Scientific Publishing Finally Joins the Internet Age - MarketWatch

"Today F1000Research published findings by Kenneth Lee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong which highlight the perils of the traditional science publishing approach. Until now, despite moving from paper to pixels, the publication of scientific research had not harnessed the full potential of the Internet. F1000Research has a unique publishing model that combines the modern technologies and culture of the Internet while maintaining the rigor of traditional publishing. Lee's paper reveals the full experimental results of an attempt to replicate a controversial study published in Nature that suggested bathing common (somatic) cells in acid can reprogram them to become stem cells (pluripotent (iPS) cells). With systematically collected and fully available data, Lee and his colleagues report that carefully replicating the original acid-treatment method does not induce stem cells. Professor Lee's paper will be peer reviewed after publication, which is the standard approach at F1000Research. The reviewers, their reports, comments and the full data set associated with the work will be freely available for download. The scientific community will have the information they need to properly evaluate the work. The original Nature paper that has proven so controversial was also peer reviewed, but the reviewers were anonymous. The underlying data of the work was not available to readers - as is standard practice. Nature is not unique in this opacity; it is how the vast majority of journals approach data and the review of papers. Today, F1000Research is pushing forward the 'open science' agenda by showing the benefits of a transparent approach to scientific publishing and the important dialogue that it creates ..."