Immediate publication aids malaria research | Wellcome Open Research Blog

"Hotspot targeted interventions

Parasites were highly mixed, both in time and space, with autocorrelation over relatively short distances and limited local clustering of genetically distinct sub-populations. Time had a strong antagonistic effect on the variation of parasites over distance such that within a relatively short time, distance was no longer predictive of parasite relatedness. We detected no barriers to parasite movement in any of the sites. This indicates that parasites move freely within the study areas.

If parasites mix freely, as suggested by our data, the impact of hotspot-targeted interventions may affect community-wide malaria transmission. This assumes that hotspots can be detected, are stable in time and the spread of parasite populations indeed primarily occurs from hotspots to the surrounding community.

Open research

The idea of fast-track publishing was enticing. We had spent nearly six months waiting for a second round of reviewer comments from another well-known open-access journal and had become frustrated with the editorial process. Additionally, we felt assured of a fair assessment of our work, as reviewer comments would be published alongside the article.

We also liked the idea of the article being immediately available and citeable, even while under review, and that the platform provides an opportunity for revising the work after publication. This means that the information is immediately available to the scientific community and provides a reference point for similar studies.

Channels of collaboration

We were already in the process of sharing our data with a modelling group interested in secondary analysis, and had experienced difficulties with another institution requiring documentation and safe-guards regarding the data sharing.

Making our data publicly available immediately circumvented these difficulties and the group have begun their analysis unhindered. The data can also be used to answer new questions not covered by the current study, in addition to opening channels of collaboration between us and others interested in similar work."