Formal education in reviewing manuscripts is rare Source: McDowell et al. Co-reviewing and ghostwriting by early-career researchers in the peer review of manuscripts. eLife 2019;8:e48425.

Public preprint review as a tool to empower the next generation of socially-conscious peer reviewers

By Rebeccah Lijek and Jessica Polka At the July 21, 2021 #FeedbackASAP meeting, Mugdha Sathe (UW), Rebeccah Lijek (Mount Holyoke), Daniela Saderi (PREreview) organized a breakout session on using public preprint review in teaching and mentorship of early career researchers.  Who is a “peer?” The session began with Daniela Saderi leading us in discussion about…

Breakout session Miro board

How to foster a positive preprint feedback culture: From FAST principles to implementation

2022-01-13 update: The FAST principles have now been posted as a preprint. As Chris Jackson pointed out in the first session of #FeedbackASAP, preprint feedback is part of the collaborative culture of science. A positive culture of comments and review of preprints brings many benefits to the scientific process, but what does this culture look…

Stock photo of a person arranging sticky notes in an office environment

Developing a taxonomy to describe preprint review processes

By Victoria Yan 2022-01-27 update: This work has now been completed. Please see our blog post announcing PReF. Why develop a preprint review taxonomy? Dozens of projects organizing peer review of preprints are active or being developed. In this landscape full of new possibilities, differentiating among innovative forms of preprint review is challenging. Furthermore, these…

ASAPbio Preprint Reviewer Recruitment network featuring logos of Review Commons, GigaScience, GigaByte, PeerJ, Proc B, JCB, MBoC, PLOS, eLife, and SAGE

Announcing the Preprint Reviewer Recruitment Network

Today, we’re excited to launch the Preprint Reviewer Recruitment Network, a pilot to share researchers’ preprint reviewing experience with journals looking for reviewers or editorial board members.  Public preprint feedback has the potential to not only help authors and readers, but also to identify potential reviewers and editorial board members for journals. Unfortunately, finding preprint…

FAST principles board

FAST principles to foster a positive preprint feedback culture

2022-04-27 update: The principles are the focus of a Point of View article in eLife. 2022-01-13 update: The FAST principles have now been posted as a preprint. As Ivan Oransky has noted, ‘science is a proposition and a conversation and an argument’ [1]; feedback and discussion around scientific reports are integral parts of the scientific…

Yearly preprints/all-papers in Microsoft Academic Graph, trend by domain, reproduced from Xie B, Shen Z, and Wang K 2021 [8]

Addressing information overload in scholarly literature

Blog post by Christine Ferguson and Martin Fenner Information overload is the difficulty in understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information about that issue, and is generally associated with the excessive quantity of daily information. – Wikipedia [1] Information overload is a common problem, and it is an old…

Review commons Extended Scooping Protection: Preprint posted, protected at 17 journals

Review Commons implements new policies on preprints and extended scoop protection

This post originally appeared on the Review Commons blog. Review Commons is announcing two new policies today: As of August 1, 2021, Review Commons will require all authors to post their manuscript as a preprint, prior to transfer to an affiliate journal1. In return, all the affiliate journals provide authors with scooping protection from the date of posting of the…

Why do some researchers have reservations about preprints? – ASAPbio March Community Call recap

The ASAPbio Community is a global and diverse group of researchers and other stakeholders in science communication. While they bring varied expertise and opinions, they all share an interest and support for the use of preprints. Our Community members had expressed interest in hearing a broader range of perspectives about preprints, beyond the pro-preprint views…

Resources for preprints in the public eye

Today, as described in Project Coordinator Jigisha’s Patel opinion piece in The Scientist, we’re pleased to share a series of resources and guidelines emerging from our work on the representation of preprints to broad audiences. These infographics summarize more detailed documents drafted by working groups who considered how to preprint servers, researchers, institutions, and journalists…