Since Richard Taylor launched one of the first scientific journals in 1798, Taylor & Francis has consistently evolved to meet the changing needs of researchers, delivering a range of services characterized by quality, trust, and impact. 200 years later, as academic publishing moved to digital, we were amongst the first publishers to offer guidance to authors on Green OA and to introduce a gold open access option into our journal portfolio. We now publish a rapidly expanding portfolio of nearly 300 fully open journals.
On the Open Research side of things, in the last couple of years alone, amongst other things, we’ve been a founder member of I4OC, we have launched a suite of data-sharing policies, signed the TOP guidelines, expanded our preprints guidance, introduced a simple way for our authors to submit to BioArxiv and signed several transformative agreements with consortia around the world. Taylor & Francis colleagues are deeply involved in the changes in scholarly communications, including membership of the Boards and Working Groups of OASPA, Dryad, Metadata 2020, Research Data Alliance, Center for Open Science, as well as STM Committees on Research Data and Open Peer Review, amongst many others.
So, at the beginning of this new decade, I am extremely excited to be able to tell you about the addition of F1000 Research to the Taylor & Francis Group. F1000 Research is a trail-blazer in the evolution of research communication. In 2013, it launched the world’s first open research publishing platform, combining the opportunities offered by technology with a passion for identifying new ways to validate and share research. You can read more about their history and passion, and about why they have chosen to join the Taylor & Francis family in Rebecca Lawrence’s (their Managing Director’s) blog.
Building upon the growth and success of its core platform, F1000 Research also provides fully managed, open research publishing services directly to research funders and institutions, including Wellcome, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Health Research Board Ireland, as well as to other scholarly publishers such as Emerald Publishing. F1000 Research combines opportunities offered by technology with a passion for identifying new ways to validate and share research.
The philosophy, culture, and customer-focused approach which have made F1000 Research so successful are the reasons we’re so excited to be working with them, and these will not change. In fact, our aim is to “super-charge” F1000 Research, giving them the resources they need to grow, flourish, and continue to innovate in pursuit of their vision: to change and transform the scholarly publications system and to create a research system that maximises reach, utility and ultimately impact of new discoveries for all.
For us at Taylor & Francis, working with F1000 Research gives us a brilliant opportunity to learn from F1000 Research’s experience and culture of challenging the status quo, as well as additional publishing choices for researchers and new possibilities for our partners.
Our partnership will also create opportunities for F1000 Research to bring together their innovative workflow with the depth and breadth of the communities that Taylor & Francis and Routledge work with across the humanities and sciences. The added investment and support from Taylor & Francis will ensure F1000 Research’s growth is sustainable and supported for the long term, enabling both Taylor & Francis and F1000 Research to transform scholarly communication and accelerate research impact across the whole scholarly ecosystem.
The researchers we work with, across all geographies and research fields increasingly require a diverse range of options to make the outputs of their research available to those who need it. The F1000Research platform offers additional choice for Taylor & Francis authors to complement the wide variety of existing publication venues, services and business models. We remain totally committed to ensuring the continued success and sustainability of all the journals we publish. The expert support we give to Taylor & Francis editors and the range of services we provide our partner societies will be enhanced by this combination, and in partnership with F1000 Research, we expect to be able to add to the services we offer to our publishing partners, who are looking to extend their capabilities.
For those of you who haven’t had the benefit of seeing the F1000Research platform in action before, here’s a quick overview of how it works. Do also check out the site at: f1000research.com
