Assemblathon 2: Unusual ‘meta’ peer review

Posted by Biome on 22nd July 2013 - 6 Comments

GigaScience’s open peer–review policy already encourages ‘open and transparent’ science, however pre-publication discussion around Assemblathon 2, the largest systematic assessment of the process of genome assembly, proceeded in a more public way than the Editors expected.

In this video, Editor-in-Chief Laurie Goodman discusses the unusual ‘meta’ peer review that ensued after one of the reviewers posted their comments about the manuscript on a blog. As the manuscript was hosted on a preprint server, and the data in the public domain, reviewers, authors and others in the community were able to contribute to the discussion, whilst the manuscript was in peer review.

 

“Probably the first time… that I felt that a review process was constructive rather than antagonistic”

Laurie Goodman, Editor, GigaScience

 

Assemblathon 2 has now been published in GigaScience, with the results of this real-time, open peer-review available to view on the Assemblathon website.

GigaScience recently reached its first anniversary, you can read more on their milestones in changing how life science research is published over the last year here.

 

Research

Assemblathon 2: evaluating de novo methods of genome assembly in three vertebrate species

Bradnam KR, Fass JN, Alexandrov A, Baranay P, Bechner M, Birol I, Boisvert S, Chapman JA et al.
GigaScience 2013, 2:10

Go to article >>
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  • Joe Fass

    Kudos to Keith Bradnam, the first author on the Assemblathon 2 paper (full disclosure – I’m second author). His attitude about the whole endeavor was *the* reason it was a constructive rather than antagonistic process …

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  • Lauren Robertson, Editor

    I use BioMed Central quite a bit when developing nursing continuing education courses for our website. Our accrediting agencies encourage us to involve “key informants” during the planning process. The idea is to get feedback and direction from knowledgeable medical people during the development phase–also to use this feedback when we update or revise a course. Our courses are supposed to rely on “evidence-based” resources (a big buzz word in nursing continuing education circles) and it’s lots easier to fulfill this requirement now that there are resources such as BioMed Central available to writers and researchers. I’d love to hear more about this “meta peer-review” process. Continuing education courses are not required to be peer-reviewed but we sure could benefit from the type of feedback you’ve described. Tell me more!

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