This blog post was written by Aneth Bella David, a 2023 ASAPbio Fellow, and reports on a recently completed community project.
The landscape of scholarly communication is rapidly evolving, with preprints emerging as a transformative tool for research dissemination worldwide. However, in Tanzania like the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa, the adoption of preprints for scholarly communication remains limited (David et al., 2024). Creating awareness of preprints and capacity building especially among early career researchers is one of the ways to address the gap. This workshop was conducted to introduce preprints to Tanzanian early career researchers, which included postgraduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and academicians.
The Workshop
The hands-on event was a one-day introductory workshop on preprints held on 20th March 2024 at Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS), Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It was organized by the ASAPbio fellow Aneth David in partnership with Tanzania Human Genetics Organization (THGO) and the Biotechnology Society of Tanzania. The workshop attracted 61 registrations and a total of 33 participants were able to participate. Although initially the workshop was planned to be full in-person, 6 virtual participants were allowed to participate via zoom meetings since they were not able to travel to attend in person. Being a hands-on workshop, participants were asked whether they had preprints ready for posting, and 10 of them indicated so. The workshop was divided into two parts, theoretical and practical sessions. A theoretical session featured three talks on scientific publishing, open science and an introduction to preprints. The hands-on session featured familiarization with different preprints servers and a demo on how to upload preprints on some of well renowned servers including bioXirv, MedRxiv, OSF affiliated server AfricArXiv, and Qeios. Participants then had an opportunity to practice on how to navigate through different servers and upload preprints for those who were ready to do so.
Sessions Overview
Session 1: Introduction to Open Science (OS) and Principles by Dr. Paul Muneja
During the first session, Dr. Paul Muneja took participants through the fundamental concepts of scholarly communication, exploring its historical evolution and the various formal and informal channels through which scientific information is disseminated. Dr. Muneja then elucidated on Open Science (OS), defining its scope and highlighting its contributions to the accessibility of scientific knowledge. He emphasized the benefits of transparency and interdisciplinary collaborations in the shift towards openness in research practices and shared strategies for practicing OS, particularly utilizing open-access publishing platforms. He finished the session by providing situational examples for analysis and discussion on scholarly communication and OS.
Session 2: The Publications Landscape by Dr. Mohamed Zahir
Dr. Mohamed Zahir discussed the significance of publications in disseminating research findings and their role in academic recognition and advancement. He provided an overview of the publication process, covering submission, peer review, acceptance, and publication stages. On selecting suitable journals for publication, he encouraged the use of journal finders and considering factors such as relevance and impact. He also pointed out some key considerations for each stage of the publication process, including common reasons for article acceptance and rejection in peer-reviewed journals. Furthermore, Dr. Zahir addressed authorship criteria, ensuring clarity on ethical issues such as ghostwriting and gift authorship. Lastly, he explained the importance of collaboration and acknowledged each author’s contribution to the completion of the article, thereby underlining the significance of teamwork in research endeavors.
Session 3: Introduction to Preprints by Dr. Aneth David
In this session, Dr. Aneth David introduced the concept, history, and characteristics of preprints. She highlighted the principles of openness and transparency, the role of preprints in accelerating the dissemination of research, as well as the benefits, challenges, concerns, and misconceptions related to the use of preprints. She also took participants through the preprints landscape with different options for servers as well as the general process of publishing a preprint. Dr. David gave tips on writing a preprint, including structure and formatting tips. She also discussed navigating preprint servers and their main differences.
Session 4: Hands-on Activities on Preprints
During this session, Dr. David demonstrated how to select a preprint server and the process of preprint submission on different servers given differing interfaces, focus areas and types of articles accepted. The session was finalized by hands-on group activities on the process of submitting a preprint. The demo was followed by collective upload of a preprint (Yona et al., 2024). Participants were then allowed to explore preprints servers on their own based on their interests and upload preprints for those who had them ready. Following the workshop sessions, participants had a chance to engage in networking and collaborative discussions amongst themselves and facilitators. This interactive platform facilitated the exchange of expertise and experiences, it also fostered meaningful connections among attendees. This social component of the training further solidified their understanding of the workshop topics through dialogue and encouraging continued collaboration and knowledge-sharing beyond formal sessions.
Outcomes and Reflections
The workshop was a success. Most of the participants had a low awareness of preprints, but the concept was well received. The majority of the participants were ECRs who immediately saw the benefits of preprints, especially to their careers. This was more so for the participants from biomedical fields such as medicine and nursing, where publishing is not a priority. ECRs in these fields usually lack guidance to publish their works, whether on traditional platforms or as preprints. Participants showed strong interest and curiosity and asked many questions. Post workshop feedback sessions indicated that there was a need for more of the same kind of activities, possibly targeting specific institutions, fields, or even lab groups. We believe that ECRs can be a source of change in scholarly communication. During and following the workshop, a total of 2 preprints were published (Mduda 2024; Yona et al. 2024), contrary to expectations where 10 participants indicated they had manuscripts ready for publishing. Nevertheless, a preprints support group was born out of the workshop where participants and other interested people continue to engage and get support on preprints from ASAPbio fellows.
Acknowledgements
The workshop was funded by ASABio and co-hosted by the Tanzania Human Genetics Organization (THGO) and the Biotechnology Society of Tanzania (BST) under Dr. Aneth David, an ASAPbio fellow.
References
David, A.B., Elkheir, L.Y.M., Dine, R.D., Adamolekun, E., Coates, J.A., 2024. The status and challenges of preprint adoption in Africa. https://doi.org/10.31730/osf.io/y7nqx
Mduda, C.A., 2024. Non-peroxide antibacterial activity of Meliponula (Axestotrigona) ferruginea honey from Tanzania. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.03.20.585900
Yona, C., Bakari, R., George, S., David, A., 2024. Bibliometric analysis and current status of Leishmaniasis research indexed in Scopus, 2010 -2023. https://doi.org/10.32388/RXCFQE
