Welcome to the PLOS iGEM 2016 Project

PLOS is pleased to launch an exciting collaboration with iGEM to publish work from the 2016 iGEM competition, involving an innovative and exciting live peer review event.

Both PLOS and the iGEM Foundation aim to advance scientific communication through the development of open community collaboration. The organizations share a belief that all research should be openly available for anyone to read and reuse, and that scientific developments should not be held back by subjective questions about impact or novelty. But it is not just the final research output that is valuable to science, it is the entire scientific process from conception to publication and beyond. That’s why PLOS and iGEM believe strongly in open data and are keen to experiment in early posting and open peer review.

Last year saw the launch of the first PLOS iGEM Collection (https://collections.plos.org//igem2015) which included an experiment in early posting and open community review. In the second year we’re doing something even more exciting. Working with Breezio, who have developed a content-driven community platform that offers unique collaboration tools, and teaming up with Biotreks, the synthetic biology journal specifically for high schools, we will be holding a live online peer review event, where teams will be encouraged to review each other’s work in real time. All submissions to PLOS or Biotreks will be featured in the iGEM 2016 Collection, and teams will still have the option to submit full research articles to PLOS ONE, the world’s largest open access journal.

We’d love for you to be a part of this exciting project. Whether you’re an iGEM team member from 2016, an iGEM alum, a synthetic biology expert or enthusiast, or have a general interest in peer review, your input would be gratefully received.

To find out more go to the PLOS iGEM Project Portal and visit the PLOS Welcome Room where you’ll find everything you need to know if:

• You’re an iGEM 2016 team who want to write up and submit your work
• You’re interested in taking part in the realtime peer review jamboree as a reviewer

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact the PLOS Collections team (collections@plos.org) and we look forward to receiving submissions and to the realtime peer review jamboree in January.