Ireland's Health Research Board (HRB) is to launch a new publishing platform that will enable HRB–funded researchers to publish all research outputs quickly, in an open and transparent way. HRB Open Research will be the first publication platform operated by F1000 on behalf of a public funder.
All HRB Open Research publication charges will be covered by the HRB and the platform will launch in February 2018. Because researchers will be able to publish any and all results, rather than standard articles as encouraged by more traditional journals, fewer results will end up filed away, which reduces duplication of work and of funding.
HRB Open Research will provide all HRB-funded researchers with a platform to immediately publish any research results they think are worth sharing. This could include research articles, null results, case reports, small findings and the data underlying their results (subject to data protection policies). The model helps address significant issues faced by the research community at the moment, such as research waste, reproducibility and rising publication costs.
The open data policy, which requires publication of all supporting research data together with an article, reinforces the HRB's commitment to research integrity, reproducibility and transparency. This is of particular importance with current concerns around what has been described as the 'reproducibility crisis' - the failure to replicate the results of previous experiments. A recent survey has found that 70 percent of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce the experiments of others.
A process of open peer review, post-publication, helps limit editorial bias and increase speed of publication. The approach allows users to see who has reviewed an article, as well as their comments on the published work in line with the HRB principles of transparency, fairness and accountability. Once a sufficient level of peer review has been reached the articles will be indexed in major bibliometric databases.
HRB Open research will be in good company as it joins Wellcome Open Research (launched November 2016) and Gates Open Research (launching autumn 2017). These are publication platforms with the same transparent peer review model operated on behalf of the two private funders of biomedical research, the UK-based charity Wellcome and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. All platforms are based on technology developed on F1000Research, which first launched in 2013.
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