With new guidelines stating that by Dec. 31, 2025, all federally funded research should be made freely available to the public moving forward, the momentum toward open access publishing at colleges and universities is growing.

As experts in information science who know how to make content more widely accessible, librarians are in a unique position to help faculty and research office staff understand and comply with open access publishing requirements.

“As the way people access information is shifting, librarians at many research universities are trying to determine what their role is in this changing world,” says Joseph Lerro, Open Research Business Development Manager for Taylor & Francis Group. “Supporting open access publishing helps them demonstrate a higher degree of value to their institution.

Librarians can advocate for open research policies at their institution and provide tutorials and other guidance to help with open access publishing practices. “When there is interest in open research beyond the library itself, it tends to be a more successful initiative,” Lerro says.

Researchers will also need tools to help them meet open access requirements. Open research publishing venues, like those offered by F1000, can help universities make their research outputs openly accessible with minimal effort.

How F1000 works

F1000, part of the Taylor & Francis Group, powers a range of publishing venues connecting research communities worldwide with easy routes to open research publishing.

F1000Research, F1000's flagship publishing venue, offers a submission system that looks similar to other systems that researchers are accustomed to using, so it’s intuitive to navigate. The F1000 Editorial team diligently checks articles at the point of submission to ensure every article meets quality and ethical standards. This includes checks around plagiarism, data availability, ethics approval, and more. Articles that pass pre-publication checks are immediately published and citable on F1000Research.

Once this happens, the article undergoes an open peer review process. Authors suggest appropriate peer reviewers who are then invited to review the article by the F1000 Editorial team. Articles are given a status of 'Approved', 'Approved with Reservations', or 'Not Approved' with details about what changes or clarifications should be made.

Once an article receives two ‘Approved’ statuses, or two ‘Approved with Reservations’ statuses and one ‘Approved’ status, it is considered as having passed peer review. At that point, it’s indexed to appear in online searches, Google Scholar, and research sources such as PubMas, PubMed Central, MEDLINE, Europe PMC, Scopus, Chemical Abstracts Service, British Library, CrossRef, DOAJ, and Embase—making it easily discoverable.

The entire peer review and publishing process takes place on F1000Research itself, with full transparency for readers. All of an article’s versions are maintained, so readers can see the peer feedback each article has received.

Aside from publishing to the venue as a whole, institutions or departments can also create “Gateways,” or personalized, branded portals with content that is specific to their organization. For instance, a university could create a Gateway on F1000Research or another F1000 publishing venue, that serves as its own publishing hub for open research.

“Many universities have institutional repositories that capture all of their research outputs,” Lerro says. “But this content is only accessible to people within that particular institution. With F1000, if an institution were to set up a Gateway, this content would be discoverable to anyone in the world.”

Not just full articles, but also research data

One thing that makes F1000 publishing venues unique is that it gives researchers the ability to publish content beyond just research articles. For instance, it allows for the publication of a wide variety of article types developed throughout the research process, such as data, notes, and software code.

“These items might not be appropriate to publish in a traditional journal, even an open-access journal,” Lerro says. “But they can be published on an F1000 publishing venue alongside the completed research article.”

As the sharing of research data becomes increasingly important, this feature is a key benefit for researchers and institutions alike.

What’s more, F1000 publishing venues display altmetrics for each published article, such as the number of times an article has been viewed or cited, to help researchers and institutions understand the impact of their work. This information is critical for effective research assessment.

Researchers are charged an article processing charge (APC) to publish their content. “A university can purchase a prepaid APC package so when researchers from their institution want to publish on an F1000 publishing venue, those costs are covered on their behalf,” Lerro says.

Visit F1000 to find out more about tailored open research publishing solutions for your institution.

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