#simplifyscience
Our new resource to help you find funding
We just wanted to give you a sneak preview of a new resource we are putting together - again, at no cost - to help you find relevant funding opportunities. We are compiling an up-to-date and fully searchable database of available grant, fellowship, and other funding opportunities offered by a range of organisations. Each entry is annotated with the funder, type of funding, broad area of research, and application deadline, and we also provide links to the specific funding details. We have started with funders in the UK and Europe, mainly within the biomedical sciences, and we already have over 200 individual entries. We aim to expand the database to provide a complete, one-stop resource for scientists to find funding opportunities, and we will try to keep it carefully curated.
We think that this will be phenomenally useful, not only for keeping on top of deadlines, but also for exploring other funders or funding opportunities you may not even be aware of. This is just one more way in which we are trying to make life a little easier for scientists (check out our free templates for your manuscript preparation, too). Remember that we can provide professional help with your applications (and see our take on Horizon 2020), and since the next two months are packed with deadlines, we are offering a 10% discount on all grant and fellowship editing until the end of April - see our Facebook page and Twitter feed for details and to find a discount code.
Finally, if you know of any funding opportunities that we have yet to include, please let us know - we can provide an even better and more complete resource with your help.
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We think that this will be phenomenally useful, not only for keeping on top of deadlines, but also for exploring other funders or funding opportunities you may not even be aware of. This is just one more way in which we are trying to make life a little easier for scientists (check out our free templates for your manuscript preparation, too). Remember that we can provide professional help with your applications (and see our take on Horizon 2020), and since the next two months are packed with deadlines, we are offering a 10% discount on all grant and fellowship editing until the end of April - see our Facebook page and Twitter feed for details and to find a discount code.
Finally, if you know of any funding opportunities that we have yet to include, please let us know - we can provide an even better and more complete resource with your help.
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Free templates to help with your paper writing
Those of you who regularly follow us will know that we feel very strongly about reducing barriers to scientific publishing. Manuscript preparation (author) guidelines vary wildly between different journals, from the sublime (see Cancer Medicine’s guidelines here, which only demand ‘a clear, generic and readable layout’) to the ridiculous (PLOS One being a notable culprit). We had considered naming the best and shaming the worst but decided against it - there are many sensible reasons for prescriptive manuscript preparation, not least to raise scientific standards (such as with guideline-driven statistical or clinical trial reporting) and improve accountability and transparency (such as full reporting of conflicts of interest or ethical statements). Not all journals have the editorial budgets they would like, and it is perhaps inevitable that some of the editorial burden is passed on to authors. Some are unnecessarily onerous, but we’ll leave that for another day.
However, complex author instructions remain a barrier, particularly if English is not your first language. Even well-seasoned scientists will have their papers returned from editorial offices from time to time for technical reasons. We therefore thought that, instead of complaining, we could be more solution-focussed and do something positive. That is why we have started to prepare a collection of free MS Word templates to help authors prepare their manuscripts for their target journal. We know that Thomson Reuters provide similar templates on their Endnote website, but these are very basic and many have not been updated for several years.
Our templates are journal specific and aim to contain all the required manuscript information under the correct section headings. Any additional information, such as conflicts of interest statements, are pre-filled at the correct point in the document. We have included example references (formatted using Endnote) in each file and provided links to Endnote style files - and a reminder that the wonderful Mendeley is a great free alternative for citation management. Additional web links are embedded in the templates where we believe them to be useful. These templates are free to use and share, but not for commercial purposes please.
This is a start and not a finish and if there is a template you would like to see, please just contact us using the request form - we will try to get that made as quickly as possible and post it for all to share. If there are errors or omissions, please just let us know. If you have a template you would like to share, you can upload it and let us know using the same form.
We hope that you find these useful - please spread the word via the usual social media channels (Facebook and LinkedIn) if you do or click here to tweet - our hashtag for this is #simplifyscience
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However, complex author instructions remain a barrier, particularly if English is not your first language. Even well-seasoned scientists will have their papers returned from editorial offices from time to time for technical reasons. We therefore thought that, instead of complaining, we could be more solution-focussed and do something positive. That is why we have started to prepare a collection of free MS Word templates to help authors prepare their manuscripts for their target journal. We know that Thomson Reuters provide similar templates on their Endnote website, but these are very basic and many have not been updated for several years.
Our templates are journal specific and aim to contain all the required manuscript information under the correct section headings. Any additional information, such as conflicts of interest statements, are pre-filled at the correct point in the document. We have included example references (formatted using Endnote) in each file and provided links to Endnote style files - and a reminder that the wonderful Mendeley is a great free alternative for citation management. Additional web links are embedded in the templates where we believe them to be useful. These templates are free to use and share, but not for commercial purposes please.
This is a start and not a finish and if there is a template you would like to see, please just contact us using the request form - we will try to get that made as quickly as possible and post it for all to share. If there are errors or omissions, please just let us know. If you have a template you would like to share, you can upload it and let us know using the same form.
We hope that you find these useful - please spread the word via the usual social media channels (Facebook and LinkedIn) if you do or click here to tweet - our hashtag for this is #simplifyscience
comments powered by Disqus