Dear all,
We’re getting in touch to follow up discussions of publishing national or regional data from Your DNA, Your Say, and with a proposal for discussion at our meeting in January.
Your DNA, Your Say has the potential to generate a large number of country and regional papers, as well as the meta-analyses papers. Our intention is to continue to direct the meta-analysis papers to international journals. However, we
are also focussed on finding publication avenues for the national and regional analyses that are ongoing.
To date, analyses of individual countries (e.g. Germany) or small groups of countries (e.g. UK/USA/Canada/Australia) have been published in journals such as the European Journal for Human Genetics. However, single journals are likely to
be overwhelmed if multiple papers are targeted to them, while distributing the project’s findings across multiple journals would make it more difficult to follow our findings across countries. Providing a central home for publication would mean that a reader
could easily access publications across the study countries.
We were recently contacted by Wellcome Open Research (WOR) (https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/) about the possibility of hosting our findings there. WOR is an online, open access journal owned
by the Wellcome Trust and open to all Wellcome-funded research. This includes YDYS through the Sanger group (Anna
et al.).
WOR includes topic collections similar to an edited collection. We suggest that such a collection would be a great publication target for papers reporting country findings from Your DNA, Your Say, forming a collection on global public perceptions
of sharing genomic and health data. In addition, alongside the YDYS research papers, we can also include invited commentaries and reflections (called Open Letters) on the implications of the findings. This would extend the reach of the project and contribute
to the wider impact.
We don’t need to wait for all papers to be ready before submission - once four or so papers have been published, the collection would be launched. However, we would propose aiming to have all papers in by
March 2021 with the aim of launching the collection then.
WOR enables rapid publication, because the papers are made available online and peer review occurs post-publication. Peer review is open, and reviews are published alongside the paper.
Existing collections can be seen here
https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/collections Further details are here
https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/for-authors/article-guidelines
We’re happy to talk about this in more detail at our meeting in January but it would be great to hear your thoughts, specifically:
1.
Is this something you’re interested in and are you happy to target your YDYS country level analysis to a WOR collection?
2.
Do you expect to have your analysis ready to submit by February/March 2021?
3.
Are you able to propose 1-2 reviewers for your paper, at least one of whom should be outside your institution and country?
We hope you’re keeping well, and we’re looking forward to speaking soon
Richard and Anna
Dr Richard Milne
Senior Social Scientist, Society and Ethics Research, Wellcome Genome Campus
Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow, University of Cambridge
Co-Lead, ELSI theme, Cambridge Public Health
