Publishing Group
There will be two "synthetic biology" publishing group meetings this week.
One during Tuesday lunch, another during Thursday lunch.
Attend one or both, as you like (I'll be attending both just to handle organization and take notes).
Each meeting will begin at 12:10p at 68-577 (5th floor tea room) and move to a nearby room.
Each meeting will end at 12:50p.
Please add your ideas/questions below that you would like to discuss.
Attending:
Things to discuss:
- Do we need a Synthetic Biology specific journal?
- Does the peer review process, as practiced work?
- Is peer review needed for engineering research articles?
- What features would we like for our papers? Reader comments? Reader Wiki?
- How should the structure of a paper be changed to reflect things like, well, the Internets?
- What existing journals are the most appropriate/receptive venues for publication of SB work?
- How is publishing on SB topics different from any other field?
- What are the other (if any) alternate publishing models already out there?
- Non-synthetic biology improvement:Author IDs or URIs or something. Noticed this while trying to set up myNCBI searches for people with more common names, what a pain. I'm changing my name to xyuitk.
- Can we ensure that publishing and access to publications is equally open to all institutions regardless of rank?
- <your question/idea>
Relevant material:
- Hal Abelson and John Wilbanks gave interesting talks on Open Networks and Open Society: The Relationship between Freedom, Law, and Technology.
An OECD report on scientific publishing was published a couple of weeks ago and seems especially relevent. Here are links to the press release and report
The following paper [[1]]
was published in Nucleic Acids Research in 1994. How different is this publication from the sort that was being discussed at the Tuesday lunch meeting? In a "B.E.Letters" model for publishing parts, would each author be independently credited for each of the ShineDalgarno/ATG spacings? That looks like 20 or more publications from this one....
- - I think that since each of these parts is just a member of a part family, a publication might describe the family and the range of performance within that family rather than each part individually. One could envisage that "family characterization" will be the norm anyway since engineers will need access to a range of parts with similar function but different performance characteristics to suit different system designs.--BC
