Wellcome Open Research: a summary of year 3

Year 3 in numbers – Robert Kiley, Head of Open Research, Wellcome, and Michael Markie, Publishing Director, F1000, provide an analysis of the activity after three years of the Wellcome Open Research publishing platform being fully operational.

The Wellcome Open Research (WOR) publishing platform has been fully operational for three years and in this time has grown to become the third most used venue for Wellcome-funded researchers to share their research findings. In this blog post, we provide an analysis of publishing activity on the WOR platform and preview some of the activities we have planned for 2020.

Year 3 in numbers

2019 witnessed another good year of growth in the total number of articles of published on this platform, with a 25% increase in the number of articles published, compared with 2018. 

* (Note: articles were accepted from June 2016; site went live 14^th November 2016)

As a consequence of this growth, WOR is the third most used publishing venue for Wellcome-funded researchers in 2019 (Table 2). 

#	Journal	Number of Wellcome attributed papers published in 2019 (by journal)
1	Nature Communications	254
2	Scientific Reports	243
3	Wellcome Open Research	208
4	Plos One	162
5	BMJ Open	119
6	eLife	116
7	PNAS	97
8	Frontiers in Immunology	65
9	Nucleic Acids Research	64
10.	Cell Reports	50

Table 2: Top 10 journals (by volume) used by Wellcome-funded researchers

As WOR uses a post publication peer review model, almost half (47%, 97 articles) of the 2019 submissions have not yet passed peer review and been indexed in PubMed. However, analysis of the 2018 submissions suggest that over the next few months, the overwhelming majority of these will pass peer review and be indexed. In 2018, of the 166 articles we published, 148 of these (89%) have now passed peer review. 

Looking across the entire dataset, we have published articles from over 3400 unique authors (16% authors have published more than once), based in 1130 institutions, from 85 different countries.

In addition to publishing research articles, the platform also enables researchers to share other findings – such as data notes, study protocols and null or negative findings. Of the 208 articles published in 2019, some 100 (48%) were non-traditional research articles, which researchers may have had difficulties in getting published elsewhere.

Speed of publication remains one of the platform’s unique selling points. Table 3, below, shows that most articles are published within 23 days of being submitted and receive the first peer review report some 19 days later. Once an article has received two “approved” statuses from reviewers (or one “approved” and two “approved with reservation” statuses) articles are submitted for indexing in PubMed and other bibliographic databases. The median, end-to-end elapsed time, from submission to when article has passed peer review, is 78 days; a slight increase on the median time we reported last year of 76 days.

Articles on the platform are also well read and cited. To date, some 43% of all articles have at least one citation, whilst the most cited article (a software tool article) has received 21 citations (according to Europe PMC) and 54 citations (according to Scopus).

In addition to publishing articles, we also publish every peer review report – and have over 1500 on the site – along with the name of the reviewer and their ORCID iD (when connected by the reviewer). 

As well as providing feedback to the researcher on how an article could be improved – remember, reviewers are not having to decide whether the article should be published; that has already happened – reviewers assign a status report to their review (see Table 4). In response to peer feedback, researchers can update their articles and publish a new version. It’s common to see reviewers suggest improvements and communicate directly with authors to advance the work that has been published.

Another major benefit of this model of publication is lower costs compared to other publishing venues. You can find more information on article processing charges on Wellcome Open Research here.

One of our big achievements of last year was launching our Early Career Researchers Advisory Board. We wanted to make sure the voices of the next generation are heard and help us catalyse reform in publishing research. We now have an energetic and creative group of researchers in place that we believe will help shape the future of WOR, and in turn the future of scholarly communications. They represent the many early career researchers that are supported by Wellcome, providing an active voice for researchers who are building their careers in academia.

In 2019 we completed a COPE audit to ensure that our own publication guidelines, best practices and workflows were compliant with the latest COPE guidance.

We have also continued to work closely with Wellcome funded institutes to create dedicated gateways to bring together all the articles published from the centres and provide them with the opportunity to build their own publishing area to showcase a range of different outputs from the centre. New gateways launched in 2019 include the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Parasitology and the Wellcome Centre for Infectious Diseases Research in Africa (CIDRI).

And finally, one of our authors, Rob Aldridge, was featured on the Channel 4 news to discuss his research that discovered that a third of all homeless deaths are due to preventable health conditions. You can read all about that research in this author-reviewer blog here.

The year ahead

2020 will be a time of change for F1000 Research – the company who manage the WOR platform – following the sale of the company to Taylor and Francis. However, we do not believe this will have any immediate impact on WOR, and indeed are seeing this acquisition as testament that the drive for open research publishing is gathering momentum. 

Working with the existing F1000 Research team we plan to work closely with all the Wellcome institutes, encouraging them to develop their own publication spaces (gateways). Not only will this allow these institutes to showcase their research but we also feel that this will complement our recently released draft guidance for Wellcome-funded organisations on how to implement the core principles of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA).

We will also continue to encourage other funders to think about developing their own publishing platforms and through the Learned Society Curation Awards – developed in partnership with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute – provide an opportunity for scholarly societies to explore the idea of developing a curation layer (known as an overlay journal) on top of content published on an open publishing platform like WOR, or Open Research Central.

Throughout 2020, we will continue to work with all our advisory groups and our wider research community to encourage our researchers to consider publishing their research outputs on the WOR platform where their research can be made available more quickly than the traditional publishing model, and in ways which support openness, transparency, inclusivity and cost effectiveness.