Automating workflows for an Innovative Open Science publishing Model

From the article:

"F1000Research is an Open Science publishing platform for life scientists, offering immediate publication followed by transparent refereeing of scientific papers. Managing Director Rebecca Lawrence says that the two-year old platform is changing the way publishing is done in a number of respects. Firstly, it reduces the time between when a researcher is ready to share their research and when it actually becomes publicly available for the scientific community to use, analyze and discuss the findings (typically about 7 days). This is largely achieved through process innovation. Secondly, F1000Research’s transparent invited peer review process, conducted post-publication, aims to tackle the bias that is inherent in the traditional anonymous peer-review and pre-publication processes, where papers move from journal to journal, causing a negative impact on both speed of publication and disclosure of findings. Data disclosure is mandatory F1000Research also has a mandatory disclosure policy that requires authors to share the data underlying any science reported in their article (as long as there are no issues with data privacy/security etc). This can help improve data re-use and research reproducibility. The philosophy is that if authors claim to have made a scientific discovery, they should be willing to share the data that underpins that claim, so that readers can analyze it and make their own judgement. Rebecca acknowledges however, that some researchers are not fully comfortable with sharing all of their data. A major impediment to the desire to share all underlying data, especially small or negative components, is the amount of time it takes to properly format, document and curate them. F1000Research is keen to reduce that time and effort so researchers will be more likely to engage in the process and increase transparency. “The biggest challenge we face is that we are trying to change scientific culture,” says Rebecca. “We want a situation where all stakeholder groups are going in the same direction, building incentives in such a way that authors are encouraged t o document and share their data but in ways in which they are not overwhelmed.” The ideal technology would provide a system in which the author’s supporting content would be published automatically in the background as it is being prepared. Key integrations into the author workflow F1000Research is using Figshare as an application service for associated research objects. They have selected the Viewer, Portal and Datastore solutions from Figshare."

Read the full case study for information on implementation of Figshare into F1000.