Last week saw the first articles go live on Wellcome Open Research. The platform, funded by Wellcome and run by F1000, follows the publishing model of F1000Research, that is immediate publication with mandatory inclusion of the supporting data, followed by transparent invited post-publication peer review. The benefits and vision for the platform were recently described on the F1000Research blog.

Scholarly articles reporting any basic scientific, translational and clinical research that has been funded (or co-funded) by Wellcome will be included on the site and will be free to access. A range of article types will be accepted, which together with flexibility in terms of format and structure should provide researchers with the scope they need to publish all results, tools, methods and observations. Published articles can be updated and amended at any time post publication, and each version is independently citable with its own digital object identifier. By default, the most recent version of an article is displayed on the platform.

By removing some of the barriers associated with traditional publishing models, Wellcome wishes to encourage openness and transparency, ensuring its research outputs are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). Moreover, it is hoped that the new platform will not only foster collaboration, but also create a fairer system for evaluating research and researchers for future jobs and grants.

——————————————————–

Summary by Louise Niven, DPhil from Aspire Scientific.