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After the whirlwind that has been the first year of publication at Cell Reports Methods, we are pleased to be able to take a moment to reflect on the year, where the journal started, and where we would like to go. Our May 2022 issue marks 1 year of publication, and with it the journal has published 127 research articles, reviews, and other article types. Although the year has had many highlights, a constant source of pleasure has been working with so many authors and reviewers to help scientists share their methods with the community. A sincere thank you to all of you for your dedication to the scientific community.
Why a methods journal? Our mission is to help readers find better ways of doing science. Whether the new approaches are faster and less resource intensive or whether they provide data in greater depth than ever before, new approaches drive science forward. We believe in providing these methods to the community in an open access format to help scientists advance their work across the world. And what better time to do this than during the pandemic, when resources may be limited and new strategies needed. New methods can also bring about a mindset change, improving not just the experiment at hand but enabling new opportunities and ways of approaching a problem. This leads to real scientific progress.
How can Cell Reports Methods help the scientific community? We believe methodological advances are important in their own right. We provide a forum where authors can highlight the work that goes into developing methods, assessing their accuracy and performance, and showcasing how they can move science forward. The methods we publish are cutting edge and can help you get things done. This year we have been pleased to feature papers with new computational approaches, methods tailored for single-cell analysis, imaging platforms, toolkits for neuroscience, cancer models, and more. We partner with STAR Protocols to provide authors with a venue for co-publishing step-by-step protocols for the methods they develop in their Cell Reports Methods paper. As part of the Cell Reports Portfolio of journals, we are open access, which means that our papers are available to be read by anyone across the globe. And finally, by focusing on the methodological advance itself, we can help authors focus their efforts and reduce the timeline to publication. We think this is truly transformative.
This year has also been a learning process for us. One fact that quickly became apparent is that not every paper making an important methodological point contains a new method for others to use. For example, an in-depth analysis of a particular aspect of an experimental design can help others conduct better experiments. With our anniversary issue, we are adding a new manuscript format specifically for this type of analysis, which we are calling a resource. Resources at Cell Reports Methods are empirical studies that inform on how methods are used and how the resulting data are interpreted. We have two examples in this issue, a paper from Quackenbush and colleagues presenting an extensive analysis of eQTL network construction and a paper from Wilmerding and colleagues that analyzes the impact of optogenetic pulse design in hippocampal memory paradigms. We expect these papers to improve the application of pre-existing methods and make future experiments and analyses more successful.
It’s been an exciting first year of bringing new experimental and analytical approaches to the community. We cannot wait to connect with even more of the community during year 2. We hope you will join us. Let’s open doors!