One million references have been loaded on to F1000Workspace - a research collaboration, reference management and authoring platform for scientists - since it was launched just six months ago.
F1000Workspace is a suite of tools designed to assist biomedical researchers when writing research articles and grant applications, collecting and managing references and collaborating with co-authors.
It is run by F1000 (Faculty of 1000), which is powered by a Faculty of over 11,000 leading experts in biology and medicine. This Faculty provides expert article recommendations as part of the sister service, F1000Prime, these recommendations are integrated into F1000Workspace through a powerful learning algorithm.
Adoption of the new service - one of the first to offer a fully cloud-based platform - has been strong with thousands of researchers already signed-up across top universities and research institutions.
Kevin Black, a professor at Washington University in St Louis (USA), who works on brain imaging research on movement disorders such as Tourette Syndrome and Parkinson's disease, said: "F1000Workspace makes it easy to save, mark up and upload PDFs of articles without leaving my web browser.
"It's also easy to find all of the above from anywhere in the world with internet access and to share collections of files, and comments and PDFs, with my colleagues."
Tamica Collins, a researcher at Columbia University, who is finishing a PhD thesis at Indiana University School of Medicine, said: "While writing my thesis, I have to search for multiple articles and it can be overwhelming. Using the F1000 browser extension helps with this because I can save references as I'm searching and add tags to let me know why I saved them.
"One of the best things about the Word plugin on F1000Workspace is that I can access my notes and references directly from Word. This helps with organisation while I'm writing my thesis. I also like the fact that I can access PubMed directly from Word."
Rebecca Lawrence, Managing Director, F1000, said: "Capturing relevant references, especially in a way that makes it quick and easy to identify the right ones when it comes to writing, can be challenging and time consuming. This problem is exacerbated when a number of scientists are co-authoring a paper and when references are drawn from a wide variety of sources.
"F1000Workspace aims to simplify the process by enabling scientists to discover key references based on tailored recommendations, save and annotate references while browsing, then easily cite these references while writing their research articles."
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For more information: Andrew Baud, Tala (on behalf of F1000), +44 (0) 20 3397 3383 or +44 (0) 7775 715775
Notes to editors
F1000 was founded by science publishing entrepreneur Vitek Tracz, a passionate advocate of open access publishing and open science. F1000 is a community of more than 11,000 biomedical experts who help scientists to discover, discuss and publish research. F1000 offers the following services:
F1000Workspace - a research collaboration, reference management and authoring platform for scientists.
F1000Prime - a service which identifies and recommends important articles in biology and medical research publications.
F1000Research - an open science publishing platform for life scientists that offers immediate publication and transparent peer review, avoiding editorial bias and ensuring the inclusion of all source data.
For more information go to http://f1000.com