Open Publishing Fest

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microPublication will participate in the Open Publishing Fest organized by  the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation. We will host four events or ‘tents’ which will focus on different aspects of microPublication and its role in scholarly communication. Mark your calendar for the following events and keep an eye on the  festival website for conference channels details!

Tent 1: microPublication: A Welcome Alternative in Scholarly Communication – May 20th, 10am Pacific

Join us for an hour packed of fun to learn how microPublication is shaping the future of scholarly communication! microPublication is a deliberately brief, peer-reviewed and indexed publication. We publish brief, novel findings, negative and/or reproduced results, and results which may lack a broader scientific narrative. We will hear from Editor in Chief Paul Sternberg, Editorial board members, Authors, and Reviewers  to learn how microPublication  is changing how they think about publishing.    

Tent 2: Knowledgebases, Repositories, Archives: Curation, Curation, Curation – May 26th, 10am Pacific

Where should your data go? What are the roles of Repositories, Knowledgebases, and Library Archives in Scholarly Communication? How are published data preserved for long term access and how are they made available to the scientific community? We will highlight similarities and differences in a panel discussion with representatives from Dryad, University Libraries, and Knowledgebase curators. 

Tent 3: The microPublication Open Access platform – May 27th, 10am Pacific

microPublication.org offered new software development and workflow challenges in  the publishing landscape. Join us to learn how our submission platform was designed and to savor the final product!  Developers Yannis Barlas from Coko and Nick Stiffler from microPublication will guide you through the submission portal and will be there to answer all your questions.

Tent 4: microPublication Inspires New Communities and Promotes Undergraduate Research – May  27th, 12pm Pacific

Started by serving the C. elegans research community, microPublication Biology has expanded to many model organism communities and beyond. Besides being beneficial to researchers at all career levels, microPublication has proven to be a wonderful tool to showcase undergraduate research and foster education. We will hear from different groups that have been inspired by microPublication and learn how they are using it to make a difference.

Coming orthology data changes in WormBase WS276

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Many of you have written to us in the past and pointed out some spurious human orthology calls for elegans genes, most of these have been noticed in the gene descriptions that appear in the Overview widget on the gene page. WormBase now uses the DIOPT orthology data from the Alliance of Genome Resources and has increased stringency by displaying only those human orthologs that have been determined by three or more methods. This should significantly improve the orthology data in WormBase which is reflected in the gene descriptions. Note that this change will go live in the WS276 version of WormBase coming soon (late April, 2020).

Under stay at home? Consider submitting a microPublication.

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Lab or university closed? Under at stay at home directive, doing your part to help slow the rate and spread of Covid-19? Need a diversion and a break from the news? Consider drafting and submitting a microPublication.

microPublications are brief, single experiment peer-reviewed publications. You can also sign up to become a microPublication reviewer.

Call to authors: provide complete information about genetic entities and reagents

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WormBase requests that authors provide complete information about genetic entities such as strains, alleles, transgenes, etc., in published papers. Providing a clear list of the experimental genetic entities used, in the paper, along with complete information about them would make curating your paper easier and quicker, saving time and effort that curators spend in searching for such information and/or writing to authors. For example, if you use strains, please provide the complete list of strain names and their genotypes, including transgenes, markers and any additional components. Papers with incomplete information about genetic entities and reagents can only be partially curated or not curated at all, making valuable data about worm models of biology and disease unavailable to both the worm and biomedical research communities.