research outputs as soon as they have met our pre-publication requirements which we'll come back to. Then at the point of publication, we invite peer reviewers to review in the open the research outputs that we publish. We support a diversity of article types for more stages in a research project from the very beginning at concept concept formation where you might publish say a review article or a registered report even a study protocol outlining a research project you're about to undertake. Then as you start to generate data, maybe software or code is in the process of doing that research, you can post that material into a repository and and write what we call data notes or software tool articles. You can publish individual findings as research notes as well as they emerge. And then when you get to the later stages in your project, you may want to publish your fullyfledged extended research article or methods paper. And again, we support all stages in that life cycle. There's an article type for each step in that process. Our portfolio publishing values all have the same sound science model or basis. They might have different eligibility criteria which we'll come back to based on your funding status. In some cases, they might have a slightly more narrow disciplinary focus. But in most cases, they will publish any material that meets those core requirements which I just mentioned briefly and that we'll come back to. We're not screening on the basis of novelty. then we don't have academic editors who will be selecting who applying criteria beyond those core um requirements. We do that ourselves with our desk editors. We screen content on the basis of meeting those ethics and publishing policies and then the point of publication. That's when academic reviewers are invited to assess the academic merit of an article that has been published using that open process. So again it's everything happens out in the open. Um we're part of the Taylor and Francis group which is a publisher of research journals, academic journals and books among other um research um and academic outputs and products. We're also an an enabler and supporter of responsible research evaluation tools and frameworks. For example, Dora, the direct declaration on research assessment, which is trying to encourage a shift away from an overemphasis on um citation measures such as the impact factor among other site citation metrics and measures that are often um used, overused, perhaps even misused to provide a shorthand measure of research quality and impact in ways that they were never really intended to. And instead, we're trying to, among others, shift that process of assessment, assessing of quality to more holistic measures, taking into account a kind of broader range of metrics beyond just the impact factor. Before getting into the submission requirements for F1000 specifically, I think it's helpful to think more generally about open research principles and how they inform our model. So open research is the idea that research results should be freely accessible to all. This includes scientific results, methods, and underlying data. It also includes the dialogue that happens in the process of publishing your results. So that open collaboration, communication and dialogue between scientists involved in the study and the people reviewing the outputs from that research. In contrast, the traditional publishing model um in what we call the closed access form typically involves publishing research in a subscriptionbased journal or a journal where you have to pay to access um those findings which obviously limits access to people who don't have the funds to do that, don't currently have a subscription for whatever reason. Um this traditional model also involves um usually a peerreview process that that also happens behind closed doors. So you don't get to see the um versions of a manuscript that were prepared before the version that was accepted. All you get to see is the articles that were accepted for publication. You don't get to see the peerreview reports or the details names of the peer reviewers themselves either and how the authors responded to that process. So that all happens in a kind of closed fashion and and open research tries to shine a spotlight really and open up that process to wider scrutiny and understanding. This general move away from sub subscription models and towards open research practices um relates sort of to the more widespread use of what we call preprints or preprinting which is where you share on a preprint server platform or repository your first the first version of your manuscript before it was published and peer reviewed in a journal. um trying to encourage early sharing of results for wider use, dissemination, commentary um before peer review, which relates to our model quite similar to it in that we allow for publication ahead of peer review. Subtly different though because we our venues are operating more like journals where you if you publish your research um in one of the venues that we support, you're committing to going through that peerreview process as well which will follow on the platform. But yet borrowing elements of preprinting in terms of trying to encourage that that early share sharing of your research outputs. The growing support for open research practices has been reflected in the adoption of these principles in uh the policies that are set by many research funders uh and government agencies. For example, UNESCO supports the principles of open research, but also many of the funders that we've actually partnered with to provide some of the open research platforms will come back to the European Commission, Welcome Trust, Gates Foundation, and many others um support these underlying principles, particularly the the notion that research outputs should be freely accessible, including data um and the supporting materials that are prepared as part of research um artic articles of dissemination. Now to look at the open research publishing model that we use for our F1000 platforms uh and understand the specifics of that a bit better. So here it is broken down in this infographic and I'll take you through the the various steps now. So this process starts by submitting to one of our F1000 venues. We'll have a look at those venues in a moment. um but you find an appropriate venue and you would submit like you would to another academic journal you would be asked to provide an orchid ID so that unique identifier for you for your for yourself for your your name and your output um as an academic and you can use that to prepopulate elements in the submission form um once you submit your article and you've filled in all the required elements again which we'll come back to um our team of in-house editorial staff will oversee a process involving desk editors that will check all of the components that you've submitted against our publishing policies and our ethics policies which are available on our platform. Um, and we'll be screening that content to make sure there are no there's no evidence of misconduct and that it meets the requirements for publication again which we'll look at in a minute. Assuming that your article passes those checks, it will be published then on our platform. Um at that stage your article will receive a digital object identifier. So DOI which is a persistent link means it can be then um cited at that stage. Um it will also be indexed in Google Scholar. Um and available on our platform for all to access. At that point the peer review process will begin. Um our editorial team will find appropriate peer reviewers for your article. they'll be invited to to review and post the comments um and their status the decision that they've set for your article um on the platform which will be freely accessible to all each of those reviews will also receive a DOI so that they can be so that they're archived and also can be persistently linked to so again opening up that process and allowing more credit for peer reviewers for uh investing their time and effort in reviewing your manuscripts as well you'll then be encouraged to respond to those peerreview comments um both by writing some comments in response but also by revising your manuscript as needed. Um each of the revisions will be published on the platform and linked together so everyone can see how that article has evolved over time. So it's quite like a kind of living document and you can revise as many times as you like in order to address the reviewer comments and arrive at a final version that is acceptable. Um so once it has been accepted again we'll look at what that looks like in terms of the threshold but um essentially once you've had two approved decisions or one approved and two approved with reservations um your article will then at that point pass peer review and at the point that it passes peer review it will be sent to uh indexes for that platform uh which will usually include um PubMed and scope purpose among other um indexes. So now to say a little bit more about choosing an appropriate F1000 venue for your research. F1000 supports a number of different open research platforms, some of which you can see on the right here. The first that we launched is called F1000 research. um and that could be used by anyone who's working in any of the fields supported by F1000 research covering the full spread of science technical medical fields also humanities and social sciences. So it's a broad disciplinary uh scope and there's no limitations in terms of your funding status. You would need to pay an article processing charge in order to publish on the platform. You can see what those APCs look like on the APC page of the platform. um the calculation is broken down in terms of that spread of cost between the various elements of the publishing service. So it's transparent, it meets the plan s transparency requirements if you're familiar with those. Um you'll also find that they're quite they're very competitive in comparison to other open access venues. Um in many cases authors are covered um their APCs may be covered by an institutional arrangement or some other funding arrangement already. worth checking with your librarian if you're at a research intensive institution uh to find out if that's the case. In addition to F1000 research, we have a number of platforms that are supported by a research funer and that available for use only by people who are funded through that uh research funer. For example, we publish open research eur Europe which is for anyone funded by the European Commission or its various funding agencies and streams for example Horizon. Then there's Gates Open Research for anyone who's funded by the Gates Foundation. Likewise, anyone who's funded by the Welcome Trust can publish a welcome open research. Um National Institute for Health and Care Research in the UK is linked to NIHR open research. Ireland's Health Research Board um is linked to HR open research um and has eligibility criteria that limits to those people who are funded through those agencies. Um in addition to the platforms that are backed by a specific research funer, we have some that have a disciplinary focus. For example, routin research um which again I suppose borrowing elements of the brand identity of Routlled you know very prominent um book publishing imprint um for the humanities and social sciences. Routage upon research is limited to research in uh broadly in um humanities and social sciences fields. We also have some that have more of a regional focus like Open Research Africa for research that's that's um coming from the African continent. Um again there there were also some fun arrangements there. You might be covered by um an arrangement with a fun in Africa. Um but it's also open for submissions outside of those funding requirements too. Um you can find out more information about the different platforms that we have uh following the link that's given on this slide. So on this slide I'm going to start to take you through the submission checklist, the submission requirements really for our F-1000 platforms. Um as we go through we may illustrate components of this in relation to F1000 research specifically just so you can see um what this looks like what a published article looks like for example later on. But these this advice and this checklist applies across the board to the platforms I described in the last slide. So the first set requirements are quite standard really across a lot of um publishing venues. Once you've chosen an article type, which we'll come back to, you will then need to select uh and enter your title um for your article. We'd encourage you to keep your title concise and specific um and descriptive. It should really reflect the content of your article, ideally its main contribution. Um the author list uh will need to be prepared both in the manuscript itself. You'll have a list of authors but also you need to enter in the details of each author into the submission form and you should make sure that the two match each other. Um you'll also be asked for the to describe the nature of each author's contribution and this relates to what we call the credit taxonomy um which you can look at. Um and this is a set way of describing uh each author's contribution to the research. Um and it's again it's trying to promote a more transparent um authorship credit system. Um where individuals will get who played a significant role in a research output are credited accordingly whether that was in terms of writing the article itself or preparing doing a literature review or preparing some data securing funding as well. So all of those components can be clearly described and it's clear how each of the co-authors contributed to that output. Um you'll have to give each author's affiliation which should include the department name, institution name, um the city, post code, zip code and country. Um all authors should have at least one affiliation listed. Um every abstract you should prepare an abstract. Every article should have an abstract which doesn't exceed 300 words. Um and ideally it should be structured. So we give some advice about how to structure that abstract in terms of um as concisely as possible describing the background of your research, the methods used uh the the results or contribution and your conclusions. Then in addition to that, we'd encourage you to include eight relevant keywords um that describe the article subject as well. have some of the submission requirements in terms of the main body of your manuscript. Overall, we're quite flexible about the structure that you use for your article. Uh for research articles, we would typically expect it to follow the IMRAD structure. So that's introduction, methods, and results, then discussion. Um for most other article types though, we are flexible as long as it does follow a structure of some kind using headings and subheadings to help the reader to navigate through your article. All articles should be written in a good standard of English uh checked for any grammar or other mistakes before submission. Um some articles will need to follow a reporting guideline for example clinical trials or systematic reviews. You can find the relevant reporting guideline for your article type at this link here. The equator network uh resource page. Also, the article guidelines for your specific article type will mention the reporting guidelines that are usually expected, and we'll come back to that later in the presentation. We'll also need some evidence of the ethics approval process, especially if your research involves human participants or animals. Um, if it does involve humans, we'll need to know about the consent uh gathering process and statements should be pro provided as part of your submission. um as well as evidence of that ethical approval process, what the outcome was and when it was done. Declarations you'll be asked to provide as part of your submission. Um first of all, you'll be asked to say whether you have consent to include any personally identifiable data in your article if that's the case, if that's relevant, and we'd need to see some evidence of that consent. Um, you'll need to declare any competing interests, financial, personal, or professional, for any of the co-authors, um, including yourself as part of your submission. If your work is funded through a funding agency or organization, we'd ask that you give details of that organization. Um, and also if you have a grant number to provide that grant number which will be useful uh and that will be listed in the article when it's published as well. So there's a link there between the output and the grant. Especially important if you're submitting to a a platform that is limited to people who are funded by specific funding organizations. Uh in some cases that grant ID number will be used to validate um your article to make sure that it is eligible. Um so yes important to provide that if you have it. Um then finally you'll be asked to acknowledge anyone who contributed to the research or the writing of the article but did not qualify as an author. Um we have some advice on our publishing policies page about authorship and how we define authorship. Also on the credit taxonomy page you can look at the committee for publication ethics has got some useful guides there as well. But you know typically as well it's the distinction is about whether they provided some some some advice maybe as part of your research or part of your um writing process maybe feedback on an early draft but weren't actually involved in the writing or in the research itself. That would be typically an acknowledgement versus a co-authorship. Um but yes, you can see see other examples on those those those um websites and resources. The back matter as part of your submission um we would encourage you to provide references in any style that you choose. Um as long as it's consistent throughout the article. Um similarly for your bibliography that referencing style is up to you but it has to be consistent. Um figures should be provided as individual files as part of your submission either as JPEG or uh TIFF format greater than 300 dpi. Um you should include titles and legends um in the main body of the text that correspond correspond to those figures. Tables again should be presented clearly. um using headings uh for each column and row as appropriate. Again, typically involving including a title or letter for each table. And this should be provided uh using the table function in Word, not as images um not screenshots of a table but um actually formatted in the document itself. And then in terms of appendices and supplemental files, so we don't accept um appendices or supplemental files as part of your submission. there may be some supporting documentation or supplemental data sets and so on that are relevant to your article. Um you can link out to those from a repository. So we would encourage you to make this some supporting data sets or for example if you have some supported documentation maybe some of the reporting guidelines we mentioned earlier um it's best to make those available in a repository where they'll get their own DOI they'll be um available under typically under a CC by license as well they'll be persistently archived and backed up um so again it's supporting that reproducibility and they could be linked to from relevant parts of your article if it's about data So for example um or again those spirit reporting guidelines or any other reporting guidelines they could be given in your data availability statement section which we'll come back to. All articles that you submit to F1000 platforms should include a data availability statement and that will tell the reader where the data that you generated as part of your research or that you've been uh drawing on as part of your research could be found and accessed. Um if your research didn't involve data, you should say so in your data availability statement. If for any reason due to um confidentiality restraints or any other uh ethics or copyright restrictions you can't make that data availability again you should just include that in the availability statement. Um underlying data should be uploaded to a relevant data repository. provide some guidance on our um submission and article guideline pages about appropriate repositories um where they will get a DOI so a persistent identifier for that data and it will be available under an open access license um if your research is drawn on someone else's data that you didn't generate yourself um again please provide details of where that data set could be found if possible um and how you used it and how it could be acquired in in the text um of your data validity statement and any conditions of access in order to access that data as well. In the presentation, I've been describing the general guidelines for submitting to an F1000 platform. I'd also encourage you to look at the specific guidelines we have for article types on the platform of choice. There might be some variance there. There might be some components that aren't required or some article types but are for others like some of the reporting guidelines I mentioned. So do have a look at those. They're on the article guidelines section of each platform. I've got a link here to for example the research article guidelines for F1000 research which you can take a look at. Some of those article types have um their own article template that you can download. There's an example here again for research articles. Um, you may also intend to submit to what's called either a collection or a gateway um, if relevant for your platform of choice. Collection is typically a timebound curated collection of content a bit like a special issue might be tied to a specific project or event um, or a theme. So we have thematic collections as well on some of the platforms. This might be a specific research area. So worth looking at that option if it's relevant to your project. And then we have more continuous curation options called gateways on our platforms as well. And they're typically tied to longerterm ongoing research projects or institutional partnerships. Um or again it might be a a thematic a broader thematic area. Um particular on F100 research we have quite a few thematic gateways worth looking to see if your submission would be relevant to one of those. And if that is the case, you can submit directly to that gateway, which means that if and when your article is published, it will be published straight into that gateway or collection. Um, so when you go to submit, um, you would scroll down to submit a new article and you'll be prompted to create an author profile before proceeding to the article submission page. Um, at that point, it's important. So, you have to have a an account in order to submit and then you can fill in your submission information from that point. um following the guidelines I've I've described so far. So just to say a little bit more about the peerreview process that follows publication. Um so I mentioned earlier peer reviewers will be identified as part of this process. Their reports will be published alongside your article along with their name and affiliation which they have to provide. um that like you like you as an author, they have to declare any competing interests, which we'll check. Um we'll also be checking the content of the reports to make sure that they meet our own requirements in terms of what a good peerreview report should look like and that there's nothing that's offensive or inappropriate in that review. Um the reviews themselves are citable and have viewing metrics. So again, some reviewers will get some feedback about the engagement with their review. um they'll be notified if there are comments posted in relation to that review as well. Um and as part of their review, as one providing comments, they'll assign a status to their report. So they'll recommend a decision just like the traditional process. We have three statuses they can choose from. Um approved, approved of reservations or not approved. Um, so approved. No content changes needed. Maybe some minor style changes or language edits, but um, but yeah, nothing that would require another version. Um, we approved with reservations so that there are some content changes that are needed, but they're not so significant that the article couldn't be in principle passed, couldn't go to past peer review um, without those changes having been made. Um, and then there's not approved, which is the article shouldn't pass peer review until some quite serious um or well substantive changes have been made um to the article. So, an article would have passed peer review if you have two approved reports, so two ticks or one approved report and two approved with reservations. Um if you get two peer reviews, which is normally the case to begin with, um and it's approved and approved with reservations, then you would have to revise in order to um have a chance of passing peer review. So you'll need to address the comments and the changes that were recommended with the approved with reservations decision until you have um again two ticks or one tick and two question marks. Um sometimes articles will be reviewed by more than two reviewers. So you may reach that threshold either on the first go or in your with your revision. Um but yes that's the that's the uh threshold for passing peer review. On this slide you can see how this peer review process looks in practice. Um so this is an article that was published on F1000 research. Um, three reviewers accepted the invitation to review and posted their reviews on the first version. Uh, two reviewers said that they would recommend it approved with reservations as their decision. Um, another gave it an approved decision. So, two question marks and one tick. At that point, it has formally passed peer review. Um, so that has met that threshold of past peer review which I described earlier. Um but obviously the authors are encouraged to respond to those reviewer comments and to refine the article based on those particular those approved as reservations uh decisions. So to address some of the reservations the reviewers had which the the author has done. So they've revised their manuscript and there's two reviewers um that had some constructive comments, constructive recommendations for changes um have approved the manuscript. they're happy that the changes have been uh made and they accept it. Um but yeah, on that first version actually the article has passed peer review and would have been transferred to indexes. So that's our full process really from submission all the way through to publication and peer review. I hope you found that useful. Um there's lots of other useful resources information on the F1000 site that I encourage you to take a look at here, particularly the resources for researchers page. um covering some of the topics we've covered here in a bit more detail um particularly how to comply with our data policy. We also have a pre-recorded webinar describing that in more detail which I'd encourage you to look at. In addition, we've got the peerreview section of our website on F1000 research if you'd like to dig into the peerreview process a bit more particularly some of the policies and requirements that we set reviewers as part of that process. Um, and also we have a YouTube playlist playlist for some of the shorter bite-siz videos breaking down elements of the um, content that I've discussed here today. Um, again, all the way from submission to to publication and peer review. Um, and the various requirements that we've got. Um, so you can see how to comply, for example, with the ethics requirements and the data requirements and so on in a with these shorter byte-size videos. So, so do take a look at that as well. But yeah, I hope you found this useful today and thank you very much for listening.