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Here we present various pieces of advice from startup founders, academic professors, research

© Nicholson This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and redistribution in any medium, provided that the original author and source are credited. Cancers are defined by abnormal karyotypes, displaying ever-changing structural and numerical abnormalities. Such plasticity of the karyotype underlies the evolution of cancer cells (Navin et al. 2011, Pavelka, Rancati, and Li 2010, Lee et al. 2011, Nicholson and Duesberg 2009). Karyotype alterations are also responsible for phenotypic variation and evolution in yeast (Rancati et al. 2008, Pavelka, Rancati, and Li 2010) and arguably of species in general (King 1993, McCarthy 2008). Because the alterations in the karyotypes of cancer cells have been shown to be non-random and stable within limits (Li et al. 2009, Nicholson and Duesberg 2009, Gebhart and Liehr 2000, Mertens et al. 1997), recently it has been proposed that carcinogenesis may be a form of speciation (Duesberg et al. 2011, Vincent 2010)

© Nicholson This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and redistribution in any medium, provided that the original author and source are credited. The value of blogs and bloggers in science is well recognized. Blogs serve as an excellent form of post-publication peer review and host much of the scientific discussion that occurs on the web today. Indeed, it is probably true that more interaction between scientists and between scientists and the public occurs away from traditional scientific articles themselves and in “alternative” forums such as Twitter, Facebook, and of course, blogs. These mediums are becoming increasingly important in scholarly discourse and often times shape what is written in traditional scholarly articles themselves (i.e. they are often cited). But for all the benefits blogs provide they are not afforded an equal footing. They are superfluous and can disappear without a trace. We want to change that. The content of these discussions can sway opinion and act as authoritative sources in their own right. Blogs are without a doubt valuable and as such deserve to be archived and aggregated, just like traditional scholarly publications are. They deserve to “count,” to be elevated to a level that is not viewed as something extra but as something integral to scientific communication (Nicholson 2014, Nicholson 2015). We need to get around the notion that where you publish actually matters. It doesn’t. It is the content, not the wrapper, and the sooner we act accordingly, the better.

How we can align open communication seen on blogs with career-advancement garnered from publications. Three key aspects of scholarly communication need to be made available for bloggers: 1) DOIs, 2) Review, and 3) Archival. 1 2

The following are pre-publication peer reviews received on the manuscript: Will we cure cancer by sequencing thousands of genomes ( Nicholson 2013 ), which was initially rejected and later resubmitted and published in Molecular Cytogenetics 1

Scientists, institutions and journals have been increasingly evaluated statistically, by metrics that focus on the number of published reports rather than on their content, raising a concern that this approach interferes with the progress of biomedical research. To offset this effect, we propose to use the R-factor, a metric that indicates whether a report or its conclusions have been verified. 1 2

This is an open letter concerning the recent launch of the new open access journal, eNeuro. We welcome the diversification of journal choices for authors looking for open access venues, as well as the willingness of eNeuro to accept negative results and study replications, its membership in the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium, the publication of peer review syntheses alongside articles, and the requirement that molecular data be publicly available. As strong supporters of open access, we welcome the commitment of the Society to making the works it publishes freely and openly available. However, we are concerned with several aspects of the specific approach, and outline herein a number of suggestions that would allow eNeuro to provide the full benefits of open access to the communities the journal aims to serve...