Times Higher Education - Publish and let your peers be the judges

“A radical open-access journal is to be launched that will rely entirely on post-publication peer review. F1000 Research is the latest initiative by the Faculty of 1000, whose large existing network of senior scientists select and evaluate top published papers in biomedicine. The new life sciences journal will also publish non-standard research outputs such as incomplete data sets, negative results, preliminary analyses and "thought experiments", which are typically rejected by standard journals... Submissions deemed to have passed a basic in-house ‘sanity check’ will be posted immediately, and the journal, which will be funded by article fees, will then invite specific experts to post a review. Other readers will also be able to comment on the paper or the reviews, and authors will be encouraged to amend their papers in the light of that feedback... But the journal would clearly display whether an article had been peer reviewed and, if so, whether it had been ‘approved’. She [Rebecca Lawrence, director of new product development at F1000] expected researchers to self-police their submissions for quality because ‘if everybody said [a submission of theirs] was a load of rubbish it wouldn't do their career much good’. This view was echoed by Cameron Neylon, a senior scientist at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and a member of the journal's advisory group.... He said the journal was an important experiment and the "next logical step" in the wake of PLoS ONE's demonstration of researchers' appetite for rapid, simplified peer review...”