ASAPbio runs a wide range of community initiatives every year. As 2024 draws to a close, we take a look back at our achievements this year and celebrate our incredible community.
Overview of community initiatives and efforts
In 2024, ASAPbio ran 7 community calls (where external speakers are invited to talk about a variety of topics), 4 Lunch & Learns (a new series where Associate Director Jonny Coates spends half an hour diving into a context-setting topic), 5 local hubs across the globe, a community action group project, an initiative converting journal clubs into preprint review clubs, produced new resources and materials, a fourth iteration of Crowd Preprint Review, and delivered a training course for the Africa Reproducibility Network. This work is in addition to our Fellows program (read more about our 2024 Fellows achievements here).
That’s a lot of effort!
Our community efforts
ASAPbio is, at its very core, a community-focussed organisation. This focus is reflected in the incredible achievements that our community has made this year alone.
Local hubs
This year we expanded our local hubs program to 5 hubs across 3 continents. Each local hub has been run by one of our community members:
- Sweden, run by Lonni Besancon
- Brazil, run by Joao Victor Cabral Costa
- Nigeria, run by Femi Arogundade
- South Africa, run by Thabiso Motaung
- Denmark (now Spain), run by Pablo Ranea-Robles and Sandra Franco Iborra
In Sweden, Lonni ran multiple local events to increase preprint awareness in addition to talking about ASAPbio and preprints at multiple conferences. In Brazil, Joao has been running a graduate-level course that utilises preprint reviews as part of the assessment, in addition to hosting two events about preprints at local institutions. In South Africa, Thabiso organised an event to help recruit for the 2024 Fellows program and has scheduled events across South Africa to raise preprint awareness. In Denmark, Pablo and Sandra ran an event to help recruit ASAPbio Fellows and have subsequently moved their lab to Spain where they will be running a local event to introduce a new institution to preprints. In Nigeria, Femi is co-organising an event with a biotech company.
Community Action Group
Our community action group (CAG) represents the most active members in our community. This year, they embarked on a writing campaign to increase awareness and discussions of preprints. The group have written various landscaping pieces, where they examined the state of preprints in a particular field, which have been published FEBS, The Node and the Physiology magazine. They are continuing these efforts with two more planned articles for early 2025.
Community projects
This year, we supported three community projects by providing funding of $3000 to community members. Early in 2024 community members organised a workshop for researchers based in Nigeria at the Yaba College of Technology. This workshop covered preprints (with ASAPbio and AfricaArXiv), preprint peer review (with PREreview), and eLife’s new publishing model (with eLife). Over 270 people registered for the event with 74 attending in person and 53 attending virtually. In the same month, a separate community project funded a workshop in Tanzania. This was an introductory workshop on preprints at the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences. This workshop featured three talks on scientific publishing, open science, and an introduction to preprints followed by a hands-on session with different preprints servers and a demo on how to upload preprints. The workshop attracted 61 registrations and a total of 33 participants were able to participate in-person. Finally, a third community project supported this year was a preprint club in Rwanda. This project is on-going and will complete in December 2024.
Journal club conversions to preprint clubs
At the beginning of the year, we launched a new initiative to incentivise the conversion of journal clubs into preprint review clubs. We provided $200 in the form of a virtual credit card to cover the cost of refreshments in return for 4 publicly posted preprint reviews. During 2024, we converted 9 Journal clubs to preprint review clubs. These clubs are still underway and will report their achievements next year but the first reviews have begun to be shared.
We also wrote an article about why all journal clubs should become preprint review clubs that was published in FEBS.
Crowd Preprint Review
Our Crowd Preprint Review initiative entered its fourth iteration this year. Launched in July, crowds are being run by 2-3 co-leads who are members of the ASAPbio community. We have four crowds covering Cell Biology, Immunology, Microbiology and Metascience. The crowd leads are more independent than in previous years and the crowds will run for 12 months. So far, we have recruited over 180 crowd members (you can still join here) and posted 16 public preprint reviews.
Community calls
We continued to host external speakers as part of our community call series this year. We hosted 9 speakers covering a wide range of topics from AI and preprints to the new Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation policy. We began the year with Martyn Rittman (CrossRef) discussing how preprints are linked to other outputs. We then heard from Ludo Waltman (CWTS) about the different perceptions towards preprints across the globe. The use of AI in publishing and preprints was discussed by Josh Nicholson (Scite) where we learned about the importance of context-based citation information. In a call co-hosted with Arcadia, Prachee Avasthi and Robert Roth discussed Arcadia’s experiments with publishing and how to measure the impact of research outputs. In a topic that is likely to become even more important, Leslie McIntosh (Digital Science) discussed research integrity, trust markers and the new field of forensic scientometrics. Two 2024 ASAPbio Fellows (Lamis Elkheir and Binay Panda) then gave an overview of preprint adoption in the Global South. We ended the year with Ashley Farley (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) where she gave an overview of the foundation’s new OA policy and held an active Q&A session.
Lunch & Learn sessions
This year, ASAPbio increased our webinar offerings by supplementing community calls with Lunch & Learn sessions. These sessions were delivered by our Associate Director, Jonny Coates, to provide context to the things that ASAPbio is working to change. These began with a brief overview of the history of peer review where we learned about just how recent peer review actually is and the long history of sharing scientific findings without peer review. We then tackled the challenging topic of Robert Maxwell and the impact he had on scientific publishing. The current publishing business models and perverse incentives of the traditional publishers can be directly traced back to one man. We then interrupted the context-based sessions with a teaching-focussed session on writing a pitch for an op-ed. Our final context-based session covered the history of preprints, where we learned that they have a much longer history than many first think. The final session was delivered by Executive Director, Katie Corker, to provide an overview of the updated TOP Guidelines.
Our community has reacted very positively to these new sessions making the three context-setting sessions the most watched and engaged with YouTube output ever for ASAPbio.
Community growth and engagement
Over the course of the year, we have seen significant growth in the ASAPbio community. Our Slack channel reached over 1100 members this year, with our newsletter registering more than 3000 subscribers, 540 of whom were new in 2024. Across social media, we gained over 800 new followers with most of them coming from LinkedIn and BlueSky.
Our community has also engaged more with our content this year. Only counting resources produced in 2024, we have had over 450 downloads. All of our webinars are placed on YouTube which has also seen increased engagement. Our Lunch & Learn sessions in particular have generated more new subscribers than any other individual piece of YouTube content we’ve ever made. Compared to 2023, we increased our subscribers by 104%, watch time by 131% and total views by 35% – meaning people are spending considerably more time actually engaging with our video-based content.
All of our resources are produced under a CC-BY licence and we strongly encourage you to all re-use and adapt things for your own institutions.
Looking forward
If you’d like to contribute to our efforts in promoting preprints and get more involved, then join our community! Sign up to our Slack here. If you have any questions or want to chat then contact Jonny; jonny.coates@asapbio.org.
We will be changing and streamlining our community initiatives in 2025, with clearer opportunities to get more involved. We’ll be announcing more in early January. Stay tuned also for the release of our community call schedule for 2025 towards the end of December. Lastly updates to the ASAPbio website are also coming soon, with a refreshed look and an improved organizing structure for the many resources described here.
