We’ve hosted all kinds of stories on the Terra blog over the past year, and by far the most popular have been the guest posts authored by actual researchers about the work they’ve been doing with the platform.
Going forward, we’d love to host more of these — and we want to make sure the opportunity is available to researchers outside of our “friends and family” network — so we’re putting out an open call for contributions.
What we’re looking for and what’s in it for you
This is all about showcasing your work and inspiring others. If you recently published a paper (or preprint — we love preprints), a blog post is a great way to spread the word — less formal than a journal abstract, and with more opportunity to include personal or “historical” commentary.
Readers tend to be especially interested in hearing about the “behind the scenes” information that never makes it into the final paper: the motivations that prompted the study, the serendipitous collaborations, the technical challenges you encountered and how you solved them.
This can also work great for promoting computational methods, tools or protocols that you’ve developed and are making publicly available through Terra for use by the research community.
Here are a few recent examples:
The Molecular Oncology Almanac: From algorithm to analysis portal
Brendan Reardon, computational biologist in the Van Allen Lab at Dana Farber Cancer Institute
Calling variants from telomere to telomere with the new T2T-CHM13 genome reference
Samantha Zarate, PhD student in the Schatz Lab at Johns Hopkins University
Introducing MAS-ISO-seq: A new long-read sequencing protocol for dramatically increasing RNA transcript isoform yield
Kiran Garimella, Associate Director for Genomic Medicine in the Data Sciences Platform at the Broad Institute
Spotlight on PANOPLY, a scalable framework for cancer proteogenomics
DR Mani, principal computational scientist in the Proteomics Platform at the Broad Institute
You’ll notice the length of these posts can vary significantly, from ~500 words to over ~2500 words, and the content ranges from very high-level to very granular/technical. We don’t impose hard requirements; it’s all about doing justice to the story you want to tell. If you have strong feelings about how you want to present your work, that’s great! If you’re not sure how to go about presenting your work in blog form, we can help you figure that out.
We can also help you with the writing itself if you’re sick of writing, struggle with the language or are just plain overworked.
Let us know you’re interested
Fill out this short form today to tell us who you are and what you’d like to talk about. It’s never too early to express interest, even if the work you want to talk about isn’t done yet! We look forward to hearing from you.
