It’s the first day of 2023 here at Binomica Labs – hopefully everyone’s had a wonderful and safe New Year’s eve, and congratulations for making it through yet another interesting year.
We wrapped up 2022 soft launching a call for submission to our publication, Willowlands – you can read the full announcement here:
I received some feedback in the meantime, so I thought I’d summarize and clarify some key details on Willowlands
What Willowlands will publish: Willowlands is specifically designed to publish very early stage data point and observation – NOT full research papers. Here’s an observation behind an example submission I’m working on:
Alignment of a certain microbial genome to it’s closest phylogenetic neighbors (with very high average nucleotide identity match) shows a large chromosome region gap unique to the microbe – the same gap is also observed in genome of the same organism sequenced by a different lab. Analysis reveals phage related machinery embedded in the region. Based on protein homology we could be looking at a previously unknown type of prophage”
Above example isn’t good enough to be a paper on its own right (it could, but it would be a low quality research paper based on the hypothetical) – but it nevertheless contains some compelling data that can easily be replicated by others. Publishing it on Willowlands will give me a citable DOI I can forward to other researchers for feedback on further experimental design.
Willowlands will publish short form letters, that are between an excerpt from a lab notebook and a research poster.
(***If you’re an amateur or independent researcher looking to publish a full & complete research paper, I recommend making use of biorxiv preprint server and then approaching established journals. Feel free to contact me if you need any help!)
License: all Willowlands content will be under creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This means anyone can redistribute and remix the content – however, attribution must be given to the original author (specifically, the author of the letter – you!) and any changes made to the material must be specified.
Format: we’re imposing a hard cap of 2 pages, including any figure(s). Formatting of the letter, such as spacing, font, margins and size are left deliberately unspecified. The details are up to the convenience and preference of the author. Please do keep in mind though, the purpose of publishing on Willowlands is to communicate your observations and ideas to other researchers in a citable manner.
Ultimate end goal for submission to Willowlands is feedback from other researchers that can help push the study forward, not publication itself! Clarity and ease of reading would be vital.
I’m aiming to draft up some real world examples this month and present them on the Willowlands website – along with minimal templates and write ups to help get people started.
Submission: The main submission should be in PDF format. Supplementary data and reference section should be submitted as zipped archives. I’m still working on a dedicated portal site – for now, please direct any submissions or submission related inquiries to sung AT binomicalabs DOT org. I’m also available on the Binomica Labs Discord.
If you have any questions or require assistance of any kind, please feel free to contact me anytime here or via other methods described in the post. Looking forward to chatting with you!