There’s a new place to publish your open-source tools or methods in neuroscience! Christophe Bernard, Editor-in-Chief at the journal eNeuro (an open-access journal of the Society for Neuroscience), recently wrote an editorial detailing the opening of a new topic tract in eNeuro for Open Source Tools and Methods. In his editorial, Bernard details how there has been a recent push for open-source science, and highlights how there are many new open-source projects being developed in neuroscience that need a proper home for publication. While eNeuro has a “Methods/New Tools” submission type already, Bernard says the “Open Source Tools and Methods” submission is available for projects like “low-cost devices to measure animal behavior, a new biophysical model of a single neuron, a better method to realign images when performing in vivo two-photon imaging, scripts and codes to analyze signals” and more.

There is no current publication venue explicitly intended for open-source tools and methods in neuroscience, and through the addition of this article type, new tools/methods/devices/projects can be published in a straightforward manner. By including this publication type, it will aid the neuroscience field in replication, reproducibility, and transparency of methods and tools used. A major point from Bernard is that this may help the developers of the tool or method, since “it allows for acknowledgment of those who developed such tools and methods fully, often rotating students or engineers recruited on a short-duration contract. On a standard research paper, their name ends up in the middle of the list of authors, but the Open Source Tools and Methods type will allow them to be the first author.”

The details for submission of an open source tool or method on the eNeuro site is as follows: “Open Source Tools and Methods are brief reports (limited to 4500 words) describing the creation and use of open-source tools in neuroscience research. Examples of tools include hardware designs used in behavioral or physiological studies and software used for data acquisition and analysis. They must contain a critique of the importance of the tool, how it compares to existing open- and closed-source solutions, and a demonstration of tool use in a neuroscience experiment.”

Cheers to you, eNeuro, for your inclusion of open-source projects to help advance the neuroscience field!

Link to the editorial: https://www.eneuro.org/content/6/5/ENEURO.0342-19.2019