By Varsha Khodiyar, F1000Research.

Releasing information in incremental steps is nothing new to software developers, for whom releasing updates for existing programmes is standard practice. The launch of a new bioinformatics tool is often accompanied by a paper describing the tool for new users. However, due to subsequent regular updates and patches, the original paper describing the tool gradually becomes outdated.

This can increase the barriers for a novice user of the software. Users requires a single source of information about how to use the software, they do not need the software's provenance. F1000Research is an open-access life and biomedical sciences journal, novel in its approach of carrying out transparent peer review, post-publication. F1000Research allows authors to continue to update their published, peer-reviewed papers, threading together incremental updates. This makes it easy for authors to include updates about new software releases within the main paper describing the software.

To encourage bioinformatics tool developers to try this new way of publishing, F1000Research are inviting the submission of papers - free-of-charge - that describe life science software. Use the code SOFT13 to submit your bioinformatics paper free of charge before 2014, including free updates to those papers.

What do you think of this new feature enabling article updates to mirror your software/tool updates? You can leave comments on the F1000Research blog, follow the conversation on twitter (with the hashtag #soft13), or email the F1000Research team.