The FlyBase Fast-Track Your Paper data submission tool has been in existence for six and half years. For five of those years we have been emailing the corresponding authors of new publications as they enter our database. In these emails we request that the authors do their own first-pass curation of their new publication. This process involves indicating any data-types in the paper that FlyBase routinely curates and associating any genes that were experimental subjects of the paper with the it. This process literally only takes a couple of minutes of an author’s time and consists of five quick and easy steps:

1. Click the link in the email you received from us or lookup a publication of interest and its curation status in FlyBase.
2. Identify yourself by name and email address so the data submission can be attributed to you.
3. Provide information on the types of data in a publication by checking boxes in order to prioritize further curation by FlyBase.
4. Identify genes that are experimental subjects of the publication by searching for them and selecting them or by uploading a file.
5. Confirm your submission when everything looks correct.

This first-pass curation done by authors benefits FlyBase by making our process of further curating these papers more efficient. The benefit to authors is that it accelerates the incorporation of their published data into FlyBase and greatly expedites the creation of links between gene reports and the report for their publication on our website. To date there have been almost 7,000 data submissions made by about 4,000 different users of this FlyBase data submission tool. These submissions have allowed authors to create links in FlyBase between these 7,000 publications and over 40,000 genes. Our response rate to our emailed requests is consistently between fifty and sixty percent. The success of this tool and its consistent use by the community improved our curation process (see Bunt et al. 2012 DOI: 10.1093/database/bas024) and it now has become an integral part of our curation pipeline.

We have been looking at ways to improve our Fast-Track Your Paper tool since its release in order to make it even more useful to the community and the project. Based on our experience with the tool and its usage and also, importantly, based on feedback from the user community over time we have upgraded the FTYP tool. New in this release improvements include:

• Rebuilt using a modern web design with more interactivity that speeds up the entire submission process significantly.
• Made it faster to associate one or many genes to a publication which speeds up the most time-consuming step.
• Made indicating the generation of any new antibodies in a publication more straightforward.
• Added the ability to bulk upload a large list of genes from a file to associate them with a publication.
• Added the ability to alert FlyBase that a paper describes a gene family or grouping.
• Added support for making data submissions for reviews which is a publication type we do not routinely curate.
• Made it easier to pause during the submission process or to come back later and make corrections to a submission.

Thanks to all in the community that have taken the time to use our Fast-Track Your Paper tool in the past. Special thanks go to those who took the time to contact FlyBase with problems and feedback regarding the tool. We hope that you find the new version of the Fast-Track Your Paper tool an improvement over the old one. If you have any questions or comments regarding the new version of the Fast-Track Your Paper tool please contact us.