African scientists launch their own preprint repository
Source: Nature
Job posting: advance the use of preprints in the life sciences as Associate Director at ASAPbio
2018-09-25 update: This posting is now closed. Join us to help make scholarly communication in the life sciences more open and efficient by catalyzing cultural change around the use of preprints! About ASAPbio We’re a young 501(c)(3) nonprofit that got its start in start in 2015 as an informal group of researchers who organized…
Advocating for publishing peer review
By Iain Cheeseman Whitehead Institute Journals play a critical role in the scientific process, refining research through peer review and disseminating it to appropriate communities. At its best, the publishing process is a partnership among editors, staff, authors, reviewers, and readers. Each group has a vested interest in working together to ensure a robust and…
Comparing quality of reporting between preprints and peer-reviewed articles – a crowdsourced initiative
By Olavo B. Amaral Institute of Medical Biochemistry, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil As the preprint movement gains traction in biology, the time is ripe to revisit some aspects of scientific publication that we view as fundamental – first and foremost of which is the peer review process itself. Common concerns about preprints…
ASAPbio newsletter vol 12 – peer review meeting summary, preprint survey, and collecting commenting venues
Dear subscribers, This month, we summarize a recent meeting on peer review and present two requests: Support for open reports (signed or not): summary of the HHMI/Wellcome/ASAPbio Peer Review meeting On February 7-9, 2018, a group of approximately 90 junior and senior scientists, publishers, editors, and funders convened at HHMI Headquarters in Chevy Chase, MD…
How to launch a transformative and sustainable forum for publication and scholarly critiques of research in the life sciences?
By Harinder Singh Director, Division of Immunobiology and the Center for Systems Immunology Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center This perspective is a result of the various insightful commentaries that have been posted on the ASAPbio site in the context of the HHMI/Wellcome/ASAPbio meeting on “Transparency, Recognition and Innovation in Peer Review in the Life Sciences.”…
Early Career Researchers and their involvement in peer review
By Gary McDowell, Future of Research When it comes to peer review and the role that Early Career Researchers (ECRs) play in it, I am of course reminded of the immortal words of Steve McKnight in his President’s Message at the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB, emphasis mine): “the average scientist today…
In support of journal-agnostic review
By Vivian Siegel In my own experience, and I’ve written about this in the past, peer review in the context of journal submission suffers from a number of biases. These include journal-based biases that would be eliminated by a journal agnostic process. I summarize the main points below. We all know reviewers are biased (why?…
Preprint QC
By Bernd Pulverer, EMBO As preprint posting takes hold in the biosciences community, we need both quality control and curation to ensure we share results in a reproducible and discoverable manner The EC has taken the bold step – at least on paper – to proclaim a Europe that is by 2020 to be ‘Open Innovation’,…
Advancing peer review
By Elizabeth Moylan, Senior Editor, Peer Review & Innovation, BMC (part of Springer Nature) At BMC, we’ve always supported innovation in peer review and were one of the first publishers to truly open up peer review in 1999. Fiona Godlee, then Editorial Director for BMC, explained the reasons for this decision, including ethical superiority (reviewers…
Preprint Journal Clubs: building a community of PREreviewers
By Samantha Hindle and Daniela Saderi, PREreview The image above (DOI) is CC-BY 4.0 licensed and is available for download on Figshare. Preprints are freely available scientific manuscripts that have not yet undergone editorial peer review. They provide data and knowledge that is current, accessible by all, and at a stage where community peer review…
On the Need for Editorial Standards
By Damian Pattinson, Research Square Introduction The term ‘peer review’ has come to mean any assessment performed on a manuscript prior to publication. So for any paper submitted to a journal, it ‘undergoes peer review’ and it is published. But in actual fact, the act of preparing a manuscript for publication requires a huge number…
New Forum for Peer Reviewed Research in the Biomedical Sciences
By Harinder Singh, Division of Immunobiology and the Center for Systems Immunology, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center Motivation Although major research advances are rapidly being made in the biological and biomedical sciences, the communication of these findings is hampered by existing publication forums. Despite the large and expanding number of journals, there are considerable limitations,…
F1000: our experiences with preprints followed by formal post-publication peer review
By Rebecca Lawrence & Vitek Tracz, F1000, rebecca.lawrence@f1000.com We have been successfully running a service (which we call platforms, to distinguish from traditional research journals), for over 5 years at F1000 that is essentially a preprint coupled with formal, invited (i.e. not crowd-sourced) post publication peer review. We have consequently amassed significant experience of running…
It’s time to open the black box of peer review
By Jessica Polka and Ron Vale, ASAPbio Opening the content of peer review reports—whether they are anonymous or not—will improve their quality, ensure that ideas that emerge through review are accessible to other researchers, and enable innovation and reform. Peer review is considered an essential standard of scientific publishing. Despite complaints, most scientists feel that…
Peer review as practised at Wellcome Open Research: analysis of Year 1
By Robert Kiley, Head of Open Research, Wellcome Introduction In November 2016 Wellcome became the first research funder to launch a publishing platform for the exclusive use of its grantholders. Wellcome Open Research (WOR), run on behalf of Wellcome by Faculty of 1000 (F1000), uses a model of immediate publication followed by invited, post-publication peer…
Scientific Publishing in the Digital Age
By Bodo M. Stern and Erin K. O’Shea Howard Hughes Medical Institute Chevy Chase, Maryland Summary Life scientists feel increasing pressure to publish in high-profile journals as they compete for jobs and funding. While academic institutions and funders are often complicit in equating journal placement with impact as they make hiring and funding decisions, we…
APPRAISE (A Post-Publication Review and Assessment In Science Experiment)
By Michael B. Eisen Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, UC Berkeley mbeisen@gmail.com, @mbeisen With the rapid growth of bioRxiv, biomedical research is entering a new era in which papers describing our ideas, experiments, data and discoveries are made available to our colleagues and the public without having undergone peer…