We are pleased to announce that we will be publishing a PeerJ Collection for the upcoming Annual Meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE 2017) in Austin, TX. The meeting will take place from July 2–6, 2017. All speakers and poster presenters are encouraged to submit their accepted abstracts to the Collection. We asked Claus Wilke, a member of the local organizing committee, to write a guest blog post explaining some of the background and motivation for this collection.
The annual SMBE meeting is one of the key conferences to attend for scientists working in the field of molecular biology and evolution. The meeting routinely draws over 1000 attendees, who travel to the meeting location from all over the world.
The SMBE meeting is intentionally international, and its meeting venue changes annually from Europe to the Americas to Asia. Each year, a different local organizing committee takes over the organization of the meeting and gives it a unique, local flair, while the Society underwrites the meeting and provides a general meeting framework.
This year, for the first time, we are providing the opportunity for SMBE meeting attendees to make their abstracts publicly available. The SMBE meeting has not historically published the accepted abstracts, and the meeting contents were previously not generally available until peer reviewed and formally published in a scientific journal. However, with increasing interest in rapid communication and preprinting in the biological sciences, we wanted to see if we could bring this more rapid communication style to SMBE.
Therefore, we have invited all SMBE 2017 presenters to submit their abstracts to PeerJ Preprints. Presenters are encouraged to attach their posters or talk slides to their abstracts, so that these meeting products are also preserved for future viewing, but they can also just submit the abstracts as is. Because this is an experiment, participation is entirely voluntary. Submission is completely free and published under a CC BY 4.0 license.
We look forward to seeing the range of submissions to this year’s conference, and we look forward to publishing the conference abstracts in this PeerJ Collection.
PeerJ will have a booth at SMBE and we are looking forward to speaking with biologists about their work and the benefits of publishing with PeerJ. If you are attending SMBE and would like to set up a time to speak with an Academic Editor at PeerJ, get in touch with Sierra (sierra.williams@peerj.com) and we will coordinate further. And don’t forget to pick up a limited edition PeerJ Preprints sticker!