By Thomas Ingraham, Publishing Editor at F1000Research 15 February 2017- 15:00 CET --The webinar was held as part of ASIRA (Access to Scientific Information Resources in Agriculture) Online Course for Low-Income Countries-- This webinar covers three emerging themes in life science publishing, which will begin to influence the way in which the agricultural researchers share and access knowledge: Faster dissemination: Publishing scientific articles is often a lengthy process, taking several months or even years from first submission. This prevents the research community and others from being able to act on new knowledge quickly, which is especially serious in emergency situations such as emerging infectious diseases. This webinar will cover two ways of tackling publication delays: preprint servers and post-publication peer review platforms. Increased access & transparency: Open Access has helped remove access barriers to a vast body of scientific knowledge. Other important research outputs that have historically been difficult to access are starting to be published more frequently such as replications, data, code and referee reports. Assessment of research: Researches are assessed by their publication record. Journal title and Impact Factor tend to be the default assessment criteria, though there is growing awareness of the disadvantages of these approaches, and alternative measures of quality and impact are gaining ground. About Thomas Ingraham: Tom is the Publishing Editor at F1000Research and has been involved with the publisher’s open science and editorial development since its inception in 2012. He manages several channels published on F1000Research, including those focussing on agriculture, and is the lead on several of the publisher’s open data-orientated projects.

1. Thomas Ingraham
Publishing Editor, F1000Research
thomas.ingraham@f1000.com
Emerging themes in
Agricultural Research Publishing

2. OVERVIEW
• Increased openness
• Reduced delays
• Changes in research evaluation

3. STATUS QUO
Often can only get this (unless you pay $$$):

4. Presentations Articles Posters
Reviews
DataCode
INCREASING OPENNESS

5. OPEN ACCESS
• Budapest OA initiative (2001)
• 232,400 OA (2011): 17%*
• Funder pressure: Gates
• Benefits
• Much greater reach
• Citation advantage
• Green OA: free / embargoes
• Gold:Article Processing Charges
• Research4life: HINARI/AGORA
• TheWinnower
* Laakso & Bjork. BMC Medicine. 10.1186/1741-7015-10-124
McKiernan et al. elife. doi.org/10.7554/eLife.16800

6. • Status quo: no or unusable data
• Benefits
• Citation advantage
• Reanalysis
• Reuse
• Journal policies: SHERPA/ROMEO
• Funder mandates: Gates, CGIAR, DfID, NERC,
Wellcome Trust
• Data papers: method + data only
• Storing and finding data: repositories and
indexers
OPEN DATA
+ 9-30%
Piowar & Vision. PeerJ.
10.7717/peerj.175

7. OPEN PEER REVIEW
• Status quo: Single blind review
• Double blind: Journal of Agricultural Science
• Open decision letters: elife
• Signed: Frontiers
• Open reports: Copernicus
• Both: F1000Research
• Why OPR?
• Context, strengths & limitations
• Constructive (social pressure)
• Proof of peer review (quality)
• Recognition for peer review

8. MORE INFORMATION NOW AVAILABLE
+ 9-30%
• Status quo: minimal information & focus on novelty -> irreproducibility &
publication bias
• USDA SAC recommendations on reproducibility:
• Positive results over-represented -> publish negative
• Data dredging -> open data, code and better stats
• Under-specified details in methods
• Open code: Github/Zenodo
• Open projects with Open Science Framework
• Grey literature: posters and presentations

9. PUBLISHING LAG TIMES: STATUS QUO
Journal 1 80 28
Rejection
Published
Journal 2
DecisionSubmitted
Editor / peer review
Editor / peer review
Rejection
Decision
Submitted
Journal 3
Submitted
• Often decision based on novelty or perceived impact
• Article remains inaccessible (and so useless) for a long time
• Takes longer to solve urgent global issues

10. PREPRINTS
• Benefits
• Free!
• Very quick: respond to emergencies
• Limitations
• Not reviewed
• Not edited
• Not indexed
• So doesn’t ‘count’ with evaluators
• Combined with journal
• Overlay journals: Discrete analysis
• Free, peer reviewed but no indexing
• Funder encouragement
• Wellcome Trust, ERC, NIH, MRC, Dep.
Biotech Gov India
Source: Open Wheat Blast

11. PUBLICATION BEFORE PEER REVIEW
Approved
Reservations
Not approved
• F1000Research, Atmospheric Chemistry & Physics,The
Winnower
• Quick responses to global issues: Ebola/Zika
• See article history

12. REDUCING PUBLISHING TIMES
80 28
7 66
+ 101 days of being visible, shareable & citable
+ 35 days of knowing quality of research
Rejection
1 1
1 1
Days inaccessible
Days accessible
Journal 1
Published
Published 2 reviews
Journal 2
Final
Decision
Key
Plant Biology, Ecology &
Environmental Science

13. RESEARCH EVALUATION: THE STATUS QUO
How do you know if an article is good?
‘‘…what matters absolutely is the scientific content of a paper
and…nothing will substitute for either knowing it or reading it’’ -
Sydney Brenner
• Journal level metrics:
• Journal Impact Factor: meant to be for librarians
• CiteScore
JIF year 3 = # citations year 1 + # citations year 2
# publications year1 + # publications year 2
• Issues:
• Can’t infer article quality
• Matthew effect
• Overestimates impact of a given article Lariviere et al. biorxiv.
doi.org/10.1101/062109

14. ARTICLE LEVEL METRICS
• Quantitative
• Measures of reach
• Views/downloads
• Altmetric
• Impactstory
• Qualitative
• Open peer review
• F1000 Recommendations
• Biosketch

15. INSTITUTIONS PROMOTING OPEN SCIENCE
• Recognize Open Science in
tenure/promotion/hiring
• OA archive for promotion
• Funder OS publishing platforms
• Work like F1000Research
• More to come!

16. http://f1000research.com/channels/okad http://f1000research.com/subjects/399
OPEN AGRICULTURAL SCIENCE ON F1000RESEARCH