F1000Research’s ecology campaign

There are many new journals coming online each day, and it’s hard to know which ones will make it and which won’t (although if you are wondering whether a new journal is considered ‘predatory’ in the sense that they will take your money without investing much effort in your paper, there’s a good list here). For the time being, I have been making the decision based on: 1) discussions with colleagues, 2) the publisher and/or partner, 3) the track record of other projects from the group, and 4) the editors.

For example, I recently went out on a limb, and published a piece with Sean Meaden in an MDPI journal, Viruses. I decided to accept the invitation to publish in a special issue on bacteriophage research because I know and greatly respect the work of the guest editor, Graham Hatfull . In the end, it was a great experience! The managing editor and all staff I worked with were very helpful and professional, and I love the fact that I can track how many people have looked at the abstract and full text of the paper (and proud to say that the latter number is higher than the former!)

I have also had good experience as a reviewer with the new F1000Research journal. I’ve discussed F1000Research before, due to their transparent and real time review process. This online, open access and open science journal publishes the paper online just after submission, and then openly (and without anonymity) publishes the reviews. I will reserve judgement about how well this model works for now, but I give them great credit for experimenting with a system that is often referred to as ‘broken.’

F1000Research has also just announced a new campaign, with an offer for authors of ecology papers: No article processing charge on the first ecology paper you publish with F1000Research until the end of December 2013 (using code ECOL16). This can be on standard research reports, but also on articles that replicate previous datasets, pure data articles and null/negative results. They are also introducing a new category of article, called an ‘Observation article’, which reports serendipitous observations that have not been studied systematically, but that offer a starting point for further exploration.

I for one will  be watching this journal with great expectation, and would love to hear from anyone who has published there.