Awhile ago it was mentioned that EteRNA or RNA biochemistry in general might get a section in PLoS Currents. Any news on this front?
Also, has anyone looked into F1000 Research? Apparently, it’s supposed to work like arXiv does for physics. Whether that’s a good thing or not - and how it compares to PLoS One or PLoS Currents - well, that’s a separate can of worms entirely. I’m just wondering.
We haven’t start the nucleic acid structure PLoS Current until we can make sure the EteRNA data & idea throughput will be up to the task (but things are looking good so far!).
I’m not sure which publication outlet will end up best. The one nice thing about PLoS Currents is that there will be no publication charge at all, and the work will be indexed on PubMed & googlescholar (primary search engines for biomedical community). PLoS One asks for ~$1000 for more ‘professional’ looking formatting, but the charge can be waived. F1000 Research hasn’t quite launched yet, but sounds like it could be an awesome venue as well. And as you might know, my own lab puts our work up on ‘qbio’ section on the arxiv, well before publication.
For you, the authors of this eventual knowledge, it will be fully up to you where to submit and archive your science. I’m really looking forward to seeing what you choose… I think/hope EteRNA will provide an unprecedented flood of experimentally validated science coming from non-academic settings. Our journal choices won’t be influenced by the pressure to get grants, jobs, etc. in academia [for a revealing look at this, check out Mike Eisen’s discussion of how PLoS got it wrong the first time but now rocks ]. In fact, EteRNA may lay out an interesting new route to getting grants, changing academia, etc… but that’s a topic for a later discussion.