We have a new paper out! You can read it here. I thought I would write a post on how this paper came to be and also about our first proper experience with preprinting. Title of the paper: Non-specificity of Pitstop 2 in clathrin-mediated endocytosis. In a nutshell: we show that Pitstop 2, a supposedly selective clathrin inhibitor acts in a non-specific way to inhibit endocytosis.

Today we have a guest posting from F1000’s Iain Hrynaszkiewicz covering the topic of medical data sharing One of the world’s most influential medical journals recently highlighted data sharing as an important issue to be addressed if we are to improve the quality of reporting of biomedical research.

A recent opinion piece published in eLife bemoaned the way that citations are used to judge academics because we are not even certain of the veracity of this information. The main complaint was that Google Scholar – a service that aggregates citations to articles using a computer program – may be less-than-reliable. There are three main sources of citation statistics: Scopus, Web of Knowledge/Science and Google Scholar;

Thinking more generally about the “Recursive Fury” debacle, something struck me as somewhat of an eye opener: the lack of support for the authors by Frontiers and the demonstrative support by their institution, UWA (posting the retracted article). Even though this might be the first time a scholarly journal caved in to legal pressure from anti-science groups, it should perhaps come as no surprise.

How long does it take to publish a paper? The answer is – in our experience, at least – about 9 months. That’s right, it takes about the same amount of time to have a baby as it does to publish a scientific paper. Discussing how we can make the publication process quicker is for another day. Right now, let’s get into the numbers. The graphic shows the time taken from submission-to-publication for papers on which I am an author.

Books about the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology are plentiful. If you haven’t read any, the best place to start are the books written by some of the Nobelists themselves: “I Wish I’d Made You Angry Earlier” by Perutz, “My Life in Science” by Brenner.

#paperoftheday #potd A common complaint from other PIs is that they “don’t read enough any more”. I feel like this too and a solution was proposed by a friend of a friend*: try to read one paper per day. This seemed like a good idea and I started to do this in 2013. The rules, obviously, can be set by you. Here’s my version: Read one paper each working day.

How long does it take to publish a paper? I posted the picture below on Twitter to show how long it takes for us to publish a paper. The answer is 235 days. This is the median time from submission at the first journal to publication online or in print. The data are from our last ten papers. The infographic proved popular with 40 retweets and 22 favourites. It was pointed out to me that the a few things would improve this visualisation: 1.

tl;dr: So far, I can’t see any principal difference between our three kinds of intellectual output: software, data and texts.   I admit I’m somewhat surprised that there appears to be a need to write this post in 2014. After all, this is not really the dawn of the digital age any more.

Endorsing Data Citation Nicely timed for the Data Citation Principles workshop at the IDCC meeting in San Francisco yesterday, the finalized Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles has just been posted on the Force11 website.