The Faculty of 1000 has a special relationship with some Biomedical conferences, inviting authors to upload their posters to the open access F1000 site. Perhaps this is an effective new way of gaining open access to specific kinds of early-report research material?
The F1000 posters site contains 909 posters. 649 of those are derived from 28 invited conferences (an admirable average of 23 posters per conference), and the remaining 260 posters are uploaded on an ad hoc basis from authors attending 148 other conferences (an average of 1.7 posters per conference).
While it is clear that the invitation approach is much more effective than the laissez faire approach, the huge size of biomedical conferences (often displaying several thousand posters over the course of four days) means that the overall success rate of this OA strategy is only 4.2% (a figure I reached by counting the total number of posters at a sample of 7 of the 28 invited conferences).
So, still no silver OA bullet!
Thank you for the post. F1000 Posters has only been going for about 9 months so it is going to take some time for people to become familiar with us. As with all new such products, many wait to see their colleagues depositing before depositing themselves.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, in the short timeframe we have been in existence, we are already seeing very significant increases in the deposit rate from an initial 10% for invited conferences, up to 20-25% currently and I am sure it will continue to grow. We now in fact have over 1000 posters.
So, give us time, we may yet become that silver OA bullet!
Rebecca Lawrence
Director, New Product Development, Faculty of 1000 (F1000)