microPublication Biology

Do you have data you want to share with your community, but it isn't or won't be included in a typical science journal article? Consider sending your science to microPublication Biology, a Caltech Library published journal that was pioneered by Professor Paul Sternberg.

In addition to being a long-standing Caltech professor and prolific science data generator and contributor, Sternberg leads an internationally known database for nematode research, WormBase.org. Sternberg's team of developers and curators spent the last 20 years generating and streamlining annotation tools and pipelines to keep up with the ever-growing corpus of published science literature on the worm. Ultimately, Sternberg and his team realized there was no way to keep up with the flow of data without a change in the scholarly publication realm itself. What evolved out of understanding the bottlenecks and hurdles in publication, is a novel science venue -microPublication, that publishes single experiment results, which are peer-reviewed like any other high-quality science article.

While the short data format of the articles is newish in the landscape of biological data, what makes this journal innovative is that microPublication works with communities from the ground up and allies with community supported authoritative databases during the publication workflow. What that means is that database curators act alongside community expert reviewers to verify and validate reported biological entities to make sure community standards are met and formatted correctly for incorporation into their resource. 

microPublication Biology, is an online, peer-reviewed, open access journal. It was launched in 2016 and has published over 500 articles. microPublication Biology articles can report data that are novel, reproduced, negative, have a narrow scientific focus, and are evaluated independent of perceived impact. Articles are discoverable through PMC, PubMed, EuropePMC, Google Scholar, and university library catalogs. Importantly, microPublication advances scholarly communication by short-circuiting the publication-to-database process, placing new findings directly into information discovery spaces upon publication. In its sixth year, the journal has expanded beyond model organism communities and now publishes research in all areas of life sciences, which is not as far as it can go. microPublication core personnel are largely Caltech members and can be reached at editors@microPublication.org. You can also find out more information about microPublication from our website, micropublication.org.