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Jerome Korzelius is a researcher at the DKFZ in Germany. As F1000 Specialist he has presented talks, helped organize meet-ups, wrote blog posts, and much more. Here he tells about his experience.

If you’d like to become an F1000 Specialist yourself, and tell your own colleagues about F1000, you can sign up here.

What kind of things have you done to tell people about F1000?

I joined F1000 in 2013 when I was still a post-doc in Heidelberg, Germany, at the DKFZ/ZMBH-University of Heidelberg. I organized a seminar about F1000 and a meet-up as well. To my surprise, my efforts as a Specialist even made me Specialist of the Year 2013! At meetings, seminars etc. I always bring up F1000 in case people start talking about writing and literature management. I really use F1000 Workspace a lot and therefore tell everybody about it. Many scientists are still stuck in their old ways and use outdated citation tools. I think Workspace represents a much better and more flexible way to use and share literature when working on a manuscript. I tend to focus on the parts of F1000 that I use most myself, such as Workspace. It makes telling other people about it that much easier if you use if regularly yourself and it comes across more naturally.

Do you have any tips or advice for other F1000 Specialists?

It’s always good to organize a seminar at your institute. This way you reach a lot of people and get to talk to them afterwards. Many people have access to F1000 services and don’t even know it. It would also be a good fit to plan a talk about F1000 in an Open Access Symposium at your university or institute. F1000Research is a good example for bringing up new ways of publishing science faster. A student of mine has worked on sequencing on the MinION from Oxford Nanopore though the MinION Access Program. Since this sequencing platform is still very much under development, it was very helpful to keep up to date with other labs through the Nanopore Channel on F1000Research. This type of practical example always helps to bring the message across when talking at your own institute. Besides that, I sport my F1000 T-shirts at the gym and will tweet about F1000 to whoever is listening!

Finally, can you tell us a little bit about your work?

This May I will move to Jena, Germany to the FLI Leibniz Institute on Aging. There I will continue my work on the regenerative capability of adult stem cells and will start to investigate how this changes during aging. I am fascinated by stem cells and I love working with Drosophila. It is the most versatile model organism: there is such an extensive genetic toolbox and this allows you to ask questions that would be very hard to address in other model systems. We will set up a fly lab in the institute that already works with mice, killifish, C. elegans etc. It is really interesting to work in a place where so many different approaches are taken to address the mystery of age-related organismal decline. Although moving across countries is always a hassle, I am really looking forward to this new opportunity!