FAQ: Featuring in the Benchtop Single-cell Letter
“I love the article, it is really beautiful and captures everything that we discussed. It is very nice, thank you so much for your hard work and giving plant single-cell transcriptomics a place in the spotlight!”
Dr. Carolin Seyfferth, Vlaams Institute for Biotechnology
Why publish in the Benchtop Single-cell Letter?
The Benchtop Single-cell Letter – and the attached blog – is a platform dedicated to sharing knowledge, technical tips, tools, and advice about single-cell technologies, experimental design, data analysis, and data interpretation to the scientific community. Academic publications describe successful experiments but often omit weeks or months of optimization and technical difficulties that had to be overcome, which knowledge can be essential for other researchers attempting to set up their own single-cell studies. This initiative aims to fill this gap.
The Benchtop Single-cell Letter is particularly adapted to the promotion of your research, may it be your latest publication or a tool you have developed, but also to share your ongoing project and the technical hurdles you are facing as someone might have a solution to suggest. The letter can also be about promoting good practice in handling single-cell experiments, whether for better collaborations or resulting in better data. You can also share your personal journey through learning different single-cell methods and helping other researchers to take the same steps.
Articles are first published online on the blog and promoted online, and later featured in the bi-monthly themed letters distributed to 7,300 subscribers (as of June 2021), all researchers in the field of single-cell studies. It is a great channel to disseminate the successes – and mishaps! – of your lab work and stimulate interest in the scientific community.
How can my research be featured on the blog and in the letter?
There are two possibilities:
- Through an interview, with the resulting transcript or quotes formatted in an article written by one of our editors. The article will include links towards your relevant scientific publications, lab/group website, host university website, personal profiles, external resources, etc. The final draft will be shared with you for review before anything goes public.
- By guest writing an article yourself. Creative freedom is encouraged and open-mindedness about topics is a given, according they are relevant to the single-cell resolution or single-cell technologies. Guest writing an article can be financially remunerated. The only formatting requirements are:
- 800 – 1200 words in length.
- Short, concise paragraphs.
- Subtitles for each section.
Who is behind the Benchtop Single-cell Letter?
The Benchtop Single-cell Letter is the initiative of Scipio bioscience, a biotech startup in single-cell RNA sequencing based in Paris, France. The publication director, Prof. Stuart Edelstein, and the editor-in-chief, Dr. Wilko Duprez, are both employees of Scipio bioscience. The blog is hosted on the Scipio bioscience website, and the subscriptions managed by Scipio bioscience.
However, the names and content from interviewees and guest writers in the framework of the Benchtop Single-cell Letter will never be used to represent Scipio bioscience as a brand, nor the contributors asked to endorse the Scipio bioscience technology.
The purpose of the letter is to sincerely feature researchers and their work in single-cell, and provide a platform to share knowledge about single-cell technologies with the community. In exchange, scientists hear about Scipio as a biotech company behind the publishing of this letter.
What about copyright? Are there hidden fees?
There are no fees associated with the Benchtop Single-cell Letter in any way. The only financial transaction involved is the remuneration for guest writers after writing an article for the blog and letter.
In terms of copyright, the Letter obviously cannot publish already copyrighted content, e.g. paragraphs and figures from scientific publications, unless authorization from the publisher has been explicitly obtained.
The Benchtop Single-cell Letter does not claim copyright on the content of the articles provided by guest writers. The idea is to share knowledge, never to prevent a researcher from academically publishing their findings even if they have mentioned it on the Benchtop Single-cell Letter and blog first.
Contact
If you are interested in featuring in the Benchtop Single-cell Letter or if you have any further queries or questions, please get in touch at stuart.edelstein@thebenchtopsinglecell.blog