Dear author,

Please review the information below about Molecule Page authorship.

On behalf of the editorial board of the UCSD Molecule Pages, I am writing to invite you to write a Molecule Page. The Molecule Pages are individual components of a comprehensive signaling database hosted by the UCSD Signaling Gateway. The database encompasses a continuously growing list of nearly 4000 signaling molecules.

The information contained within a UCSD Molecule Page (MP) is highly structured. Each MP in the database contains an extensive automated data section, which displays automatically acquired and regularly updated data from publicly available databases such as GenBank, the Protein Data Bank (PDB), InterPro and the Human Protein Reference Database (HPRD).

A published MP contains a text-based review article and a database entry containing all verified protein-protein interactions, post-translational modifications and subcellular locations for that molecule.

While this publication format may look unusual at first, there is help at every level - through our detailed author instructions and from our editors via phone or e-mail. We have also appointed an editorial board, members of which will be happy to discuss scientific questions related to your MP.

The Signaling Gateway Molecule Pages were created because we believe that this highly structured publication format is an ideal way to capture the exponentially growing knowledge base in signal transduction. We particularly want to emphasize five important aspects of this database:

• The information is reliable and authoritative. All entries are authored by top experts in the field, who have the ability to extract the relevant and reproducible published information. To ensure balanced and authoritative coverage, the Signaling Gateway Molecule Page editors supervise a full, independent and anonymous peer-review of each MP, and perform comprehensive developmental editing on each submission. Thus, the published information has passed through the most stringent filters available.
• The database is fully interlinked with other complementary publicly available databases, allowing one-stop access to all the relevant information.
• This is a dynamic information environment. In contrast to many other static databases, this means that all information is dynamically linked and fully navigable. Data are captured in both textual and database-compatible formats. The integration of your molecule into signaling networks is navigable both through the database links and graphic tools.
• Each MP is citable using a digital object identifier (DOI) reference. See the online help for information on citing a Molecule Page.

We are excited about this project, and we very much hope that you will accept our invitation to participate in this unique format of scientific publication by agreeing to the following:

Author Agreement

The database is entirely open access. All content acquired by the UCSD Signaling Gateway will be made freely available for broad use by the research community under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode. Publications that result from use of UCSD Signaling Gateway data should acknowledge http://www.signaling-gateway.org/ as the source of those data, but are otherwise free to distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon UCSD Signaling Gateway content.

You warrant that the submitted material does not infringe the copyrights or other intellectual property rights of another, nor does the submitted material violate any laws or another’s rights of privacy or publicity. The submitted material is solely your original creation or if not, those portions that are not your creation are used with the copyright holder’s express permission or as permitted by law.

We realize that writing your UCSD Molecule Page (MP) involves a significant time commitment, but we hope that you agree that this growing database will enable community-wide communication and progress in the form of a comprehensive, reliable, up-to-date and open-access research tool.

Below, we add a few important points that are designed to make this database work.

• We expect you to submit your MP within 2 months of accepting your invitation. Please contact the editorial office at webmaster@signaling-gateway.org if you will be unable to meet this deadline so that we may extend it as necessary.
• You are welcome to assign co-authors for the MP. They will be visibly associated with the MP in the same way as co-authors are on traditional review articles. Thus, you can assign a first author, middle authors and/or a senior author. You will be the corresponding author for this MP.
• We require data entry to a significant, but realistic, depth. Obviously, this very much depends on how well studied the protein of interest is, so this will be judged on a case-by-case basis by the editorial team.
• Every MP is peer reviewed in a confidential process administered by the Signaling Gateway Editorial Staff. The editors will make a decision to publish, to ask for revisions, or to reject an MP outright on the basis of the referee reports. The process is highly similar to traditional publication formats.