🚢 Pub-a-thon 2026

A biweekly scientific writing & peer-review workshop. Every two weeks the crew meets, picks one manuscript section, and works through it together using the Roberts Lab Writing Guide. Each manuscript is a little boat sailing from the Port of Idea to Publication Harbor — and this repo's GitHub Page tracks the voyage. ⚓

👉 View the live tracker

(Once Pages is enabled — see setup below.)

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⚓ The 8 Ports of Call

We tackle one section per meeting, in the order the writing guide recommends:

#	Port	What we do
1	🎯 Title	Convey the central contribution in one line.
2	📝 Abstract	A self-contained mini-paper (150–300 words).
3	🧭 Introduction	Establish why the work matters.
4	🔬 Methods	Enable replication and judge credibility.
5	📊 Results	Present the data and the logical evidence.
6	💭 Discussion	Interpret findings and implications.
7	📚 Refs & Acks	Acknowledge prior work and helpers.
8	✨ Final Edit	The three-pass review: details → structure → big picture.

A manuscript's progress bar = sections complete ÷ 8. Reach 8/8 and the boat pulls into the harbor 🏝️ (confetti included 🎉).

🗓️ How a meeting works

1. Open the Writing Guide to that meeting's section.
2. The author shares their draft; the crew gives peer-review feedback on that section only.
3. After the meeting, log what got done (see below) — the boat advances.

We meet every two weeks. The site shows a live countdown to the next meeting.

➕ Add your manuscript

Two ways:

• Easy (automatic): open a New manuscript issue and fill out the form. A bot (issue-update.yml) parses it, adds the entry to data/manuscripts.json, commits, and closes the issue — the live page refreshes a minute or two later. ✨
• Direct: edit data/manuscripts.json and open a PR (see CONTRIBUTING.md).

✅ Log progress

After each meeting, mark the section done with a Progress issue — the same bot checks off those sections (and updates status) automatically. Or edit the manuscript's sectionsComplete list in data/manuscripts.json directly.

How the automation works: when an issue labeled new-manuscript or progress is opened/edited, the workflow runs scripts/issue_to_data.py, validates the result, and commits it. If it can't parse the form it comments asking a maintainer to apply it by hand — it never pushes broken data. Requires Settings → Actions → General → Workflow permissions → Read and write.

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🛠️ Maintainer setup (one time)

1. Settings → Pages → Build and deployment → Source: GitHub Actions. The included pages.yml workflow publishes the site on every push to main.
2. That's it. The site is plain HTML/CSS/JS reading data/manuscripts.json — no build step.

The links above assume the repo lives at RobertsLab/pubathon-2026. If it lives somewhere else, the relative ../../issues/... links still work; only update the hard-coded URL in index.html's top buttons and the live-tracker link above.

🧪 Local preview

python3 -m http.server 4173
# open http://localhost:4173

Validate the data file before committing:

python3 scripts/validate.py

📁 Repo layout

index.html              # the tracker page
assets/style.css        # nautical theme
assets/app.js           # renders cards + progress from the data file
data/manuscripts.json   # ← the single source of truth (edit this!)
scripts/validate.py     # sanity-checks the data file (runs in CI)
.github/                # issue forms + Pages/validate workflows
meetings/               # running log of what we covered each meeting

Fair winds and following seas. 🌊