Cracking cell signalling by sharing - not publishing

LONDON, 13 September. A new international research programme that hopes to solve the riddle of how cells interact with each other is set to test the notion that scientists must publish their findings or risk perishing their chances of receiving future funding grants or promotion. The Alliance for Cellular Signalling (AFCS) will encourage investigators to share their findings and new discoveries by posting them directly onto a special 'molecule page' that links into the AFCS website. This, says Dr Alfred Gilman, chairman of the AFCS steering committee, will be "equivalent to publishing in a scholarly journal" and will give researchers around the world the chance to comment on the findings, theories and discoveries long before the work would have been published by a journal. Gilman hopes that this novel approach will not only "enable the solution of a major problem in biomedical research" but also "facilitate the next evolutionary stage ...