The importance of Data Reports

There is a new data report “Microbial Resource Announcement” paper from the EisenLab just published: Bacterial Community Sequences of Submerged Aquatic Vegetation in the Potomac River by Alex Alexiev Laura Vann Jenna Morgan Lang and myself. https://mra.asm.org/content/9/1/e01175-19?fbclid=IwAR02fI2a22hFOeYvJ3PKGs0LDdzSL1Ma7EySC2a4iU7slzOZxGqXgysRVh4

This is a simple paper in that it is really just reporting some data. However, data reports are a really important new type of publication that I encourage more people to do. We have a large number of data sets that end up not being part of "bigger" papers and also sometimes bigger papers using those data sets take a long time to get out. So Data Reports like this a re a great way to share data with a formal description of the data collection and any analysis and also a way that the data producers get some credit.

Sure it would be great to turn every study into a more detailed, thorough paper. However that is not always possible or simple. In this case, this project was led by an undergraduate student in my lab Alex Alexiev. Alex went off to grad school at CU Boulder and has a lot of other things on her mind right now. And so fortunately Laura Vann worked with her to get out this data report. They actually had tried to get out a more detailed paper but after submitting it and getting back reviews we all agreed that we simple did not have the right number of samples and the right study design to make too many conclusions based on this data. So we decided to just share the data itself with the world in the hope that it might be useful to other people.