We are delighted to announce the launch of the new Europe PMC Plus – the manuscript submission system for authors supported by Europe PMC funders. Europe PMC is the repository of choice for 29 international life sciences funders, who recommend or require that publications arising from the research they fund, are made openly available via Europe PMC.
Since the rather surprising apppointment of Mike Eisen as the new Editor-in-Chief of eLife , I’ve found myself thinking about this journal again.
Europe PMC is getting ready to release an upgraded version of Europe PMC plus, a system for PIs supported by Europe PMC funders to submit accepted manuscripts for inclusion in Europe PMC and PMC. The new version of Europe PMC plus has an improved design, and new features for creating and reviewing manuscript submissions. The new Europe PMC plus will be released on 1 May 2019.
The Collaborative Knowledge Foundation (CoKo) and Europe PMC are excited to announce a new partnership to develop web-based, open source content and workflow management components that will enable ingest and processing of manuscripts. The system will be built on Coko’s PubSweet technology framework and will contribute to the vision of creating modern, digital-first technologies that improve the speed of research.
Jo McEntyre, EMBL-EBI; Thomas Lemberger, EMBO; Mark Patterson, eLife; Kristen Rattan, Collaborative Knowledge Foundation; Alfonso Valencia, Barcelona Supercomputer Centre. The use of preprints in the life sciences offers tantalising opportunities to change the way research results are communicated and reused, and the work of ASAPbio has been key in engaging the scientific community to promote their uptake.
Our recent paper on “the mesh” in kinetochore fibres (K-fibres) of the mitotic spindle was our first adventure in 3D electron microscopy. This post is about some of the new data analysis challenges that were thrown up by this study. I promised a more technical post about this paper and here it is, better late than never.
We have a new paper out! You can access it here. Title of the paper: The mesh is a network of microtubule connectors that stabilizes individual kinetochore fibers of the mitotic spindle What’s it about? When a cell divides, the two new cells need to get the right number of chromosomes. If this process goes wrong, it is a disaster which may lead to disease e.g. cancer.
My post on the strange data underlying the new impact factor for eLife was read by many people. Thanks for the interest and for the comments and discussion that followed. I thought I should follow up on some of the issues raised in the post. To recap: eLife received a 2013 Impact Factor despite only publishing 27 papers in the last three months of the census window. Other journals, such as Biology Open did not.
I noticed something strange about the 2013 Impact Factor data for eLife . Before I get onto the problem. I feel I need to point out that I dislike Impact Factors and think that their influence on science is corrosive. I am a DORA signatory and I try to uphold those principles. I admit that, in the past, I used to check the new Impact Factors when they were released, but no longer.
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of posts from rOpenSci’s recent hackathon. I recently had the pleasure of participating in rOpenSci’s hackathon. To be honest, I was quite nervous to work among such notables, but I immediately felt welcome thanks to a warm and personable group. Alyssa Frazee has a great post summarizing the event, so check that out if you haven’t already.