No, do not worry, we are not adding one more drop to the bottomless journal sea (though if you use PubChase to find relevant literature, the number of journals should not matter much). Instead, we are inaugurating a weekly author’s essay series with a personal story from Meleah Hickman on her recent ground-breaking discovery of the haploid C. albicans.
We nicknamed it an “anti-journal club”. This is born out of the common frustration with journal clubs, which typically become paper-shredding exercises that focus almost exclusively on ripping the work apart. These meetings may be useful, but they are demoralizing. You come out of a journal club feeling that you once again wasted an hour of your life on a crappy paper.
So, instead of a journal club where the presenter eviscerates someone else’s work, we are doing the opposite - we are inviting the authors to tell us what it took to make this publication happen and why it is special to them.
You spend what feels like eternity on the research, in the end carefully packaging the years of your life into a few published pages. The publication is, as it should be - results and conclusions. But what about the journey to the publication? Did you anticipate the opposite results? Was this an accidental discovery? What was the most daring and risky experiment here? What personal drama lies behind this neat and formal publication?
We hope you will find our anti-journal club inspiring and exciting.