The Israel Science Foundation (ISF) big step towards Open Science

 The ISF gateway in F1000Research is open for submissions from ISF grantees.

The Israel Science Foundation, the largest funder in Israel, has made a concrete step in the direction of open access and in support of the principles of open research. It takes the form of a new and alternative publishing venue called the ISF gateway, which is hosted within the F1000Research platform. This follows the example of several high-profile funding agencies such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, among many others.

Prof Geiger Chair of the Academic Board of ISF says: "The ISF is committed to the promotion and support of excellence in all fields of academic research, including the exact sciences, life sciences and medicine, social sciences and the humanities. We firmly believe that open publication and data sharing with the research community and the broad public plays a key role in increasing the impact of scientific research. We sincerely expect that the peer-reviewed contents published in the ISF gateway will provide excellent exposure for ISF-funded science to wide audiences, world-wide."

The ISF gateway combines the ability to publish rapidly with functionality to ensure transparency, robustness and reproducibility of research. While traditional pre-publication review slows down the progress of research, publishing in the gateway is promised to be fast, with papers entering the peer-review phase immediately after publication. The goal is to move away from the culture of the journal impact factor, remove unnecessary bias and barriers in publishing, minimize delays and research waste, foster reproducibility and ethical practises and accelerate the dissemination and potential impact of research. This approach is designed to support a more collaborative and 'open science' future, providing full and FAIR access to any data and resources underpinning research.

The ISF gateway operates a post-publication, invited peer review model of publishing. Peer review should be a service to authors and readers and, in this approach, its objective is (i) to help authors improve the quality and presentation of their work, and (ii) to help readers understand the context of research and its potential qualitative impact; essential to this is transparency and openness.

The platform is for authors from all disciplines and will publish findings from ISF grants awarded in the past ten years. ISF offers to cover the publishing fees for the first thirty papers published in the first year.

You can read all about the ISF rationale for this initiative here.