A comment to: f1000research.com

A comment to:
http://f1000research.com/

Good job,

This is what I was looking for and what I suggested to Royal Society in response to a BBC documentary, Science under attack!

Below is my few cents;

CC BY 3.0 may be insufficient to protect the writers, CC BY-SA 3.0 may be more appropriate. As for raw data itself attribution should be mandatory a lot of work goes in converting real life data to a table, no modification (no derivatives) may be allowed.

This new system of scientific publication would allow fast and free expression. Prevent cherry picking and undeserved copyright to publishing groups.

As for the submission process:

It should prevent, forgery, allowing transparency, public and peer review/rating and evaluating of submitted materials for key components such as ethics, authenticity of authors, conflicts of interest, etc. validity of methods and findings.

Authenticity of authors & reviewers.

The review should consist of multiple steps. Each completed step can appear next to article.

* Real name and identity of submitter(s) should be verified √ by some system. This is hard I know! But this is one of the steps forgery occurs or may occur. If identity is not verified. a (?) may appear near identity box. Identity may be peer reviewed too: I personally know this researcher. √

* A consent about accuracy of data and writings, conflicts of interest should be signed by submitter.

* Real name and identity of reviewers (s) should be verified √ too.

* Reviewers should somehow be categorized: No publication/not a scientist, certified in his/her country but no publication, first name publication on same topic, other name publication on same topic, expert on topic, publication on other topics.

* Reviewers should examine the material for key presented aspects. Upon finalization a √ check-box should show finalization of exam. A rating of 1-5 or 1-10 should be used for each aspect. Unexamined aspects should remain unchecked.

* Does the reviewer have any conflict of interest (+ or -) with author.
* Is the reviewer an expert on topic?
* Does the data appear authentic?
* Does data contain scientifically new information?
* Does data contain contradictory information to current knowledge?
* Is the method valid?
* Is the method ethical?
* Are the calculations valid?
* Are the findings valid?
* Are drawed conclusions valid?
* Is material presented easy to understand?
* Do writings show good command of language?
* Do you recommend reading to peers?
* Do you recommend reading to public?
* Overall evaluation: Pass/Fail (1-5 fail) (6-10 pass)

The review process should also allow communication by notes in sides of document as in popular word processing apps and google docs.

The versioning throughout review should be visible as in Wikipedia articles. Major and minor versions can be marked too.

Raw data should be stored on author's web site, publisher's site and distributed by torrent. This would prevent punishing of publisher for bandwidth usage by distributing large data and safeguard availability of data.

Authors should have the choice to withdraw (reason), revise, remain published with approval by peers, published despite disapproval by peers, published controversial (approvals and disapproval's), unreviewed, unfinished reviews.

A Wikipedia type of categorization and tagging may be more than appropriate for this site. Where tags can be added when appropriate and removed. With no predefined set of tags allowing dynamic creation of categories for new hormones, new species and more...

I have more to say but tired for now...

Congrats and hope you success...

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Reply of f1000resarch.com

@Nevit – there are some great suggestions here, thank you. With the licensing of the article, our default will be CC-BY. There may be specific instances where this is not always appropriate, but I think it is important that we encourage the use of CC-BY where at all possible. Data is obviously more tricky and as you say, although CC0 doesn’t require attribution, the cultural norms of citing work that you are building upon still need to stand. By enabling the data to stand as its own article (but potentially closely linked to a related analysis/conclusions article), it enables the specific individuals who created the data to be fully credited as named authors, as they may well be different individuals to those who analyse the work.

You make some good suggestions about the peer reviewing. There will be invited referees (just as with standard publications now) and so we will be clear who they are, but anyone else who wishes to comment will need to first register with us so we know their identity. Of course a system like Orcid will help greatly with this issue (both for authors and referees). Authors will then be encouraged to improve their article and all versions clearly marked and stored. I will be asking some more questions about peer review in the coming weeks on this site so will welcome your thoughts.

In terms of the data, as I mention to Janne above, we want to avoid storing it ourselves, and we also don’t want to link to data stored on an author’s site as these pages are notoriously unrealiable in terms of still being there in several years time. Our plan is that the data will be stored in the appropriate repository if there is one e.g. GenBank, PDB, etc or if there is nowhere appropriate for that specific data type, in somewhere like Dryad, FigShare, etc

Rebecca Lawrence