Israel Science Foundation

What is it?

The Israel Science Foundation (ISF) gateway on F1000Research gives all researchers funded by the Israel Science Foundation the opportunity to publish their scientific and scholarly work quickly and in a format supporting research integrity, reproducibility and transparency. Its open access model enables rapid publication followed by open, invited peer review, combined with an open data policy.

Why are we doing this?

The ISF gateway on F1000Research is a significant step towards implementing the ISF's open access policy, which is being established. The platform provides grantees with a publication option that ensures all outputs of research funded by the ISF can be made quickly and freely available without editorial barriers. The open access model allows everyone to access the results of ISF-funded research, encompassing the global interdisciplinary scientific community. The gateway supports reproducibility and reduces research waste and hence helps maximize the value, impact and reach of the foundation’s funding.

What is the scope of the ISF gateway?

All researchers funded by the Israel Science Foundation for the past ~10 years will be able to publish any research outputs and data they wish to share, in the four broad disciplines: exact sciences, life sciences and medicine, social sciences and humanities. The gateway welcomes positive, negative or null studies, replication studies and refutation studies equally. Early career researchers, who do not hold an ISF grant themselves, will be welcome to publish with the endorsement of an ISF grant holder.

How does the publishing model work?

The ISF gateway is hosted by F1000Reseach using its publishing model. It enables authors to guide the publication process themselves: submitted articles and references/links to their accompanying source data are published after a rapid set of objective checks, ensuring that basic scholarly publication policies and standards are adhered to. The published articles then undergo invited and transparent peer review: reviewer names and their peer review reports are published alongside the article. Authors can then revise or update their articles when and how they wish.

What are the advantages of publishing in the ISF gateway?

The ISF gateway on F1000Research is a new publishing option available for the foundation’s funded science. There are several benefits to researchers who choose to publish in this way:

• Authors, not editors, choose what they wish to publish.
• Rapid publication allows the sharing of new findings without any delay.
• Publication of a wide range of outputs is supported – from standard research articles to software tool articles, from new insights to confirmatory or negative results. For a detailed description of each article type, please see our article guidelines.
• Authors can suggest reviewers most appropriate to their subject and whose opinions they value, and they can cite the open peer review reports that vouch for the quality of their work.
• The inclusion of references/links to supporting data facilitates reanalysis, replication and reuse and thus improves reproducibility and increases impact.

Are grantees of the ISF required to publish their research outputs on the ISF gateway?

No, grantees are absolutely free to choose where they wish to publish their research. However, we hope that the benefits of publishing on the ISF gateway, in particular the speed and ease of publication without hurdles and the transparency of the peer review process, will be attractive to many grantees.

How will the ISF view articles published on the ISF gateway?

The ISF gateway on F1000Research offers an alternative approach to traditional journal publishing, but it is fully embedded in the established scholarly publication framework, ensuring all publishing standards are adhered to.

The foundation strongly supports the view that all outputs should be judged on their own merit regardless of the venue of publication.

What will it cost to publish on this gateway?

During the first year of the ISF gateway, the publication costs will be covered by ISF for the first 30 articles on the ISF gateway.

At a later stage, authors will be charged a fixed article processing charge (APC) of between US $150 and US $2000 per published article, depending on the article's length. The APC will cover the publishing costs incurred by the service provider, F1000, who will provide editorial, production and administrative support to authors throughout the publication and post-publication peer review process.

Are there space/word limits or restrictions on articles?

There are no word limits, or limits to the number of figures and tables that can be included. The costs for the first 30 articles published on the gateway in the first year will be covered directly by the ISF. Thereafter, the article processing charges will be based on word count.

Is the ISF gateway a preprint server like bioRxiv or arXiv?

No. A preprint server is a repository for pre-publication draft versions of full papers that are often subsequently submitted to journals for peer review and publication. All articles on the ISF gateway are permanently published (with a DOI) and undergo formal peer review after publication. Since peer review starts the moment they are published, they are not preprints and cannot be submitted to other journals, regardless of the peer review outcome. Those articles that pass peer review will be indexed in the major bibliographic databases and are hence part of the formal scholarly literature.

Why undertake post-publication open peer review?

There are many good reasons for being open about reviewer identities and comments.

First: We believe that secret or closed peer reviewing, where authors do not know who has reviewed their work and reviewers do not have to publicly stand by their comments, opens up the possibility of bias.

Second: Peer review reports can be interesting and informative and we believe that everyone should have a chance to see them. At their best, they offer an objective critique that adds real value to the article in question for authors and readers alike. It is also interesting to see the range of positive, negative and neutral reviews some papers receive, which often reflects the real breadth of expert opinion in controversial and cutting-edge areas of science.

Third: If peer review reports are kept secret, reviewers get no credit for their contributions. They devote an immense amount of time and effort to reviewing other scientists' work and advising them on how to improve it, and it is fair that this should be recognized and acknowledged.

Finally, publicly accessible, signed reports tend to be better written and more constructive than anonymous, behind-the-scenes reviews. This has also been shown in randomised controlled trials. So the act of publishing the reports actually improves the quality of advice the authors receive.

If you’ve been invited to review an article and would like more information on the model, please visit the F1000Research How it Works page.

Does the ISF gateway have an Impact Factor?

As part of F1000Research the ISF gateway does not have an Impact Factor. An increasing number of funders and institutions strongly support a move away from a focus on journal-based metrics. The ISF believes it is the intrinsic value of research that is important and not the venue of publication.