Faculty of 1000: Efficient Online Research Service

1. Marie Martens BioMed Central Ltd

2. What is Faculty of 1000? A new online research service that systematically highlights and reviews the most interesting papers published in the biological sciences based on the recommendations of a faculty of well over 1400 selected leading international scientists. www.facultyof1000.com

4. Information overload There’s a lot of research out there…

5. How do scientists cope currently? • Scan table-of-contents of top journals • Read review articles • Search databases • Talk to colleagues (at work or at conferences) Faculty of 1000 combines and optimises these methods to identify important articles easily and quickly.

6. How F1000 is organized • All of biology is divided into16 Faculties (subjects), each run by 2-4 Heads of Faculty • Each Faculty issubdivided into 3-12 Sections, each run by 2-3 Heads of Section • Each Section comprises between 10 and 50 Faculty Members • Each Faculty has representation proportional to the number of papers published in that discipline

7. What Faculty members do Faculty members evaluate ~1-2 papers/month, which they: • Comment on: 2-3 sentences • Rate: Recommended / Must Read / Exceptional • Classify: “Interesting hypotheses”, “New finding”, “Important confirmation”, “Technical advance”, “Controversial finding” • Categorize: assign all most relevant Sections

8. Sample list of Sections within a Faculty

9. Sample list of Faculty members within a Section

10. Front page

11. Key features of the site • Advanced Searches — Pinpoints precisely the articles you are interested in • Tailored MyF1000 email alerts—Regularly updates you on recent papers of note, based on your sections of interest and your stored searches • Hidden Jewels — Papers from less widely read journals, which you may have missed but which rate highly on Faculty of 1000 • Top 10s — The most highly rated and most viewed papers across All biology or by Faculty

12. Facts and figures • Top papers selected by Faculty come from over400 different journals --- currently, only ~15% are from Nature/Science/Cell • Updated dailywith new entries • Direct link to PubMed abstract (if available) • As of April 2003, over 12,000 evaluations on the site

13. Future developments • New Faculties for 2003: • Physiology • Pharmacology • Ecology • Biological Physics/Mathematics • expand Evolutionary biology • Faculty of 1000 Medicine

15. Faculty of 1000 is keen to make itself available to scientists in all countries, so offer free institutional subscriptions to the poorest countries, in line with HINARI. In addition, contributing Faculty Members can nominate an institute of their choice in other developing countries for free access to F1000. • The following institutes have been sponsored for free access to F1000 by Faculty Members • University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Iasi, Iasi, Romania (Antony Carr) • Peking University, Peking, China (Xing Wang Deng) • Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Annette Dolphin) • International Centre for Genetic Engineering, New Delhi, India (Kristina Downing) • University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina (Martin Giurfa) • Centro de Investigación sobre Fijación de Nitrógeno - Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (CIFN-UNAM), Morelos, Mexico (Richard Gourse) • Instituto de Botanica Darwinion, San Isidro, Argentina (Elizabeth Kellogg) • University of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia (Vance Lemmon) • Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India (Andrew Lumsden) • Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil (Sue Malcolm) • Advanced Biotechnology and Breeding Centre of the Malaysian Palm Oil Board, Selangor, Malaysia (Marjori Matzke) • University of Buenos Aires (INGEBI), Buenos Aires, Argentina (Sheila McCormick) • National Center for Health and Education Training (NCHET), East Timor (L. Alison McInnes) • Centro de Estudios Cientificos, Valdivia, Chile (Christopher Miller) • University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa (John Moore) • Charles University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic (Robert Palmer) • Institute of Protein Research, Russian Academy of Sciences, Pushchino, Moscow Region, Russian Federation (Kevin Plaxco) • University of Rio Cuarto, Rio Cuarto, Argentina (Juan Luis Ramos Martin) • National Institute of Public Health, Cuernavaca, Mexico (Marilyn Roberts) • University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (Karin Romisch) • Tsinghua University (Yigong Shi) • The American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon (Charles Streuli) • Center of Molecular Immunology, Havana, Cuba (Matthias von Herrath) • Institute of Research in Physical Chemistry of Cordoba, National University of Córdoba, Argentina (Patricia C Weber)

16. In summary, two main objectives of Faculty of 1000 are: • Highlight important papersin an efficient and time-saving way, organized and run by scientists for scientists • Redirect the attention to the scientific merits of the paperrather than the journal in which it appears “This is really going to help busy scientistsfind the gems in amongst the mounds of rubble!” Keith Roberts, John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK

17. Some of the larger and more prestigious subscribers USA Harvard TIGR CalTech Whitehead Institute Scripps Salk Institute Rockefeller University Columbia University University of Wisconsin – Madison Yale Washington Univ Med School St. Louis Northwestern (Illinois) Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories Princeton University Johns Hopkins Univ School of Medicine NCI-Frederick nonUSA McGill University Canada Weizmann Institute Israel Max Planck Institutes (all) Germany Oxford UniversityUK CNRS (all) France INSERM (all) France Institut Pasteur France Lund University University of Zurich University of Lausanne ETH Zurich Hutchison/MRC Research Centre Wellcome Sanger Institute King’s College London IMP Austria University of Helsinki Finland