A multi-publisher partnership aims to streamline scientific publishing by producing refereed preprints Heidelberg and San Francisco—September 30, 2019—EMBO Press and ASAPbio have partnered to create Review Commons, a platform that peer-reviews research manuscripts in the life sciences before submission to a journal. Papers submitted to Review Commons, which will be launched in December 2019,…
September 20, 9am PDT, 12pm EDT, 6pm CEST The theme of this year’s Peer Review Week, “quality in peer review,” should resonate with anyone—author, referee, or reader—invested in the process of formal publication. But how can those without a direct window into the peer review process be assured of its quality, both the entire body…
Over the last year, the Transpose team (which includes ASAPbio staff Naomi Penfold and Jessica Polka and board member Jennifer Lin) have been working to produce a database of journal peer review, co-reviewing, and (detailed) preprint policies. We anticipate the launch of this database along with an interactive website in the coming weeks. In the…
Publishing peer review reports has many benefits, but critics often worry that it’s unlikely to be read or seen. This isn’t true: data suggest that peer review reports can receive 10% or ⅓ of the traffic to the article itself. However, it stands to reason that this number could go up or down depending on…
This post originally appeared on The Scholarly Kitchen on 2019-03-26. Cover image via Eddi Aguirre. The design of critical infrastructure determines what its users can do, and when. For example, the New York City subway system carries 1.7 billion passengers annually, shapes centers of residential and commercial activity, and enables a vibrant culture with its late night…
Those who have been following ASAPbio for a while know that journal policies on preprinting are always in flux. As adoption of preprints—and editors’ comfort with them—increase, these changes are typically positive. However, one potential downside to a rapidly-evolving policy landscape is the potential difficulty authors may face in finding their footing, especially when preprint…
Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of ReimagineReview, a registry of platforms and experiments innovating around peer review. We now have the technology to experiment with peer review and research evaluation in ways that were not possible decades ago. Many such experiments are already underway—both within the traditional journal system and outside of it—that…
On February 7-9, 2018, editors, publisher, funders, and researchers gathered at HHMI Headquarters in Chevy Chase, MD to discuss innovations in peer review. A clear majority of participants at the meeting agreed that publishing peer review reports (ie, the contents of peer review, whether anonymized or not), would benefit the research community by increasing transparency of…
By Iain Cheeseman Whitehead Institute Journals play a critical role in the scientific process, refining research through peer review and disseminating it to appropriate communities. At its best, the publishing process is a partnership among editors, staff, authors, reviewers, and readers. Each group has a vested interest in working together to ensure a robust and…
By Olavo B. Amaral Institute of Medical Biochemistry, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil As the preprint movement gains traction in biology, the time is ripe to revisit some aspects of scientific publication that we view as fundamental – first and foremost of which is the peer review process itself. Common concerns about preprints…
By Harinder Singh Director, Division of Immunobiology and the Center for Systems Immunology Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center This perspective is a result of the various insightful commentaries that have been posted on the ASAPbio site in the context of the HHMI/Wellcome/ASAPbio meeting on “Transparency, Recognition and Innovation in Peer Review in the Life Sciences.”…
By Gary McDowell, Future of Research When it comes to peer review and the role that Early Career Researchers (ECRs) play in it, I am of course reminded of the immortal words of Steve McKnight in his President’s Message at the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB, emphasis mine): “the average scientist today…
By Vivian Siegel In my own experience, and I’ve written about this in the past, peer review in the context of journal submission suffers from a number of biases. These include journal-based biases that would be eliminated by a journal agnostic process. I summarize the main points below. We all know reviewers are biased (why?…
By Bernd Pulverer, EMBO As preprint posting takes hold in the biosciences community, we need both quality control and curation to ensure we share results in a reproducible and discoverable manner The EC has taken the bold step – at least on paper – to proclaim a Europe that is by 2020 to be ‘Open Innovation’,…
By Elizabeth Moylan, Senior Editor, Peer Review & Innovation, BMC (part of Springer Nature) At BMC, we’ve always supported innovation in peer review and were one of the first publishers to truly open up peer review in 1999. Fiona Godlee, then Editorial Director for BMC, explained the reasons for this decision, including ethical superiority (reviewers…
By Samantha Hindle and Daniela Saderi, PREreview The image above (DOI) is CC-BY 4.0 licensed and is available for download on Figshare. Preprints are freely available scientific manuscripts that have not yet undergone editorial peer review. They provide data and knowledge that is current, accessible by all, and at a stage where community peer review…
By Damian Pattinson, Research Square Introduction The term ‘peer review’ has come to mean any assessment performed on a manuscript prior to publication. So for any paper submitted to a journal, it ‘undergoes peer review’ and it is published. But in actual fact, the act of preparing a manuscript for publication requires a huge number…
By Harinder Singh, Division of Immunobiology and the Center for Systems Immunology, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center Motivation Although major research advances are rapidly being made in the biological and biomedical sciences, the communication of these findings is hampered by existing publication forums. Despite the large and expanding number of journals, there are considerable limitations,…
By Rebecca Lawrence & Vitek Tracz, F1000, rebecca.lawrence@f1000.com We have been successfully running a service (which we call platforms, to distinguish from traditional research journals), for over 5 years at F1000 that is essentially a preprint coupled with formal, invited (i.e. not crowd-sourced) post publication peer review. We have consequently amassed significant experience of running…
By Jessica Polka and Ron Vale, ASAPbio Opening the content of peer review reports—whether they are anonymous or not—will improve their quality, ensure that ideas that emerge through review are accessible to other researchers, and enable innovation and reform. Peer review is considered an essential standard of scientific publishing. Despite complaints, most scientists feel that…