Reader FAQ ~ Author FAQ ~ Institution FAQ

COBRA Institutional FAQ

Who can have a technical working paper series in COBRA?
Hospitals, research groups, or academic institutions with biostatistics research programs can start a series. Existing COBRA members include Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Harvard School of Public Health, University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine, and the Bioconductor Project: open source software for bioinformatics.
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Why is joining COBRA a good idea?
A COBRA technical paper series will have far greater reach than a school website. In the first quarter of 2006 alone, COBRA papers were downloaded over 50,000 times. Scholars can find your papers by topic, author, keyword, or by institution. We also have PDF search capability, which means that our system allows for a much more powerful and complete search than most. Customized email alerts and RSS feeds are also available to readers, allowing them to be automatically notified of new research. Please see the Reader FAQ for more information. Lastly, COBRA brings the best biostat programs together in one place, maximizing your research exposure and improving your department’s general web presence.

We also pursue several avenues to grow our audience of academics, biomedical professionals and researchers. For example, COBRA has a relationship with Google that facilitates their ability to crawl and index our sites. Our content is featured on medbioworld.com (the largest medical and bioscience resource directory on the Internet) and the Current Web Contents™ portion of the ISI Web of Knowledge (Thomson’s research powerhouse), which adds significantly to our web standing. In addition, COBRA is linked to numerous general biostatistics resource pages throughout the web.
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What else can COBRA do to promote our scholarship?
In addition to the COBRA website, your institution can choose to purchase "COBRA mailers," a comprehensive email service that sends institutionally specific table of contents messages (a summary of your new COBRA content) to our database of over 50,000 researchers and scholars. Opting for mailers will typically triple the number of downloads that your institution’s articles receive.
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Can we brand our technical report series?
Yes. Your institution’s logo and name will be prominently displayed within your COBRA series. We also link out to your department website, allowing visitors to access your department’s webpage. This provides more visibility for the programs and/or services that you offer. Lastly, COBRA mailers are sent out under the name of an honorary editor of your choice (a distinguished member of your institution).
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How can COBRA help us reach out to our own department?
Through COBRA, you can create your own internal mailers, emailing content updates to faculty, alumni, and students.
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Does COBRA replace or supplement our own site's technical report section?
Some institutions who have had a portion of their website devoted to technical reports find that COBRA is a welcome replacement. Others choose to maintain their own site in addition to COBRA. If you don’t already have a technical report series, we encourage you to save yourself the headache and let us create one for you. If you already have one, COBRA can take your existing research to a new level of exposure.
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Who maintains our COBRA site?
We build and maintain your COBRA website. The only thing your department is responsible for is posting papers. The reason behind this is so that you maintain editorial control of content displayed under your moniker.
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Who actually does the work of uploading and posting new reports to the site?
Each institution designates an administrator (a member of your department’s support staff or a particular faculty member) to upload and post papers. The upload process takes about three minutes. Individual authors can also choose to upload their own articles, which will then be sent to the administrator for approval. Our system automatically converts on the fly from Microsoft Word to PDF if needed. For a more detailed description on posting, please visit the Author FAQ.
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How do I know how often papers in our technical reports series are being read?
The administrator of your working paper series can download readership reports at anytime. There are several types of reports that you or your administrator can run on the COBRA system. The "cover page" download report will tell you how many people have accessed the abstract page of your article, while a "full text" report tells you how many people have actually downloaded the full text of the article. A full-text download is accomplished when a reader selects the "download the paper" option and allows the PDF to launch fully in their browser. You can also find out where people are being referred from, by URL and country.
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Does COBRA own the papers that it posts?
Since these technical reports are works in progress, we hold no ownership of the content. Many reports that are currently posted have been published in journals, but continue to be available in some earlier form in COBRA. Most professional journals and/or reviews don’t request the removal of earlier versions; a few do. If they (or you) want the paper taken down at any time, just let us know and we will remove it from the site.
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