F1000Research is a scientific publishing platform for life-scientists that offers transparent peer review and speedy publication. It publishes agricultural research articles on the main F1000Research site and on the Open Knowledge in Agriculture Channel (OKAD), one of its many thematic channels    

Submitting scientific research for publishing is a key way for authors to validate their work, and in the wider scheme of things to create novel solutions to complex problems through dialogue with fellow researchers.

Close to two million scientific papers are published every year - often scattered across the internet – and publishing platforms like F1000Research are a way of gathering these disparate resources together and giving visibility to research. Whilst not all scientific findings have the same value and impact, broadcasting the results – big or small, is important. What one individual or group may find insignificant another scholar may be able to use as a building block in their research.

In the spirit of open science F1000Research provides a transparent publishing platform for authors to publish all forms of scientific content related to the life sciences and medicine, from posters and lecture slides to software and research articles. It accepts all scientifically sound articles, including single findings, case reports, protocols, replications, null/negative results, and more traditional articles.

Agricultural-themed research is well represented on the platform. Many leading agricultural initiatives and organizations feature, including but not limited to GODAN, Cell5M, AgGateway, and AgroPortal.

Agricultural research is tagged under “agriculture and biotechnology” and encompasses plant biology, ecology and environmental sciences with a mixture of research, opinion and method articles, slides and presentations.

The scope cuts across themes – compare Elizabeth E. Hood’s review of Plant Based Bio-fuels, to Jason A Cranford and Donald C Cooper’s research on The Manufacture of Filtered Cannabis Cigarettes.

Elsewhere Fabrizio Celli, Johannes Keizer, Yves Jaques, Stasinos Konstantopoulos, and Dušan Vudragović look at how the social media revolution is impacting on scientific publishing with their article on: Discovering, Indexing and Interlinking Information resources.

A range of opinion articles look at trends and advances in current agricultural research - see Andreas Drakos and partners’ analysis of the European Commission-funded agINFRAproject, a data hub for agriculture, food and the environment, or David A Norton’s view on the Ultimate Drivers of Native Biodiversity Change.

Meanwhile close to 30 agriculture and biodiversity-tagged sets of slides and 42 posters are also available, a vast number of which were presented during the March 2016 Research Data Alliance Plenary 7, where theInterest Group on Agricultural Dataplayed a central role.

Post-publish peer-review

Whereas traditional pre-publication review models can slow scientific research down publishing on F1000Research is rapid, with papers coming up for peer-review only once they are published and on the back of a quick in-house quality test related to ethics and legibility (see the complete editorial policy.)

It is the F1000Research community who “peer-reviews” a piece of research, leaving comments and feedback alongside the paper. As there’s no formal editor research isn’t blocked by editorial bias, leaving scientists and researchers to judge work for themselves. 

Why publish everything?

F1000Research makes a persuasive argument in 53 seconds on why all findings no matter how small should be published. It’s a waste of scientific research, they say, not to include null and negative results, case reports, data notes and observation articles. Broadcasting all results opens them up to a larger field of interpretation and potential uses which individual authors or groups may have overlooked.

F1000Research channels and gateways

F1000Research hosts a series of channels and gateways. Gateways are portals for larger organizations with multiple channels.

Channels are collections of published research curated by academic institutions, non-commercial societies and organizations.

The Open Knowledge in Agriculture and Development (OKAD channel).

This community-led channel on F1000Research is a platform for sharing research articles, slides and presentations covering all aspects of agriculture, agri-food and agri-biodiversity. Slides and presentations from the March 2016 Research Data Alliance Plenary 7 in Tokyo recently made a huge contribution to the channel. However, fresh articles and content are always welcome and authors can submit work on the following themes:

• E-infrastructure for agricultural development 
• Publishing and communicating scientific knowledge 
• Open access, open data and open educational resources 
• Dissemination, metrics and impact assessment
• Development of open source software, applications and platforms
• Policy and socio-economic issues

Non-digital open knowledge initiatives

Submitting research on F1000Research

F1000Research publishes scientific articles, slides and presentations on 18 subjects. Before you submit consider whether your work is original and that at least one of the authors is a qualified researcher in the life sciences. Then register or sign-in to F1000Research and follow the submission steps. Once an article is published authors can submit a new version of it free of charge, in line with comments from peer review.

Costs

Publishing posters and slides on F1000Research is free. Processing charges apply on all articles and are based on word count, irrespective of the article type. Authors are encouraged to respond openly to referee reports, which are published with the article, and can publish revised versions of their article at no further cost.

However, F1000research grants full (Group A) and half waivers (Group B) to AGORA (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture) country researchers.

If your institution is already registered with AGORA find out which group you are in, here If you are not already registered and would like to know more about the project, which offers low-cost access to online agricultural research resources in low-income countries, click here.

F1000Research also considers individual full or partial waiver requests on a case-by-case basis in situations where there is a lack of funds. In addition 2016 articles whose main topic are suitable for the scope of the subject area “Publishing, Education and Communication” and which do not exceed the length limit of a long article (8,000 words) will receive a 100% waiver. See full cost information, here.