UCL Child Health Open Research FAQs

What are the advantages of publishing in UCL Child Health Open Research?

UCL Child Health Open Research offers researchers at UCL a new option for publishing child health-related research. There are several benefits to researchers who choose to publish on this new platform:

• Authors, not editors, choose what they wish to publish.
• Immediate publication allows the sharing of new findings without any delay.
• Supports publication of a wide range of outputs – from standard research articles to data sets, from new insights to confirmatory or negative results.
• Authors can choose referees most appropriate to their subject and whose opinions they value, and can cite the open referee comments that vouch for the quality of their work.
• The inclusion of supporting data facilitates reanalysis, replication and reuse and thus improves reproducibility.

Who owns UCL Child Health Open Research?

The platform is owned and controlled by the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and will use technology provided by F1000.

Who is eligible to publish on this platform?

Anyone who is affiliated with UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health or is based at another UCL institution and works in the field of child health, is eligible to publish on UCL Child Health Open Research.

What research will this platform publish?

UCL Child Health Open Research will publish any research in the field of child health with at least one contributing author who is affiliated with UCL. The platform will consider any type of research output, including traditional research articles, clinical trials, systematic reviews, study protocols, data sets, negative/null results, case reports and many others.

What will it cost to publish on this platform?

There will be no charge for authors. All publishing costs will be covered directly by UCL, which will pay the service provider, F1000, a fixed charge (between $150 and $1000, depending on the article length) per published article. F1000 will provide editorial, production and administrative support to authors throughout the publication and post-publication peer review process.

Are ICH staff members required to publish their research outputs on UCL Child Health Open Research?

No, all researchers can continue to choose where they wish to publish their research as long as it meets UCL’s Open Access Policy requirements. However, we hope that the benefits of publishing on UCL Child Health Open Research, in particular the speed and ease of publication without hurdles, the transparency of the peer-review process, and the flexibility to publish a wide variety of research outputs, will persuade many researchers to consider this platform for their articles.

How will funders and research institutions evaluate outputs published on UCL Child Health Open Research?

Many institutions and funders now strongly support initiatives aimed towards direct evaluation of research and judging all outputs on their own merit regardless of the venue of publication. UCL Child Health Open Research is fully embedded in the established scholarly publication framework, ensuring all publishing standards are adhered to. Article-level metrics (e.g. citations, views, downloads, altmetrics) will enable direct evaluation of the research output itself, and are in line with initiatives that aim to improve the evidence base on which researchers are evaluated.

How will the publishing model work?

UCL Child Health Open Research enables authors to control the publication process themselves: submitted articles and their accompanying source data are published after a rapid set of objective checks, ensuring that basic scholarly publication policies and standards are adhered to. The published articles then undergo invited and transparent peer review (referee names and the referee report are published alongside the article). Authors can then revise and update their articles when and how they wish. Once the platform has been formally approved by bibliographic databases, articles that reach an adequate level of positive formal peer review will be indexed there. UCL Child Health Open Research will use the F1000Research model, which is also used by Wellcome Open Research.

Is UCL Child Health Open Research a preprint server like bioRxiv?

No, UCL Child Health Open Research is similar to a preprint server in that authors can publish immediately anything they wish to share. A crucial difference from preprints is that all articles on UCL Child Health Open Research undergo formal, invited peer review, and those articles that pass peer review are eventually indexed in major bibliographic databases and are hence part of the