Points of clarity | Discussions – F1000 Research

As you can see, we have had a busy couple of months with plenty of new articles published on a wide range of topics. I just wanted to take a few minutes to explain a couple of points that have been causing a little confusion on our site. What does ‘indexed’ mean? The first relates to what counts as ‘indexed’.  The eagle-eyed amongst you have noticed that some articles published last year became ‘indexed’ at a slightly different level of peer review compared with their counterparts published in 2013.  Just to be clear, we are not applying standards unevenly, as some have commented; there is a specific reason for this difference, which I will now explain. In 2012, we agreed with Scopus and others that an article would be indexed as long as it had obtained any two of our ‘Approved’ or ‘Approved with Reservations’ statuses.  At the start of 2013, NLM agreed to index our content but they requested slightly more stringent criteria: either two ‘Approved’ statuses, or two ‘Approved with Reservations’ statuses plus one ‘Approved’ status. Going forward, we decided to apply these more stringent criteria across all the indexers of our articles to make it simpler for everyone.  What this does mean though is that there are a small number of articles published in 2012 that passed the old criteria but not the new criteria. It would be unreasonable to the authors to un-index them but of course those articles will not be indexed in PubMed as it stands, and most of those authors are working on new revisions as we speak... A mega-journal ...  There has also been some confusion about whether we are a journal or essentially a preprint server.  We are most definitely not a preprint server – we in fact already have a preprint server, F1000Posters.  F1000Research is most definitely a journal; articles published here are fully published and cannot be removed and published elsewhere (and should not be submitted elsewhere after publication with us as this would count as duplicate publication). We had been very deliberately avoiding the term ‘journal’ as the ‘character’ of a journal often defines the articles published in it (for example, a journal’s Impact Factor may be seen as a surrogate measure of the quality of an article) and we believe that this is not a good thing. Articles should be judged on their own merits and not on where they are published.  We also believe that, ultimately, journals as they exist today are no longer needed.  However, our avoidance of the term ‘journal’ in describing F1000Research seems to have caused real confusion for many. Given the importance of clarity on this point, we will be using the term journal, or indeed mega-journal, from now on."