Why care about CELL?
Advisory and steering seats are open to experts who care about durable open science.
Most of us chose science because we wanted the truth to be legible and shareable. We wanted results that stand when a different lab, a different toolchain, or a different dataset tests them. Too often the opposite happens. Methods are hard to rerun. Assumptions are unstated. Credit flows to polished narratives, not to artifacts that actually work. If you care about open science, these are not side issues. They decide what future scientists inherit.
CELL exists to change what counts as a first-class research output and to make that change public, testable, and durable. Not a new brand. Not another PDF venue. A set of shared, open defaults that make three things routine instead of heroic: runnable models with provenance, transparent evaluation that others can repeat, and governance that rewards the people who build reliable tools as much as those who write clever prose.
What this is not. It is not a demand that everyone adopt one ideology of modeling. It is not a top-down committee that writes a manifesto and disappears. It is a working agreement that any lab can inspect and use. Open licenses. Versioned artifacts. Lightweight rules that a skeptical reader can verify without emailing an author.
Why people who already have standing should care.
Integrity at scale. You already hold yourself to a high standard. The problem is that the system does not. When a single group does rigor, it is admirable. When the defaults do rigor, it becomes cheap to do the right thing and expensive to fake it. That shift only happens if people who care about openness anchor the first standards.
Time well spent. Senior scientists are asked to sit on panels and advisory boards that change little. CELL is building a small number of artifacts that change a lot. A public checklist that reduces reviewer guesswork. A benchmark that any lab can exercise without inside knowledge. A minimal metadata pattern that lets code run in a clean container. Each is visible, citable, and reusable.
A fairer credit economy. Open science fails when the people who build solvers, curate datasets, or design robust experiments are treated as invisible labor. CELL treats those as publishable contributions with DOIs, clear authorship, and public provenance. If you have argued for this change, here is a place to make it real.
Students and early-career scientists. They learn the habits you normalize. If the first public defaults are honest and tractable, they will carry that forward. If they are opaque and brittle, the next decade will look like the last one. The most durable mentorship you can offer is to help set the defaults they will inherit.
Common objections deserve straight answers.
“It is too early.” Early is when the cost of shaping norms is lowest and the impact is highest. Once journals and funders copy the first workable defaults, the window closes.
“Abstraction will wash out biology.” Only if it hides assumptions. CELL requires that assumptions are explicit and testable. Competing formalisms are welcome. Hidden ones are not.
“Funders will not care.” Funders care about predictability and reproducibility when they have a way to measure them. Give them a checklist that cuts review time and a public benchmark that cuts debate, and adoption follows.
“I cannot take on another committee.” Do not. Contribute one precise thing that survives scrutiny. A calibration rule for evaluation. A measurement model that matches what instruments actually see. A minimal spec for containers that any student can run. Small, sharp contributions move the needle more than general speeches.
The commitments are simple and non-negotiable.
Open by default. Every standard, benchmark, and reference implementation is public, versioned, and licensed for reuse.
Runnable by default. Artifacts ship with the minimal context needed to execute and inspect them without private knowledge.
Auditable by default. Assumptions, units, and invariants are stated in a way that a third party can check.
Attribution by default. Credit flows to the people who build and maintain the things others depend on, with visible authorship and clear provenance.
If you already care about open science, CELL is a force multiplier for that care. It takes the private rules you hold yourself to and turns them into public rules that anyone can use. That is how norms change. Not by exhortation, but by making the honest path the easiest one to follow.
Help us with your key opinions, your insights, your energy to make science open.
If you have a standing in the field and a key opinion leader with influence, the bare minimum you can do is join our channels and amplify the message. If you have reach, someone in your network may contribute. That is a real win for science.
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