I recently published a methods paper in the new Elsevier journal Methods X. This is a really exciting paper for me as the work would probably have never been published if it wasn’t for this new journal with a very interesting mission – to publish the “hidden gems” from your lab book.
The articles tend to be brief with no introduction. They simply report on small customisations to methods that are important enough to be shared but perhaps not big enough to fit, or be noticed in a larger publication. Publishing small methods online is not such a new phenomenon, in fact the internet is awash with protocols available on a number of very useful websites. However, in a lot of cases there is no review process and no way of verifying the methods presented. This is problematic as we cannot cite people and give them recogonition or know if the information is any good.
So, with the group at the Karolinska, we wrote up an observation by Haris Antypas that different FBS preparations stimulate epithelial cells in different ways. This is important because in our lab, we study the effect of bacteria on the stimulation of epithelial cells and FBS is a common and very important additive to cell growth media. If FBS is stimulating cells, then it can be very difficult to see any effect in our experiments.
Anecdotally, it seems that many people have this kind of problem but until now, it hasn’t really been worth writing it up into a manuscript — there was nowhere for it to go. But now there is and I look forward to seeing what kind of methods begin to be published in MethodsX.
Have a look at the Full Text of our article here.