Instructions for Authors and Reviewers

The Genetics Society of America is now accepting submissions of educational resources for peer-review!  If you have an original resource that you would like to submit, please follow the instructions for authors below, paying particular attention to the rubrics reviewers will use to assess your submission.  Please also include a Resource Justification along with the other materials for your submission. 

We are currently accepting In-Class/Lecture Exercises, Laboratory Exercises, Laboratory Protocols, and Images/Animations.  Please also feel free to submit sample course syllabi, which will not be subject to peer-review.  We also accept whole lab or lecture courses; for review procedure, see below.

GSA PREP is thrilled to be a partner with the Life Science Teaching Resource Community (LifeSciTRC), an online community with 600 registered users and a library of more than 6,700 peer-reviewed teaching resources for life science educators at all levels.  All original resources published in GSA PREP will be deposited in this library, and will join life science resources from eight other professional societies.

If you would like to suggest excellent educational resources already available on other websites, please contact Beth Ruedi directly with your suggestion.

For Reviewers:

Please use the following rubric to assess the resource you have been asked to review.  Please fill out the rubric online and any additional material that you think would be relevant to your review within two weeks of receiving the resource you are reviewing.

Peer-Review Evaluation Rubric

Peer-Review Evaluation Rubric for Full Courses

Instructions For Authors:

Core Concepts and Competencies:

The lecture and laboratory exercises should help students develop core competencies while covering necessary genetics concepts. Please use these concepts and competencies as a guideline for what we are looking for. Resources should promote development of at least one core competency while demonstrating at least one core concept.  Ideally, resources will cover several competencies and one or two core concepts.

Resource Justification:

Each published resource should have a document providing a description of the method and the concepts and competencies covered.  This will be included along with any instructions for faculty, TAs, and students as well as any other supplemental material necessary to make the resource complete.  The document should cover the following:

Synopsis (paragraph with a short description of the resource and its intended use)

 

Introduction (What's the reason for this resource? Why is unique or different from other resources?)

 

Approach/Method (Instructor's guidelines for how to do the exercise)

 

Justification (How does this resource improve the core competencies that students should be learning?)

 

Sample/Example (if necessary)

How to Submit:

Please fill out the online submission form for your resource. Please also see the rubric in the Reviewer section to note what criteria your peers will use to review your resource.

Peer-review Process:

Submissions selected to proceed to review will be sent to two peer-reviewers with an expected time to decision of 3-4 weeks.  If the two initial reviews are contrary, the resource will be sent to a third reviewer.

Full courses are now also being accepted!  Lab courses will be reviewed by treating each laboratory unit as a separate entity sent out to two reviewers; one additional reviewer will assess the big picture of the course as a whole.  Lecture courses will be sent to two reviewers who will assess the big picture as well as providing a more detailed review of two resources of their choosing from the course.

Use in Other Portals:

Resources accepted to GSA PREP will also be deposited the Life Science Teaching Resource Community (Life Sci TRC) library, which in turn deposits the resource in BEN and NSDL. GSA is a new partner in LifeSciTRC, and this partnership will result in a much wider audience for our resources.

In addition, authors may choose to submit their resource to HHMI's CourseSource, and it will be cross-posted in GSA PREP.  Some resources published in GSA PREP that are appropriate for CourseSource will be chosen to cross-post on the CourseSource site as well.

In all cases, the resource is clearly marked as a GSA PREP resource and proper credit is given to the resource authors. 

Copyright:

All original resources published on GSA PREP are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Authors can choose to withdraw their resource from GSA PREP in order to publish educational research conducted using said resource; we'd recommend publication in CBE-Life Sciences Education.

Citations and Digital Object Identifiers:

GSA PREP is committed to publishing top-quality, useful resources in genetics education. We're also committed to promoting and disseminating your work, so it receives the most usage in the classroom.

To that end, we have secured a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for these resources. The DOI prefix is associated with GSA and used with our journals, GENETICS and G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics.

Resource citation format follows most article citations. An example of a GSA PREP citation is:

Noor, J. K. F. and Noor, M. A. F. (2013). Finding Selection in All the Right Places: A College Genetics Laboratory Inquiry-Based Learning Exercise. Genetics Society of America Peer-Reviewed Education Portal (GSA PREP): 2013.001; doi: 10.1534/gsaprep.2013.001