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ASAPbio March Community Call: Institutional Recognition of Preprints

ASAPbio March Community Call: Institutional Recognition of Preprints

Our Community Call on March 26, 2025, focused on the topic of institutional recognition of preprints, which is one of the key barriers to the broader adoption of preprints.

Our first speaker, Michael Dougherty, Professor and Department Chair of Psychology at the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, University of Maryland, represented HELIOS (Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship). HELIOS is a United States-based organization working toward improving how we share and value scholarship. HELIOS promotes practices that enhance research reproducibility, facilitate the better sharing of data and research, and create scholarship more accessible for the public good.

Michael’s work focuses on aligning incentives with institutional values. He believes that institutions’ mission statements are very value-centered, but what an institution says it values and what it rewards is often skewed. He discussed the misalignment at the level of individual scientists, whose activities are focused on reward systems in academia. Instead, he is working to transform the academic reward system so that it rewards people for conducting open, transparent, and high-quality scholarship.

Michael discussed initiatives underway at the University of Maryland that aim to build trust in science, correct misalignments between what the university claims to value and what it rewards, and address issues with problematic metrics used in hiring, promotion, tenure, and annual rewards. 

The areas of work include:

  • Improving rigor through transparency, which would lead to higher quality and reproducible science
  • Giving back to the community: rewarding science that would have a use in society
  • Increasing accessibility to all aspects of science: including a bigger swath of the population in the scientific effort
  • Accepting alternative ways to document aspects of the scholarship that we care about, such as an annotated CV that allows researchers to describe the scope of the research effort, or making the code public to increase reproducibility and transparency.

What did he learn?

  • Faculty members want to do the right thing, but they also want to be rewarded for doing so.
  • It’s challenging to get people to envision a new system; it takes time for change to occur.
  • Administrators are open and supportive of changes, but they want the faculty to bring the ideas; they don’t want to force faculty to do things.

Our second speaker was Shubha Tole from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. She elaborated on the history of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and her role as a Dean. She explained that when she arrived as a Dean, the students in the Graduate School had to have a scientific paper published in a scientific journal to graduate. Due to the lengthy review process, this adds approximately a year to the student’s timeline. 

Under Shubha’s leadership, the Institute changed this rule. Now, they accept preprints instead of journal-published articles for graduation. She explained that although there were obstacles to implementing this change, the leadership of the Mathematics Department helped persuade the Biology Department to adopt it. Shubha explained that in the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Mathematics Department, preprints were accepted for graduation for a long time. Using them as an example, she was able to convince the Biology Department faculty to accept preprints instead of a journal-published article for a student to graduate. 

This allows students to graduate more quickly and decide whether they want to move on or stay with their advisor as a postdoctoral researcher to undergo the review process and have a journal publication.

Some people who had reservations about accepting preprints for graduation were concerned that students would post low-quality work as a preprint. However, based on her experience, concerns about low-quality publications being used for graduation are unfounded, as faculty are reluctant to post a work of low quality on a preprint server, as they do not want low-quality science publicly associated with them. 

During the Q&A session, both speakers agreed that presenting data is the most effective way to convince those who are hesitant about making changes to the system, as researchers tend to respond to data. For example, Shuba presented data on the time it takes from manuscript submission to the journal’s publication. It also helped to have experience on multiple international committees that recognize preprints as published research.

The speakers also discussed their approaches to teaching the undergraduate and graduate students about the publishing system and how to balance striving towards change in academia while still working in the old system of rewards and recognition that values where you publish. 

They advised that one must work within the existing system while still adopting positive practices. Once you have a critical mass of people who are willing to embrace change, others will follow.

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