I’m a big fan of preprints, the posting of papers in public archives prior to peer review. Preprints speed up the scientific dialogue by letting everyone see research as it happens, not 6 months to 2 years later following the sometimes extensive peer review process. They also allow more extensive pre-publication peer review because input can be solicited from the entire community of scientists, not just two or three individuals.
The 2013 Galaxy Community Conference (GCC2013) and GigaScience are today announcing a call for papers for a special thematic focused series on studies utilizing large-scale datasets and workflows. Galaxy is an open, web-based platform for data intensive biomedical research allowing their growing community of users to reproduce and share analyses.
Following from our previous blog posting, here we profile and interview Dr Xin Zhou, lead author of our recent “squishome” insect goo metabarcoding paper.
Insect goo aids biodiversity research Apologies to Jonathan Eisen (see Badomics in the journal), but today in GigaScience we publish a new “squishomics” approach for assessing and understanding biodiversity, using the slightly wacky sounding method of combining DNA-soup made from crushed-up insects and the latest sequencing technology.
The BBSRC has just released an excellent video and article on crowdsourcing killer disease outbreaks very relevant to our recent commentary and blog postings on the OpenAshDB (the Ash Dieback disease crowdsourcing) project.
Bye Bye Bluebells Bluebell woods, the dense carpets of violet–blue flowers found in ancient woodland are a spectacular and famous springtime sight in Britain, but this picture postcard scene is threatened as never before.
Over at Dynamic Ecology this morning Jeremy Fox has a post giving advice on how to decide where to submit a paper. It’s the same basic advice that I received when I started grad school almost 15 years ago and as a result I don’t think it considers some rather significant changes that have happened in academic publishing over the last decade and a half. So, I thought it would be constructive for folks to see an alternative viewpoint.
Communicating research more broadly is not only important for outreach to the public, but with the rapidly expanding literature, we think it’ll also be important for communicating to other scientists.
UPDATE: If you’re looking for the information for 2014, checkout the DEBrief post for links. It’s that time of year again when we’re all busy working on preproposals for the National Science Foundation, and just like last year it’s more difficult than you would think to track down the official guidelines using Google.
Over the past year, you can’t get two scientists together who submit to the BIO Directorate at NSF without the conversation drifting to the radical changes in the proposal process. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’ve added some links at the bottom of the post for you to check out.