It appears that F1000 research has added a number of new features since their initial announcement. They are still Gold (as in author pays) but, their current about blurb reads:
“F1000 Research is a new fully Open Access publishing program across biology and medicine, that will start publishing later this year. It is intended to address the major issues afflicting scientific publishing today: timely dissemination of research, peer review, and sharing of data. Diverging from traditional journal publishing, F1000 Research will offer immediate publication; open, post-publication peer review; open revisioning of work including ongoing updates; and encourage raw data deposition and publication. In addition, F1000 Research will accept a broad range of article formats and content types.”
(emphasis mine)
I’ll be very interested to see the final form this all takes. There’s no reputation economy associated, but, they appear to be firmly on the right track.
Thoughts?
This looks really interesting. It looks like they’re trying to skip the intermediate steps we assumed were necessary and jump straight to full-on open peer review. The big downside to this is that by asserting themselves as a journal replacement, they’re incompatible with publishing in other journals, so they can’t function as a normal preprint server. Maybe they can get away with it by having enough big names attached. But I’m a bit doubtful of anything that tries to fix everything in one go like this.
It’s going to be an interesting experiment, and it may create an atmosphere more conducive to our experiment, I think. I’ll be even more interested to see how other journals respond!