PubMed Central and F1000 Research — More Signs of Favoritism and Activism, and More Conflicts of Interest | The Scholarly Kitchen

"Journals wishing to be included in PubMed Central (PMC) have to apply — unless they hold a membership in the old guard of open access (OA) publishers. In the case of eLife, that membership was granted via the long-standing cozy relationship between PMC and Wellcome Trust. In the case of F1000 Research, it seems the membership came from a shared history with BioMed Central (BMC). The final 200+ pages of items responsive to an expanded 'F1000 Research' portion of my Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request show not only that PMC leadership once again violated its stated policies by inviting F1000 Research into PMC, even assigning a long-term contractor to reach out, but also shows another poor handling of conflicts of interest. BMC was founded by Vitek Tracz in 2000, and sold to Springer Science + Business Media in 2008 (Springer itself was recently acquired by a private equity firm). In 2006, a journal, Biology Direct — edited then, as now, by Eugene Koonin, NCBI, NLM, NIH; Laura Landweber, Princeton University; and David Lipman, NCBI, NLM, NIH – was launched at BMC, when Tracz was still in control. Tracz subsequently launched F1000, which in 2012 launched F1000 Research. These facts provide some context for what follows ..."