Editorials in 2009

The genome of the seventh plant to be sequenced, Cucumis sativus L., was assembled using the conventional long-read Sanger sequencing and higher-throughput short-read technology. This genome is the entry point for exploring the diversity and function of the Cucurbitaceae family of agriculturally important plants. Its compact genome, without evidence of recent duplication, will be useful in comparative analysis of plant genome evolution.

The US Department of Health and Social Security's Public Health Service (PHS) ruled in 2005 that “Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit.” Despite this, its Office of Research Integrity (ORI) risks giving the wrong impression that plagiarists have enduring conjugal rights to former collaborators' ideas.

Datasets released to public databases in advance of (or with) research publications should be given digital object identifiers to allow databases and journals to give quantitative citation credit to the data producers and curators.

The UK House of Lords Science and Technology Committee reports that genomic medicine is already in practice but needs a coordinated set of infrastructural and training systems to allow the healthcare system to cope.

The Mediterranean Medical Genetics Meeting 2009 at Bilkent University, in Ankara, Turkey, reaffirmed the commitment of a pragmatic group of scientifically excellent researchers to local problem solving and to the vision of borderless global collaboration in human genomics.

Most of our readers access our articles online, in formats that deal well with increasingly complex research methods and the growing requirement for increased precision of citation. These considerations have now led us to publish Methods online.

One-sixth of the world's population does not have enough food to sustain life, and the world's food supply needs to double by 2050 without increasing demand for water or fuel. Agricultural genetics is one of the easier parts of the solution.

Sequencing technologies have unleashed more than enough quantitative data to test systems models of genome function, and sequence data are now driving a new systems biology. The new RNA entities uncovered may require new concepts of how genomes regulate their own expression.

Authors frequently ask the journal to help them get properly listed in PubMed, which we do. However, representing detailed international contributor attribution is no job for a national public library's index.

It's the year of Charles Darwin, with a variety of celebrations of his life and work ongoing. Educational outreach should emphasize the power of molecular and quantitative genetics to flesh out and build on Darwin's insights.

High-throughput datasets and analysis protocols are intrinsically difficult to referee. Community standards enforced by journals may be less effective than is widely appreciated. Greater awareness of the needs and value of secondary data users can result in higher-impact papers.

An increasing number of research papers are the products of research consortia. How is the journal coping with the effects of team knowledge production on publication? What can you do to expedite the publication of your work?