[marcowanger]

I think funding is an important issue. Who funds SeqAnswers ? I think if I remember rightly there was some mention one of the admins was at Pac Bio. How is advertising handled and the site supported ?

I personally do not think there is a lot of bias due to advertising etc, but some who do not know the community may be more skeptical.

Also, what are the guidelines on commercial software plugs, and should this be mentioned ?

To briefly answer your question (as a ordinary registered member ONLY), the writing below was the initial writing for the SEQwiki manuscript.

ECO is the founder of the SEQanswers community. SEQanswers has advertising relationships with companies. All relationships between SEQanswers and sponsoring companies are explicitly listed in “About SEQanswers” (http://seqanswers.com/index.php?pageid=about). These companies have no role in operation of SEQanswers. SEQwiki does not host any sponsored content, and all the contributed text is available under a copyleft agreement. Discussion on SEQanswers forum and curation on SEQanswers wiki is based on the entity of an individual registered with an account.

For the commercial plug, I remember the company-user is tagged with "Registered Vendor" before they can advertise, and only in "Vendor Forum", so I don't see there is any problem.

[ulz_peter]

The letter should make an effort to address PI's in the audience to make them point their students and post docs to this forum, especially if they are newbies. It will help, if metrics like the average time for response and % of answered queries were included, to present the effectiveness of the forum to non-users.

Maybe that's a nice catch for the future directions part

[ulz_peter]

Just to inform you: LibreOffice tells me its (only letter text) already 472 words... without summary or future directions

[marcowanger]

Just to inform you: LibreOffice tells me its (only letter text) already 472 words... without summary or future directions

Ya, obviously the text are too clumsy for a letter. But let's forget about the word limitation for now and write as much as you can. We can always trim the content down when fitting the stuff into particular letter/opinion/perspective/etc

[marcowanger]

I think the future directions section is interesting. Just some ideas on what could be mentioned there:
1) The addition of a wet lab protocols wiki
2) As the size of the community increases, what are measures that can be implemented to keep the ratio of good information high to bad information? Perhaps the addition of energetic application specific moderators. This by the way it should be mentioned in the text that the ratio of good information to bad is really high on this forum.
3) Something else that might be cool is if there was some way to 'like/+1' threads and a section with the most popular threads. Might make browsing more efficient for causal readers.

ETHANol, regarding the point 3), I think the current vbulletin board has already scored the discussion thread quite well (by view count, and time-of-reply). But I am inspired by your point. Why not add a "SHARE" button, just like other site? I am not sure if it can be easily implemented, but it would be good to share the good discussion thread.

[marcowanger]

I think the overall idea is already there. We just need to make the wordings precise and simple. And less feel like an advertisement.

I would be impressed and visit the site if I read this correspondence.

[simonandrews]

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

You can do that now. Eco turned on the ability to edit your profile tag a few weeks ago.

[ulz_peter]

I tried to create a first trimmed version of the letter. It now consists of 370 words. Someone stated a Science letter may have less than 400 words which would be ok then. To cut it down to 300 words is nearly impossible...

[ulz_peter]

current status 337 words (thanks marcowanger)

[andreas.sjodin]

I just saw this statement in the Science "Guidelines and Directions for Web Submission of Letters to the Editor"

Letters submitted, published, or posted elsewhere, in print or online, will be disqualified.

It will be interesting to see how they judge online community writing. However, it is a working document in progress and not really posted as a final document.

[marcowanger]

Andreas, it should be fine. I will make the fimal version in google doc. As you have said, it is still a working draft.

[marcowanger]

I have added all high impact journals that acknowledge SEQ* explicitly in their text to our letter to science. It looks nice!

[marcowanger]

polished the language, the letter is ready to go! (IMO)

[ulz_peter]

Great stuff, totally agree with the current version. References look great indeed.

[ulz_peter]

As the current version only has 170 something words (without references of course), do we want to add some future directions parts?