BioSysBio

Discussion

After the short discussion, I have posted a plan for the open review. please let me know what you think. --Johncumbers 21:54, 15 July 2006 (EDT)

Open Review

Aim: We want to create an on-line community of scientists that aides collaboration and communication between different researchers. That come together at a conference to present and discuss science. The conference does not begin and end in January, it starts on-line before the conference and we hope it will continue there afterwards as well. www.openwetware.org is already a growing community of scientists and would be a good place to host this.

1. Open conference registration July 06 without payment. (tell people that registration does not mean they have been accepted yet) publicise and register delegates.
2. Ask for short abstracts < 300 words due in late September. (These are kept private on a password protected website)
3. Get session chairs to do a brief review on-line and reject any unsuitable. If we register more than we have capacity for then reject the lowest scoring abstracts to bring the number to venue capacity 160. Accept all others for posters and maybe for oral presentations. (to be decided after open review period)
4. Early October - Ask delegates whose abstracts were accepted to pay registration fee on-line.
5. Ask delegates to publish a longer abstract on the web, including results, pictures, tables and as much supplementary information as the delegate wants to add on other pages (using the wiki at www.openwetware.org) by end of October, they have 1 month to prepare images/ tables, get used to wiki.
6. November is the month of Open Review, where all other delegates are invited to post comments and questions on the web (longer abstracts invite more comments/questions). Open review closes at the end of November. The session chairs then review the long abstracts and make the decision about who will speak at the conference based on these (they should be higher quality due to the open review period). Speakers are notified December 11th (1 month before conference)
7. All posters published on-line two weeks before conference.
8. Publication deadline is 2 weeks after the speaker decisions have been made
9. Abstracts to be published are formatted and posted in journal format on-line. Long abstracts collated and sent to journal.
10. comments added to web after conference as well.

• The above plan addressesd the fact that people won't want their results public too far before the conference, because they are only made public at the end of October. 2 months before the conference. Is this still too far before?
• What if they want to change their original title/abstract after it has been accepted?

Open review on-line, a new model in publishing conference abstracts.

I wanted to start a discussion about whether OWW could be used for people to edit their abstracts that they submit to the conference BioSysBio & Young Bioinformaticians Forum that I'm involved with (Manchester 2007). I anticipate if it were used then about 150 accounts would need to be created and abstracts could be submitted under a namespace like BioSysBio. It could work like this, we have a submission deadline, then an open review session using the wiki to communicate with people about their abstracts, then we have a second submission where delegates submit their final version. (this would then go on to be published, or a selection of the total). I think it would be great for people to submit an abstract and then for it to go through open review on OWW. It would be a test of a new model in publishing. It would also allow people to link to extra material, perhaps unlimited extra material. Whilst only the front page would be published, on-line would be a whole bunch of background on the topic.

I think it would also be good exposure for OWW, as once people see how easy it is, they might move their lab page onto the site.

Please let me know what you think of the idea, --Johncumbers 01:34, 27 March 2006 (EST)

• Sri Kosuri 17:46, 28 March 2006 (EST): Are people going to be willing to put there abstracts in for public viewing so far ahead of the meeting? Also, what about those abstracts that are rejected, are their abstracts still up for viewing?

--Johncumbers 15:39, 3 April 2006 (EDT) yes, I was thinking about these issues too, the meeting is in Jan 07, the current date for abstract submission is Sep 06, but maybe with an open review period it could be closer to the date of the conference. A formal review would follow the open review period. All abstracts could be written individually e.g BioSysBio07:abstracts/cumbers07 and then accepted ones could be linked from a main page. In theory, with open review, more abstracts would be accepted (at least for posters)

• jamesW 11:51, 17 April 2006 (EDT):So this type of thing is being done at Biology Direct. I'm not sure its entirely appropriate for a conference - two rounds of peer-review that is. I like the idea of reviewers comments being available for abstracts accepted for presentation; it'll encourage the presenters to take the comments on board when preparing their talks. I'm not sure it is necessary for those accepted as posters - are any abstracts rejected for posters? Probably not, so, there may be some negative comments that are probably best not shared (in fact usually these aren't given to the authors!). Finally remember that talk abstracts are generally short so there's not an awful lot to comment on. What would be more fun is comments posted after the talks...

• --Johncumbers 07:43, 12 May 2006 (EDT) If we published in BMC Bioinformatics again then we could take advantage of the long abstracts e.g http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/7?issue=S1, which would give more to comment on. The idea of open review before hand would try and create a conference community before the actual conference, increasing collaboration at the conference perhaps?