As we come to a close on our 5th cohort of ASAPbio Fellows, we wanted to take a moment to celebrate their achievements over the past 8 months.
This year, the Fellows program consisted of two tracks: a culture and community track and a projects track. As part of the culture and community track, Fellows were given training on the current preprint landscape, the history of preprints and peer review, communicating and talking about preprints, and skills in advocacy. Additionally, this year Fellows were required to deliver a local talk on preprints. For the projects track, Fellows optionally participated in one or more of 7 different projects aimed at increasing preprint awareness and adoption.
2024 ASAPbio Fellows
We received 146 applications to our program in 2024. From this, 44 Fellows were selected with 37 successfully completing the program. Our 2024 cohort consisted of individuals from over 21 countries, with an equal number residing in African and USA/EU countries at 17 Fellows each. The remaining Fellows were residents of Brazil, Australia, India and China. This highlights the global reach and inclusivity of the Fellows program. Most Fellows had fewer than 5 years experience (77%) indicating our continued efforts and focus on early career researchers in particular. “Learning more about publishing and peer review” was the most frequently cited reason for joining the Fellows program.
Culture & Community
Community is the heart of ASAPbio, and our Fellows program encapsulates this focus perfectly. In addition to the training that Fellows of previous years have received, this year we had a greater emphasis on embedding Fellows in their local communities as preprint experts. All Fellows were asked to prepare slides and deliver a local talk on preprints. Fellows had full choice over the exact topic, with a variety of topics chosen. Nineteen Fellows successfully delivered a local preprint talk, and as a commitment to the wider community, their slide decks are available to all through our Zenodo repository (here).
Projects
This year, the Fellows engaged in 7 projects relating to preprints. Collectively, the Fellows have produced: 2 preprints, 2 podcast episodes, a 4-part webinar series on preprints in Africa, a poster competition, and 2 scripts for YouTube videos. That’s in addition to the 19 slide decks created as part of the Culture & Community track. It’s been an exceptionally productive year!
Awareness of preprints in Africa
There were two projects specifically focussed on the African region. The first project involved detailed conversations with stakeholders to better understand the perceptions of and barriers to preprint adoption across Africa. There were over 100 registrations from individuals interested in sharing their views on preprints in the African context.
The second project involved a series of seminars to raise awareness of preprints for researchers based in Africa. Over 140 people registered for the webinar series with the Fellows delivering 3 of the 4 sessions, with the fourth being delivered by ASPAbio’s Associate Director. This 4-part webinar series is available on the ASAPbio YouTube channel.
An analysis of the ASAPbio Crowd Preprint Review initiative
ASAPbio has been running our Crowd Preprint Review initiative for 4 years which has culminated in 87 public preprint reviews since 2021. This year, a group of Fellows surveyed crowd members to investigate the experience of being a crowd reviewer. We surveyed all previous crowd members and received a 9% response rate. The outcomes of this project will be posted as a preprint in early December.
Institutional recognition for preprints
Institutional recognition is a vital step towards greater preprint adoption. Frequently cited as a significant barrier to preprint use by researchers, it is essential that institutions adopt policies that support and reward preprint use. Building on a previous ASAPbio funder’s toolkit, a group of Fellows this year developed expanded policy wording for a greater number of institutionally-focussed stakeholders. This whitepaper was preprinted and is available on Zenodo. As a testament to the importance of this topic, the whitepaper has already had over 700 views and 300 downloads in a little over a month after being released.
Preprints and podcasts
To give Fellows an opportunity to participate in something further away from the average activities of a researcher, this year Fellows were offered a project to produce their own preprint episodes. Two Fellows took up this opportunity and produced two episodes; one on the perspective of librarians towards preprints and one on the role of preprints in tenure and promotion. For the librarian episode, Melissa (who herself is a librarian) interviewed Patricia Verdines from Ohio State libraries. In the tenure and promotion episodes, Binay interviewed Mike Eisen, Rahul Siddharthan, Katie Corker (in Part 1) and Fiona Watt (in Part 2) to discuss the global role of preprints in tenure and promotion.
These episodes are available via the Preprints in Motion podcast, and you can listen to the librarian episode here and the tenure and promotion episodes here and here.
Combatting preprint myths
In addition to podcasting, this year we provided Fellows with an opportunity to produce content for YouTube. Despite preprints having been established for over 10 years in the Life Sciences, a number of persistent myths remain. To tackle these myths and build from previous efforts of ASAPbio Fellows, we produced scripts and whiteboard style animated videos. Fellows chose to tackle myths on preprints being preliminary work, scooping and preprint quality . The first 2 of these videos can be found on YouTube. The scripts and further references are also availabe on Zenodo.
Poster competition
To encourage earlier sharing of data and to foster a culture of transparency, a group of Fellows ran a poster competition this year. The competition is based on transparency and openness, two characteristics that are fundamental to a good preprint. The competition closes on Dec 1st 2024 and will announce winners in early January 2025. Two prizes of $500 will be awarded to lead authors of posters that best achieve transparency and openness when sharing ealy results.
Feedback from this year’s program
An end of program survey was emailed to the 43 Fellows who took part in the 2024 Fellows program. The survey received 16 responses (~35% response rate).
Respondents were highly satisfied with the program with 73% rating the program 5/5 and the remainder rating it 4/5. Respondents also stated that the program had met their expectations with 69% rating 5/5 and 31% rating 4/5. Individual Fellows scored the individual cohort calls as very useful in 75% of responses and useful in 23%. Only one Fellow scored a single session as “somewhat useful”. Fellows particularly rated the “information about preprints”, “interactive elements” and “1:1 sessions” as “very satisfied”. The least satisfactory element were the “networking opportunities” and “small group meetings,” which we intend to address with some program revisions in 2025.
Regarding the separation of the program into two tracks, 87% of respondents found this change to be beneficial, with the remainder (2/15) “maybe”. For the Culture and Community track, respondents found the creation of the slide decks to be “very satisfactory” for the majority of respondents, although a minority rated this as “somewhat satisfied”.
As positive as the data is, we thought it would be best to hear directly from some of the 2024 Fellows.
Looking forward
We are very excited to be opening applications for our sixth cohort on 1st Jan 2025. Look out for future announcements across social media and our website. With 100% of our 2024 cohort recommending the program to others, this is an opportunity not to be missed. If you have any questions please email jonny.coates@asapbio.org.
