Resources/PLOS iGEM Collection

PLOS iGEM Collection

Dear iGEMers,

For the second year running, iGEM have teamed up with PLOS to publish the outputs of your 2016 projects. This year we’ll be trying something different; after submitting your papers, we will be holding a live online peer review “Jamboree” to encourage engagement between teams to help improve each other’s iGEM Reports. During this event, you will have the opportunity to peer review each others papers and experience the full cycle of academic publishing.

After the online peer review event, teams will have the option to submit full research articles to PLOS ONE, or to post them on the PLOS Collections blog. We recommend teams look at examples from the 2015 Collection when writing up their projects. Information on how to log in and submit your iGEM report will be announced at the 2016 Jamboree, but the guidelines for how to format and present your work are available below.

The deadline for submissions is 20th January 2017.

The online peer review “Jamboree” will be held on Saturday 28th January 2017 at 11am EST.

Teams will then have 4 weeks to revise their papers in line with the peer review comments and must resubmit revised versions to PLOS by 24th February 2017. Teams who decide to submit a full research article to PLOS ONE will then undergo a second round of peer review overseen by the PLOS ONE Editorial Board, which is comprised of over 6000 practising academics and researchers. Teams who decide to submit a shorter iGEM Report will have their work posted immediately to PLOS Collections.

All submissions will be included in the PLOS iGEM 2016 Collection.

Submission Guidelines

The PLOS iGEM Collection welcomes submissions for all project outputs. We recognize that the scope of the projects will differ and, to accommodate this, we will consider submissions in two categories:

  • “Research Articles”, intended for publication in PLOS ONE,
  • “iGEM Reports”, intended for project outputs by jamboree participants which might not meet PLOS ONE’s scope or requirements for publication.

Both categories of submissions will be peer reviewed and upon publication, will be featured together in the PLOS iGEM Collection.

Detailed submission instructions

All submissions should be written clearly and concisely, and any underlying data should be made available in line with the PLOS Data Policy. Data and methods that are adequately described in the team’s iGEM wiki can be linked to directly in the paper. We also encourage the deposit of data to figshare or Dryad, and the description of protocols at protocols.io/, as the team from Northwestern did last year.

We encourage groups to use the CRediT taxonomy for authorship and contributions and to include all members of the team as authors, with each individual’s contribution clearly stated as per CRediT guidelines#. Writing the paper is not the only requirement for authorship.

All submissions should include statements on competing interests and the sources of funding, as well as a data availability statement, which should provide details about where data can be accessed. Data and methods that are adequately described in the team’s iGEM wiki can be linked to directly in the paper. We also encourage the deposit of data to figshare or Dryad, and the description of protocols at protocols.io, as the team from Northwestern have done. As reference, the PLOS ONE editorial and publishing policies are available online. Any questions about submissions can be sent to collections@plos.org.