Time to publish SEQanswers?

[fkrueger]

I also think that SEQanswers is an incredibly useful knowledgebase all around NGS and its bioinformatics applications. I especially love its instantaneous character and the (usually) extremely short reaction times of experts and developers in the fields to all sorts of questions, ranging from biological questions to discussion/usage of various bioinformatic tools to bug reports or feature requests. For many questions I have and had in the past, SEQanswers has become my first port of call to look for solutions or help.

[dan]

I also think we should aim to keep it short and that it is a great idea. At least if we are going for a letter. An alternative would to write a more extensive "application note" describing the features but that would require much more work.

That's what I was thinking too... anyone know the guidelines for 'letters' to Science or Nature? Lets stick to one guideline or the other.

[maubp]

Also, is it worth thinking about an option for real names in forum profiles at this point?

[maubp]

OK, I've added a bit of text along those lines.

Peter

[marcowanger]

Do we want to mention that SeqAnswers also acts as a useful forum for helping users with problems using NGS tools (sometimes leading to useful bug reports for the tool developers)? Or would that just encourage more of this - which wouldn't be such a bad thing except it can drown out other more important threads, like file format changes etc.

Maubp, you raised an important point. Helping users with tools selection and bug report and improvement is an important "function" of this forum(IMO). In fact we. have written a bit in the introduction part, maybe we need to stress it more.

[ulz_peter]

I think thats a good idea, as most of the threads in Seqanswers are indeed related to usage questions

[maubp]

Do we want to mention that SeqAnswers also acts as a useful forum for helping users with problems using NGS tools (sometimes leading to useful bug reports for the tool developers)? Or would that just encourage more of this - which wouldn't be such a bad thing except it can drown out other more important threads, like file format changes etc.

[andreas.sjodin]

I also think we should aim to keep it short and that it is a great idea. At least if we are going for a letter. An alternative would to write a more extensive "application note" describing the features but that would require much more work.

[ulz_peter]

Publishing SeqAnswers for being able to cite it "formally" is a great idea.
I second the opinion of marcowanger to keep it quite short.

[marcowanger]

How long will we aim?

Personally, I think we should keep it short.

[dan]

During the review of the SEQwiki paper, an important point was raised by the reviewers: the SEQanswers forum has yet to be published, and deserves a good publication.

Why don't we write a letter to Science or Nature about SEQanswers?

The project has already been 'informally' cited dozens of times in the literature, so why not write a nice summary for everyone to cite?

The proposal is to use the wiki to collaboratively draft a letter to Science or Nature (see: wiki:Publication/Letter_for_SEQanswers), with each contributor adding their name to the paper. The final list of authors will be ranked according to (democratically determined) contribution to the final text.

Please contribute (and sign the letter) here!

Meta paper discussion should stay on this thread (wiki sucks for discussion).