WG 11 – Microscopy publication standards

WG11 will work together with scientific publishers to promote the adoption of best practices in the reporting of metadata (for both image acquisition and analysis) throughout scientific journals and books. Only by ensuring all relevant constituents researchers and imaging scientists submitting publications and designing research; editors, scientific publishers, and reviewers monitoring and preparing publications; and funders, researchers, and educators evaluating and disseminating publications) are working in concert can we raise the bar to ensure reproducibility in imaging experiments. WG11 will focus on the following activities: 1) inform scientific publishers of the standards and metadata put forward by the other QUAREP-LiMi Working Groups; 2) liaise with and encourage individual journals to modify their imaging guidelines to align with these recommendations; 3) work together with the scientific publishers to enforce high standards of imaging metadata reporting in all research works accepted for publication; 4) facilitate the involvement of technical reviewers with significant microscopy expertise during the review of papers that rely heavily on imaging techniques; 5) work together with publishers to promote and increase the appropriate acknowledgement and co-authorship of imaging scientists and core imaging facilities in publications; 6) encourage publishers to compel authors to make raw imaging data available if, and when, required for validation of published research and to make reasonable suggestions regarding duration of storage of raw imaging data relevant to published results; 7) propose minimum standards for figure quality, figure colour selection, scale bars, inserts, annotations and labelling, in order to render all microscopy figures easily interpretable by experts and non-experts alike.