Announcing the Assemblathon ‘publish for free’ contest
The Assemblathon 2 paper won the 2013 BioMed Central Research Award for Open Data. Typically these Research Awards are presented to individual scientists and winners receive a small cash prize in recognition for their efforts. Given that there are almost 100 authors on the Assemblathon 2 paper, it didn’t seem practical to split up any prize money.
Instead, we have decided to give that money back to the community by way of awarding waivers to cover Article Processing Charges (APCs). Specifically, BioMed Central (BMC) will grant two APC waivers that can be applied to any BMC journal. These waivers will be awarded to any interested parties who are currently writing manuscripts that fall into one of the following three areas:
- Manuscripts that describe new methods/tools that will advance the field of ‘omics’ assembly (genome, transcriptome, or metagenome)
- Manuscripts that propose other contests similar to the Assemblathon. I.e. contests that aim to determine the relative performance of bioinformatics tools that are focused on a particular problem area (e.g. read mapping, de novo gene finding, SNP calling)
- Manuscripts that help promote, or advance the use of, 'Open Data’ methodologies in the genomics and bioinformatics community
The first round of this contest will last from today (1st August) through to the end of September. If there are no suitable manuscripts submitted, we will extend the contest by another month and repeat this process until both APC waivers have been awarded. An overview of the contest along with detailed instructions for submitting entries are included below.
We hope that the prize money from our Open Data award can be put to good use and help lead to some stimulating new ideas being published in a BMC journal!
Contest Overview
- Entries will be judged by a panel made up of members from the Bioinformatics Core facility at the UC Davis Genome Center and the decision of the judging panel is final.
- To avoid potential conflict of interests, this contest is not open to Faculty who are members of the UC Davis Genome Center, nor to any of their lab members.
- Draft manuscripts may be submitted from now until the end of September when we will review all entries.
- If we have not received any suitable entries by the end of September, we will extend the deadline by another month and continue to repeat this process as appropriate.
- If a manuscript is deemed suitable to receive an APC waiver, it still must undergo the standard peer-review process by a BMC journal. If a manuscript is then rejected by the journal, we will allow others to then apply for that APC waiver.
- Winners of the APC waivers will be announced on the Assemblathon website and twitter account.
How to submit your entry
- To apply for one of the two APC waivers, please email a manuscript to [email protected].
- Manuscripts must be submitted as a single PDF document. No other formats will be accepted.
- Do not submit supplementary material unless specifically requested by the judging panel.
- Manuscripts do not necessarily need to be complete, but must contain enough data/results/ideas so that the judging panel can assess their suitability.
- Draft manuscripts will not be shared with anyone outside of the judging panel