We are pleased to announce the agreement between F1000 and the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL), whereby MPDL will cover the cost for Max Planck Society-affiliated authors to publish on F1000Research, making it free for the authors. 

The F1000Research publishing model has been designed to remove unnecessary barriers and delays that researchers often face when sharing their research findings. It operates a post-publication, open peer review publishing model which combines the benefits of pre-printing (immediate publication) with expert peer review (quality assurance).

Importantly, F1000Research also provides a cost-effective route to achieving immediate (‘gold’) open access (OA); all content is licenced by the authors under Creative Commons licenses (CC-BY for articles or CC0 for research data) and available without charge for others to view, access and use. F1000Research is fully compliant with research funder and institution OA requirements – particularly important given the recent announcement led by Science Europe of ‘Plan S’^[1]. 

Agreements between publishers and organisations like the MPDL help to support the transition to a full open access world, by removing the burden of article payment and management from publishing authors, their research institutions and libraries, as well as by removing subscription costs from the whole system.

Rebecca Lawrence, Managing Director at F1000 said: “We are excited to be working alongside the MPDL in its aim to drive OA uptake among Max Planck researchers and to make research as discoverable, accessible and useable as possible.” 

Kai Geschun, Open Access and License Manager at MPDL said: “F1000Research excellently demonstrates how open access innovates scholarly publishing in terms of transparency, swiftness, inclusiveness, and costs. We are happy to include this pioneering journal in our offer of centrally funded open access publishing venues.” 

Since its introduction, F1000Research has seen increasing adoption among researchers and F1000 is now working with a number of high-profile funding agencies, research institutions and organisations across the world, including the Wellcome Trust^[2], Gates Foundation^[3] and African Academy of Sciences^[4], to provide open research and data publishing services.

Authors at Max Planck Institutes also have access to the related services F1000Prime and F1000Workspace. F1000Prime is a literature recommendation service helping researchers to quickly discover the articles of greatest relevance to their work, while F1000Workspace is a suite of tools to help researchers to work collaboratively to discover, organise and discuss the literature and use this to support them in writing their manuscripts.  

For more information contact:

Alanna Orpen
Communications Officer, F1000
alanna.orpen@f1000.com
lic.contact@mpdl.mpg.de

Notes for Editors

About F1000:

F1000 provides a suite of services to support researchers in discovering literature, and then writing and communicating their own work. F1000Prime helps with literature discovery; F1000Workspace makes it easier to write and share articles; F1000Research provides an author-driven approach to the publication of research results in an immediate and transparent way. F1000 also works with funders and research institutions to ensure their grantees can publish the outputs of their funding in more rapid and open ways. https://f1000.com

About the Max Planck Digital Library:

The Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) in Munich is a central unit of the Max Planck Society and supports the scientists of all Max Planck Institutes with a broad portfolio of services relating to information provision, publication support and research data management. The MPDL and its predecessors have featured as one of Europe's largest purchasers of scientific information for more than 10 years. As coordinating body of the international initiative “Open Access 2020”, MPDL strongly supports the transition of the current subscription model to open access. www.mpdl.mpg.de