To kick off 2025, we at ASAPbio held our January community call on the topic of what’s next for ASAPbio’s strategic direction. If you weren’t able to make it, you can watch the recording (below). What follows is a brief summary of what you should expect to see soon from us.
For the past eight years, ASAPbio has been a strong advocate for open, rapid sharing of research, especially via preprinting. Our successes are visible in the rapid adoption of preprints in the life sciences. Yet, even as preprints have exploded in growth, the volume of life science research articles has also grown substantially. We estimate the proportion of life science research worldwide that is currently preprinted to be about 13% (based on data from Europe PMC). This number represents a substantial degree of adoption that is still far from universal.
As we continue to advocate for increased adoption of more open, rapid, and rigorous research reporting, both in preprints and in other areas of open scholarly communication, ASAPbio will continue to invest effort in you, our community. You are the reason for the changes that we have observed so far, and your continued partnership will be vital to our success going forward. As noted on the call, we are planning some changes for our community programming in the coming months as well. A follow up blog next week will explain those changes in more detail. Stay tuned!
We are also shifting substantial attention to address an issue that you have told us is crucial to expanding adoption of open research practices: rewards and incentives. Although survey data is clear that researchers see the benefits for science of practices like preprinting (see, e.g., this report commissioned by cOAlition S), they simultaneously report that they do not feel that these practices are recognized and rewarded by their employers. Notably, this issue seems to affect researchers worldwide, perhaps even being more strongly felt by researchers in the Global South. It seems clear that researchers will be unlikely to take up new practices if they believe they will not benefit, and might even harm, their careers by doing so.
To address these challenges, ASAPbio is planning projects to engage various parts of the academic ecosystem, including heads of academic departments, to enable them to create environments that are more supportive of the types of new practices that we are advocating for. We’ll be convening a community of practice of life science department leaders who are looking to make changes together that would be difficult to do individually. We’ll also be preparing case studies of exemplary departments and other organizations to showcase good practices in action.
We need your help! If you know of a department that is already living the vision that ASAPbio is championing, tell us about them in this brief form. In particular, we want to know about departments that are strong, positive role models in terms of their culture of preprinting, encouragement of transparent peer evaluation, and/or general support for researcher-led, open, rigorous research communication practices.
To kick off 2025, we at ASAPbio held our January community call on the topic of what’s next for ASAPbio’s strategic direction. If you weren’t able to make it, you can watch the recording (below). What follows is a brief summary of what you should expect to see soon from us.
For the past eight years, ASAPbio has been a strong advocate for open, rapid sharing of research, especially via preprinting. Our successes are visible in the rapid adoption of preprints in the life sciences. Yet, even as preprints have exploded in growth, the volume of life science research articles has also grown substantially. We estimate the proportion of life science research worldwide that is currently preprinted to be about 13% (based on data from Europe PMC). This number represents a substantial degree of adoption that is still far from universal.
As we continue to advocate for increased adoption of more open, rapid, and rigorous research reporting, both in preprints and in other areas of open scholarly communication, ASAPbio will continue to invest effort in you, our community. You are the reason for the changes that we have observed so far, and your continued partnership will be vital to our success going forward. As noted on the call, we are planning some changes for our community programming in the coming months as well. A follow up blog next week will explain those changes in more detail. Stay tuned!
We are also shifting substantial attention to address an issue that you have told us is crucial to expanding adoption of open research practices: rewards and incentives. Although survey data is clear that researchers see the benefits for science of practices like preprinting (see, e.g., this report commissioned by cOAlition S), they simultaneously report that they do not feel that these practices are recognized and rewarded by their employers. Notably, this issue seems to affect researchers worldwide, perhaps even being more strongly felt by researchers in the Global South. It seems clear that researchers will be unlikely to take up new practices if they believe they will not benefit, and might even harm, their careers by doing so.
To address these challenges, ASAPbio is planning projects to engage various parts of the academic ecosystem, including heads of academic departments, to enable them to create environments that are more supportive of the types of new practices that we are advocating for. We’ll be convening a community of practice of life science department leaders who are looking to make changes together that would be difficult to do individually. We’ll also be preparing case studies of exemplary departments and other organizations to showcase good practices in action.
We need your help! If you know of a department that is already living the vision that ASAPbio is championing, tell us about them in this brief form. In particular, we want to know about departments that are strong, positive role models in terms of their culture of preprinting, encouragement of transparent peer evaluation, and/or general support for researcher-led, open, rigorous research communication practices.