ASAPbio newsletter vol 3 – REQUESTING FEEDBACK on a central preprint service for biology

Dear ASAPbio subscriber,

It’s been an exciting few months at ASAPbio! Here’s what’s happened:

• The report of our February meeting at HHMI was published in Science, and Ron Vale and Tony Hyman recently published an article about priority of discovery & preprints in eLife.
• ASAPbio was awarded grants totalling $400,000 in provisional funding from the Arnold, Sloan, Simons, and Moore foundations for a period of 18 months.
• We held a Funders’ Workshop at the NIH on May 24th.
• As an output of this, representatives from funding agencies called for ASAPbio to develop a proposal for a preprint service for biology.
• In response to this request, we’re now seeking feedback from the community on a draft proposal for a central preprint service that could aggregate content from multiple servers. Please consider leaving a public comment on the web and sharing the link with your networks. After future iterations, we will present several variations to funders in the fall.
• To develop the technical aspects of this proposal, we’re hosting a Technical Workshop in Cambridge, MA on 8/30. We’re aiming to provide a video stream so that anyone can follow along.

Finally, effective 8/1, I’m now serving as full-time director of ASAPbio! Please don’t hesitate to contact me with any comments, questions, or ideas on how we can work together to advance the productive use of preprints in biology.

Best,

Jessica Polka, PhD

Director, ASAPbio