In 2024, ASAPbio ran a poster competition encouraging the transparent and early sharing of data, ideas and protocols. Early dissemination is vital in times of emergency, such as global pandemics. But even outside of these situations, earlier sharing of work accelerates scientific discovery. We’ve seen the scientific community increasingly embrace the rapid release of research…
Are you new to preprints and want to learn more about their use? Have you been using preprints for a while and now want to engage others? Then our Fellows program is for you! The use of preprints in the life sciences has grown over recent years, and an essential driver has been community support…
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…
As we come to a close on our 5th cohort of ASAPbio Fellows, we wanted to take a moment to celebrate their achievements over the past 8 months. This year, the Fellows program consisted of two tracks: a culture and community track and a projects track. As part of the culture and community track, Fellows…
By Katie Corker (ASAPbio), Ludo Waltman (CWTS Leiden), Jonny Coates (ASAPbio) We are excited to share a new ASAPbio resource: a brief explainer on the Publish-Review-Curate model of scientific communication. We have published the explainer on MetaArXiv, and we invite you to access it here. Abstract: The purpose of this brief is to provide an…
This blog post was co-written by Jonny Coates and 2024 ASAPbio Fellows; Josie, Jade & Lamis It’s peer review week and to celebrate, we are releasing a preview of one of the 2024 ASAPbio Fellows projects focused on investigating the ASAPbio Crowd Preprint Review activities. ASAPbio Crowd Preprint Review The theme of peer review week…
By Katie Corker (ASAPbio) & Lisa Cuevas Shaw (COS) Keeping current on organizations and initiatives that are active in the area of open scholarly communication is challenging. Like other parts of the open science community, the open scholarly communications landscape is decentralized, fast-paced, and constantly evolving. To identify both established and emerging organizations and initiatives,…
Share your research results, data, ideas, or tools for a chance to win one of two $500 cash prizes Transparent and early sharing of data, ideas and protocols Current publishing practices don’t reflect the often disorderly trajectory of scientific research. Negative data, unreplicated results, or early-stage ideas are often omitted from the scientific narrative in…
Being part of the ASAPbio community is an enourmously enriching experience. We know how awesome the community is as we get to work with incredible individuals every day. However, we want the world to know how great our active community members are too, and so earlier this year, we worked with our graphic designer to…
This blog post was written by Aneth Bella David, a 2023 ASAPbio Fellow, and reports on a recently completed community project. The landscape of scholarly communication is rapidly evolving, with preprints emerging as a transformative tool for research dissemination worldwide. However, in Tanzania like the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa, the adoption of preprints for scholarly…
A comprehensive and high quality survey of researcher attitudes toward the scholarly publishing process was published last week. The joint product of a consultation with Research Consulting and the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) Leiden, a wide-ranging report on the survey, along with the complete dataset and survey materials, are now available. The…
This is a post written by Gracielle Higino about her community project that was funded in 2023. I was tired of hearing students and colleagues sharing their bad experiences with reviewers. I was tired of working really hard to submit a paper for publication and receiving inconsiderate reviews and editorial decisions. We needed a change…
In 2016, ASAPbio began its journey with a simple yet powerful mission: to accelerate research and communication in the life sciences. Since then, we have made significant strides and contributions to the adoption of preprints and other innovations in scientific publishing. Now, we are thrilled to share some exciting updates that will ensure ASAPbio continues…
Guest post by; Doherty Funmilayo PhD, Atoyebi Abdulwakeel O., Balogun Peter, Aguh Anthony and Adamolekun Emmanuel A hybrid training titled “Empowering Researchers: Leveraging Preprints for Academic Advancement” was organized by Yaba College of Technology, Centre for Research Support and Grants Management, Lagos, Nigeria on March 11, 2024 and sponsored by ASAPbio as one of their…
Victoria Yan started her preprint advocate journey as the Project Coordinator for ASAPbio’s ReimagineReview. She is now an Open Science Research Information Specialist at EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany. In the following interview, we discuss how EMBL is promoting the use of recognition of preprints from an institutional perspective. How do preprints fit into the bigger…
Join us to make scholarly communication in the life sciences more open and efficient by catalyzing cultural change in scholarly communication, for instance around the use of preprints and other interim research products, transparent review, and other innovations! About ASAPbio ASAPbio is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization working toward a vision of a life sciences communication…
Are you new to preprints and want to learn more about their use? Have you been using preprints for a while and now want to engage others? Then our Fellows program is for you! The use of preprints in the life sciences has grown over recent years, and an important driver has been community support…
Traditional journal clubs are present in most labs and departments bringing together early career researchers to discuss and review a chosen article. These groups effectively perform peer review but often don’t share the comments with the authors. This year ASAPbio is launching a fund to support current journal clubs in performing (and sharing) peer reviews…
In 2023 we progressed 38 people through the third installment of the ASAPbio Fellows program. Together this group participated in cohort calls to provide fundamental knowledge and training around preprints in addition to multiple projects, which we celebrate here. Awareness of preprints in Africa The adoption of preprints across the globe has not been equitable,…
Introduction Since the launch of bioRxiv in 2013, preprints have seen an explosion in use and adoption across the life sciences. Preprints now represent ~10% of the biomedical literature and are seeing increasing recognition across funding bodies, policy makers, academics and universities in promotion and hiring decisions. However, this adoption and recognition is not globally…
In our November 2023 community call, we heard from Lonni Besancon (Assistant Professor, Linkoping University) about his work exposing fraudulent and unreliable science. Lonni began with an overview of how he started researching reliability issues and highlighted that this is not his primary role; indeed, it is a large issue in the current system that…
We’re pleased to announce preprint launch parties during Cell Bio 2023 (Boston, MA, USA)! These lunch events are not formally affiliated with ASCB/EMBO, but will be held Monday and Tuesday, Dec 4 and 5, at a conference room at street level about a 10’ walk from the conference center. The agenda The event will kick…
Take cOAlition S’s survey by the November 29th deadline to support a new model of publishing cOAlition S, an initiative of more than 2 dozen national funders and charitable organizations, has recently released the “Towards Responsible Publishing” proposal. The two key features of this proposal, as stated in an introductory blog post, are: 1. Authors,…
As this year’s Fellows program comes to an end we wanted to reflect back on the past 8 months. The 2023 Fellows have been involved in a variety of projects from crowd preprint review to exploring the perceptions of preprints from researchers across Africa. Throughout the program, we have been utilising a fun, if underused,…
Science is a community effort, but publishing has long been co-opted by commercial interests, where researchers’ labor in authoring, reviewing, and editing are used to bolster publishers’ profits. Preprints are free to post and read, but to what extent do commercial interests influence the space? The theme of Open Access week 2023 was “community over…
The practice of preprinting in the life sciences has grown rapidly. In addition to accelerating scientific publication, preprinting also has the potential to open new avenues of communication among researchers. For example, preprint peer review offers tremendous potential for changing the culture of scientific assessment, broadening participation, and enhancing the robustness of scholarship. While only…
“[T]he Federation of American Scientists (FAS) is partnering with the Center for Open Science and the Wilson Center to source ideas that can chart a course for the next decade of U.S. government action.” See below our response to the call. Motivation: What is an important challenge and/or opportunity in open science you hope to address? Why and why…
Culture change happens within communities. While virtual programs like the ASAPbio Fellows and Community calls link preprint enthusiasts across continents, nothing beats face-to-face interactions. So, as in-person events picked up earlier this year, we created a new program to support discussions about preprints; the ASAPbio Local Hubs program with three community leaders. Here, two of…
Despite technological advances, the time and amount of data required to publish scientific results in journals has increased. The lengthy process of peer review is contributing significantly to that timeline. One of the ways in which this issue can be improved is preprint peer-review, which has been becoming more popular in recent years with new…
These events have now been announced! See details and sign up to attend Network with colleagues in your subfield attending Cell Bio 2023 while celebrating the release of the latest papers at Preprint Launch Parties, a series of events ASAPbio will host in Boston from December 2-6. After a meet & greet over lunch, the…
Preprints have the potential to bring about greater equity in the publishing process and academia more widely. However, the adoption of preprints varies significantly across academic fields and geographical regions. Across Africa, there is limited evidence regarding the number of preprints posted and used. However, the data that does exist points to a low number…
This post originally appeared on Olivier Pourret’s blog and in Indonesian on Dasapta Erwin Irawan’s blog. Authors According to Katharine Sanderson, “publishing-industry representatives warn” that May’s EU Council call for a “no pay” academic publishing model is “unrealistic and lack[ing] detail”. However, the proposal is already being implemented via several approaches: (i) Authors can publish their work…
As the fall conference season approaches, consider maximizing the impact of your talk or poster by posting it as a preprint! While you can also archive your slides or the image of your poster on Zenodo, Figshare, or another repository (a great way to increase your visibility and get a DOI), there are several benefits…
Everyone should have free and immediate access to research results, especially when they are publicly funded. Preprints are one way to share papers immediately and without cost to authors and readers, but much of the peer reviewed literature is still behind paywalls. The 2022 Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo, also known as the Nelson…
Our fourth Community Call of 2023 featured a discussion about the use of preprints in research assessment. The adoption of any product or innovation requires the presence of appropriate incentives and preprints are no different. Academia is driven by research and researcher assessment; from funding bodies awarding grants, hiring committees assessing potential new faculty members…
Different institutions around the world have varying requirements for PhD students to graduate. Some require a thesis whilst others require published papers (or several!). Publishing a paper can take months or even years, delaying the graduation of students in programmes with this requirement. Delays in graduating can have serious consequences for students. Preprints speed up…
Interested in honing your peer review skills while providing valuable feedback to preprint authors? Then join one of our preprint review crowds! Following our two previous cycles of preprint review activities, we are thrilled to announce that ASAPbio will host more crowd preprint review activities in 2023. This year our crowd preprint review activities will…
Iratxe Puebla and Francisco Silva Garcés This post has been cross-posted on the SciELO blog, in both Spanish and Portuguese. The first Iberoamerican Congress for Open Science took place on 23-24 November 2022, as a forum for Iberoamerican dialogue on the right to science and to promote change in how we understand science, from an…
This is the third in our series of posts highlighting the winners of the ASAPbio competition ‘Make your negative result a preprint winner,’ which celebrates the value of using preprints to share negative and inconclusive scientific results. In this post, we hear from Livia Songster (University of California San Diego), the first author of the preprint ‘Woronin…
This is the second in our series of posts highlighting the winners of the ASAPbio competition ‘Make your negative result a preprint winner,’ which celebrate the value of using preprints to share negative and inconclusive scientific results. In this post, we hear from Lilya Andrianova (University of Exeter Medical School & University of Glasgow), the first author…
Last week we announced the winners of the ASAPbio competition ‘Make your negative result a preprint winner’, a project by a group of ASAPbio Fellows that aimed to celebrate the value of using preprints to share negative and inconclusive scientific results. We have talked to the authors of the winning preprints to learn more about…
As of 2023-05-11, 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, transparent review, and other advances in scholarly communication! About ASAPbio ASAPbio is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization working toward a vision of a life…
Today, we’re happy to share a preprint written by a subset of the participants in December’s Recognizing Preprint Peer Review Meeting hosted by ASAPbio, HHMI and EMBO. It’s an exciting time for preprint review, with new services, models, and policies providing the foundation for a growing ecosystem. At the same time, the diversity in the…
Last month, the US NIH released a Request for Information (RFI) for feedback on its planned implementation of last year’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) directive to make all US federally-funded research immediately publicly accessible. In addition to ensuring that “publications resulting from NIH-supported research are made available in PMC without…
We are pleased to announce the winners of the ASAPbio competition ‘Make your negative result a preprint winner’, which aimed to highlight the value of sharing negative and inconclusive scientific results via preprints. We know that science advances through a persistent exploration of research questions and approaches, and that this brings with it the fact…
Preprints help to improve the overall quality, integrity and reproducibility of research outputs, as highlighted in UNESCO’s recommendations on open science. Preprint adoption is increasing across scientific disciplines and geographies thanks to the involvement of multiple players, including researchers, publishers, institutions, societies, and funders. Funders can significantly influence, and benefit from, the preprint landscape by…
ASAPbio hosts a global community and we regularly organize online events and activities for audiences across the world. At the same time, we recognize that in-person interactions can be invaluable for developing new relationships and the deeper engagement needed for change in science communication. To support and amplify the work that community members do in…
ASAPbio is thrilled to join the Transform to Open Science (TOPS) initiative, a NASA project “designed to rapidly transform agencies, organizations, and communities to an inclusive culture of open science.” TOPS is also part of US White House’s Year of Open Science. Quoting the TOPS website, the initiative’s four goals are to: How ASAPbio is…
Our first Community Call of 2023 hosted a discussion about the use of preprints by communities in East Asia. While there has been increasing use of preprints in the last few years, trends so far suggest that communities from different geographical regions are at different stages of adoption. An analysis of bioRxiv preprints by Abdill…
In advance of the Recognizing Preprint Peer Review meeting in December 2022, ASAPbio convened two Working Groups of different stakeholders to articulate the added value of incorporating preprint review into assessment processes, catalog potential uses of preprint review as part of assessment processes, develop working definitions for preprint review according to the needs of different stakeholders and discuss how…
In advance of the Recognizing Preprint Peer Review meeting in December 2022, ASAPbio convened two Working Groups of different stakeholders to articulate the added value of incorporating preprint review into assessment processes, catalog potential uses of preprint review as part of assessment processes, develop working definitions for preprint review according to the needs of different stakeholders and…
Are you new to preprints and want to learn more about their use? Have you been wondering what the buzz is about preprint review? Have you been using preprints for a while and now want to engage others? Then our Fellows program is for you! The use of preprints in the life sciences has grown…
Preprints provide a great avenue for researchers to get feedback on their work from the community. This type of community feedback is particularly valuable when gathered on early preprints, that is, on manuscripts that are still work-in-progress, prior to their submission for journal publication. The feedback from the community can allow authors to get a…
In preparation for the Recognizing Preprint Peer Review workshop, ASAPbio integrated input from two working groups to prepare a survey for researchers, funders, and journal editors and publishing organization employees. The survey sought to gather views and experience with preprint feedback and review from a broad range of stakeholders, to help inform the conversations at…
Post by ASAPbio Fellow Ana Đorđević On 2 December 2022, the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Belgrade (Serbia), hosted a lecture concerning open science and preprints. The event was supported by ASAPbio and aimed to raise awareness around preprints and their place within open science among the local Serbian researchers, and to encourage this…
Would you like to organize an event about preprints and are unsure where to start? Then search no more, we have the resource for you. ASAPbio wants to support members of our community who are interested in doing outreach about preprints with their communities or wish to raise awareness about preprints with their students or…
Image reproduced from Biogeosciences Post by ASAPbio Fellow Aditi Sengupta Preprints are increasingly becoming a tool to support the peer-review process and aid rapid dissemination of research results. The increased transparency in the review process that preprints can support has been welcomed by many journals with many pivoting to an environment of supporting preprints. A…
As adoption of preprints has grown over recent years, researchers have made use of a variety of platforms to share the early drafts of their manuscripts. In addition to the existing preprint servers, there are also many institutional or generalist repositories where authors can deposit their manuscripts – Zenodo, for example, lists over 6,000 records…
Illustration by Roberto Bia, shared under a Creative Commons CC BY license. Post by ASAPbio Fellow Laura Celotto There has been much debate for over a decade about reproducibility in science (Ioannidis). By “reproducibility”, we mean the ability of a scientist to reproduce their own results or others scientists’ published work. In a survey conducted…
Last year we ran a trial where we experimented with translating the crowd review model pioneered by the journal Synlett to preprints, and we coordinated activities to develop public reviews on cell biology preprints. The activities resulted in sign up by over 100 researchers, and in 14 public preprint reviews developed through comments contributed by…
Post by ASAPbio Fellow Jackie Carozza Preprints provide an outlet for sharing scientific results outside of the traditional peer review and journal publication process – not only can researchers post their manuscript early before going through peer review, but they can also post work that may traditionally have found less favor with journals, such as…
ASAPbio wants to support community members who want to learn more about preprints and share information and resources about preprints with their own communities. To empower our community members to be preprint advocates, we started a Fellows program in 2020, a dedicated set of activities around preprints that allows participants to learn more about preprints,…
Post by ASAPbio Fellow Kasturi Mahadik Throughout the year, groups of researchers, librarians, and other scholars are not only learning more about preprints but also unearthing various outlooks towards preprints through the ASAPbio Fellows program. As part of our activities in the program, some of us are interested in discovering the various perspectives that journal…
Today, we’re excited to announce a meeting co-organized with HHMI and EMBO to promote recognition for open dialog on preprints. Learn more and register to watch the livestream on December 1-2 here. Greater recognition for preprint review would build on important momentum: in April, EMBO announced that refereed preprints would fulfill eligibility requirements for its…
We applaud the recent US White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research. The updated policies requiring public access to peer-reviewed publications and research data will bring many benefits to the US and the global research community. We thank the OSTP for…
Do you have data buried in your lab notebooks that did not prove your hypothesis but would be useful to your scientific field? Or perhaps inconclusive results due to technological limitations which would be relevant for others to avoid duplicating efforts? Preprints allow sharing of all research works in a flexible format; this includes negative…
ASAPbio aims to provide researchers with information and resources that can help them make productive use of preprints. Our Preprint Resource Center hosts materials such as videos, the Preprint FAQ and a wonderful set of preprint infographics developed by ASAPbio Fellows, which you can find at asapbio.org/preprint-info#infographics. We want to ensure that communities with different…
Post by Ehssan Moglad On July 19, the Medicinal and Aromatics and Traditional Medicine Research Institute, National Center for Research, in Khartoum (Sudan), hosted a workshop about preprints and open science. The event was sponsored by ASAPbio and aimed to raise awareness around preprints among the local community of researchers, help them build skills about…
Post by Anna Drangowska-Way Whether a preprint will get noticed depends on many factors. Ideally, the quality or the relevance of its scientific findings will be of primary importance, but this is not always the case. There are many disparities in how preprints (and science in general) get attention. One of the most obvious of…
View translations on the SciELO blog: Español | Português What are the benefits of open peer reviews on preprints, and why should researchers consider publishing their journal-invited reviews alongside preprints? To answer these questions, ASAPbio Fellows Bianca Trovò, Nicolás Hinrichs, Saeed Shafiei Sabet, and Susana Henriques organized an interactive conversation about the recently-launched Publish Your…
Post by Yamini Ravichandran On June 7th ASAPbio hosted a workshop in collaboration with IndiaBioscience and Open Access India, to discuss preprints and the value they can add to research assessment frameworks in India. ASAPbio works to drive open and innovative communication in the life sciences and promotes the productive use of preprints. IndiaBioscience aims…
At ASAPbio we believe that there are many benefits to public preprint feedback: comments that can help authors improve their work, opportunities for early career researchers to develop review skills, and further context for non-specialized readers, among others. Since last year, we have been supporting this important activity by coordinating public reviews on preprints developed…
We’re thrilled to announce four new members of the ASAPbio Board of Directors: Gautam Dey, Carole Lee, Kleber Neves and Ludo Waltman. These appointments allow the Board to incorporate new perspectives from researchers in a wide range of disciplines including meta-research and also broaden the geographical representation in our Board. Gautam Dey orcid.org/0000-0003-1416-6223 Gautam is…
Today, we’re excited to launch Publish Your Reviews, an initiative encouraging reviewers to post their comments alongside the preprint versions of articles. We invite all researchers interested in promoting more open dialog around preprints to sign the following pledge: When a journal invites me to review an article that is available as a preprint, I…
Tuesday, 7 June 2022 5-6:30pm Mumbai Preprints are increasingly used, but we know that their use varies widely across geographical regions (Abdill et al.). The countries where the use of preprints is most widespread overlap with those where funding organizations and institutions have signaled support for preprints for the dissemination of research works. India is…
In line with our mission to accelerate research communication, we believe that preprints can provide a valuable tool to accelerate research if used to share ongoing or preliminary work well in advance of journal submission. To inform how we can best support early sharing of preprints and understand what concerns may arise about this practice,…
In a major step toward promoting preprint peer review as a means of increasing transparency and efficiency in scientific publishing, Review Commons is updating its policy: as of 1 June 2022, peer reviews and the authors’ response will be posted by Review Commons to bioRxiv or medRxiv when authors transfer their refereed preprint to the first affiliate journal. By Thomas…
Following our successful trial last year, we are thrilled to announce that ASAPbio will pursue crowd preprint review activities in 2022. Join us in supporting public feedback on preprints by becoming a crowd preprint reviewer! We are expanding the activities to include different disciplines. In addition, we are delighted to collaborate with SciELO Preprints to…
In our 6-month trial of the Preprint Reviewer Recruitment Network, participating journals made 124 total additions to their reviewer databases; they also extended 28 invitations to review and 62 invitations to advisory or editorial boards. We plan to extend the program into a second phase. Many early-career researchers want to get involved with journal peer…
Inspiring others to think about, consider, and use preprints requires not only passionate champions, but also resources to help them create successful events and projects. For this reason, we at ASAPbio want to support members of our community in spreading the word about preprints in original and inventive ways. To do so, we’ve launched ASAPbio…
By Jonny Coates (@JACoates) & Emma Wilson (@ELWilson92) Podcasts have exploded in popularity in recent years, with over 504 million people listening to podcasts across the world, representing an exciting avenue for scientific communication. Similarly, preprints have seen unprecedented usage and become a vital conduit to sharing scientific findings during a global pandemic. Although a…
ASAPbio is seeking several new members for our Board of Directors to support our mission to drive positive change in science communication and to broaden our geographic representation. We are looking for new Board members who can help us deliver on our strategic goals and complement the perspectives of existing Board members. We particularly seek…
We’re delighted to announce that we will be continuing our work on preprints and open peer review through 2024 with a combined $250,000 per year in funding committed from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and the Simons Foundation. This generous support will sustain ASAPbio’s mission to accelerate discovery in the…
2022-05 update: this posting is closed. ASAPbio is seeking a part-time Communications Assistant to help us share our work on preprints & open peer review with the life sciences community. This position provides an opportunity to engage with open science and build communication skills; it might be especially well-suited for students or postdocs. The role…
Blog post by Sarah Stryeck The ASAPbio Community Action Group chaired by Marco Fumasoni (Harvard University, US) and Sarah Stryeck (University of Technology, Graz and Know-Center GmbH Austria), both 2020 ASAPbio Fellows kicked off in March 2021. As we approach the one-year mark, we wanted to celebrate the group’s accomplishments in its first year and…
During the pandemic, research communication and progress has accelerated through the massively increased posting of preprints. The increased use of preprints is a positive development, however, most preprints still take the form of traditional research papers posted shortly before or in parallel to their submission to a journal. As a result, preprints generally appear 4…
We’re thrilled to open applications for the 2022 ASAPbio Fellows program. Interested in a deep dive into the preprint landscape? Seeking to drive forward your own preprint initiative? Then join our Fellows program! The ASAPbio Fellows program aims to provide participants with resources, tools and contacts to allow them to drive discussions about the productive…
This post originally appeared on ReimagineReview. Preprint reviews hold the potential to build trust in preprints and drive innovation in peer review. However, the variety of platforms available to contribute comments and reviews on preprints means that it can be difficult for readers to gain a clear picture of the process that led to the…
As open scholarship practices grow, dedicated preprint servers are springing up in many disciplines. However, researchers are also depositing preprints in other platforms, including institutional and generalist repositories. These destinations can be familiar to researchers and well-integrated into the scholarly communications infrastructure, but many do not presently offer the same preprint-related features found in purpose-built…
Post by Cassandra Ettinger and Madhumala Sadanandappa The ASAPbio Fellows program offered by ASAPbio is an excellent opportunity for graduate students, postdocs, and information professionals to learn and become engaged with preprints. Through the 2021 Fellows program, we interacted with researchers across different career stages from various countries and learned about their experience and familiarity…
Post by Sandra Franco Iborra and Iratxe Puebla While preprints have been adopted as a means to promptly disseminate research, they also open up new ways to participate in the scientific discourse around the latest research. There are many benefits to public feedback on preprints: comments that can help authors improve their work, broader opportunities…
Traditional peer review relies on a couple of individuals spending hours on a paper. What if the wisdom of the crowd could get it done much faster? And would this work for the public review of preprints? In order to find out, in autumn of 2021 we coordinated the crowd preprint review trial announced at…
Tuesday, January 11, 2022 – 9am PT, 12pm ET, 5pm UTC (see in your time zone) – Register here Wednesday, January 12, 2022 – 6am PT, 9pm ET, 2pm UTC (see in your time zone) – Register here Feedback on preprints doesn’t have to take the shape of a journal-style review. Short comments or questions…
Post by Iratxe Puebla, Associate Director, ASAPbio We are at the end of 2021, a good time to reflect on the accomplishments and lessons of the year. One of the highlights for me has been, without a doubt, our fantastic group of 2021 ASAPbio Fellows. Following the success of the Fellows program last year, we…
We are pleased to announce the winners of the first ASAPbio preprint communication competition, which aimed to communicate to a wide audience the value proposition of preprints as a tool for research communication. Preprints played a crucial role during the COVID-19 pandemic, speeding up the dissemination of scientific findings that led to a quicker understanding…
ASAPbio’s Preprint Reviewer Recruitment Network aims to help researchers, especially ECRs, break into reviewing or editing roles by sharing their comments and reviews of preprints as examples of their work. Comments and feedback to preprints can occur in many forms. We are partnering with PREreview to host a live-streamed preprint journal club, an opportunity for…
View COAR’s post about preliminary results from a COAR and ASAPbio survey of preprints in institutional and generalist repositories [External link]
On October 6, we gathered virtually for a lively discussion about the benefits of preprints for early career researchers. The event was an initiative by the ASAPbio Fellows Keti Zeka, Nafisa Jadavji, Gabriela Nogueira Viçosa, Osman Aldirdiri and Eider Valle Encinas. Through this webinar, the Fellows aimed to raise awareness about preprints but also provide…
Our crowd preprint review trial has been running for a month. We discuss the trial in this blog post on Sciety.org. [External link]
ASAPbio’s Preprint Reviewer Recruitment Network aims to help researchers, especially ECRs, break into reviewing or editing roles by sharing their comments and reviews of preprints as examples of their work. We recognize that people have diverse backgrounds and prior experiences in peer review. To assist researchers in the Network in developing their expertise with writing…
Wednesday, 6 October 2021 9am Los Angeles | 12pm New York | 1pm São Paulo | 5pm London | 9:30pm Mumbai | 12am Hong Kong The use of preprints is growing in the life sciences. Preprints help researchers worldwide to accelerate dissemination of research findings to the scientific community, but how exactly can preprints be…
Blog post by Iratxe Puebla and the ASAPbio Fellows Tara Fischer, Gautam Dey, Jonny Coates, Aleksandra Petelski, Vanessa Bortoluzzi & Gilbert Kibet-Rono A key step in the research process is the communication of researchers’ work to the scientific community. Preprints can bring many benefits to science communication, but the inner workings of the publication process…
We sent the list of signatories below to the ARC on September 3, 2021. The Australian Research Council (ARC) does not allow researchers to cite preprints in their grant applications and recently disqualified a number of applications for this reason. Preprints advance scientific discovery and are encouraged by many funders, including Australia’s National Health and…
Good scholarship calls for citing work from which ideas come. But unfortunately, when submitting to a small number of journals, you may be asked to remove a citation to a preprint. Here’s how to handle it. Why (not) cite preprints? Previously on this blog, we covered the importance of giving due credit to all works…
Assembled following the July 21, 2021 FeedbackASAP meeting.
The growth of preprints in the life sciences has amplified earlier concerns about the challenges of keeping abreast of the latest research findings. Researchers need to keep up to date not only with the most recent publications in journals but also with the latest scholarly work posted on preprint servers. Three quarters of the respondents…
By Victoria Yan At the ASAPbio #FeedbackASAP meeting held on July 21st, 2021, the Sciety team (Hannah Drury, Godwyns Onwuchekwa, and Paul Shannon) led an interactive session examining different aspects of the evolving landscape of preprint curation and review. What is curation? We began the session by brainstorming what curation encompasses. Through a mind-mapping exercise,…
As part of the July 21, 2021 FeedbackASAP meeting, Ludo Waltman (CWTS, Leiden University), James Fraser (UCSF), Cooper Smout (Free Our Knowledge) organized a breakout session entitled “Posting journal reviews on preprints” to identity an evolutionary bridge between a system based around journal-organized peer review and referred preprints. Peer reviewing: for whom and why? The…
By Rebeccah Lijek and Jessica Polka At the July 21, 2021 #FeedbackASAP meeting, Mugdha Sathe (UW), Rebeccah Lijek (Mount Holyoke), Daniela Saderi (PREreview) organized a breakout session on using public preprint review in teaching and mentorship of early career researchers. Who is a “peer?” The session began with Daniela Saderi leading us in discussion about…
2022-01-13 update: The FAST principles have now been posted as a preprint. As Chris Jackson pointed out in the first session of #FeedbackASAP, preprint feedback is part of the collaborative culture of science. A positive culture of comments and review of preprints brings many benefits to the scientific process, but what does this culture look…
By Victoria Yan 2022-01-27 update: This work has now been completed. Please see our blog post announcing PReF. Why develop a preprint review taxonomy? Dozens of projects organizing peer review of preprints are active or being developed. In this landscape full of new possibilities, differentiating among innovative forms of preprint review is challenging. Furthermore, these…
Are you keen to show your passion for science and preprints to the non-scientific community? Got an aptitude for writing or showcasing visual art? If this sounds like you, we’re looking for you! Our preprint science communication competition seeks to find new ways to engage and reach out to the general public. Organized by the…
We are thrilled to announce that we will be running a trial to test the crowd review approach for preprint review. We invite cell biologists with an interest in preprints and preprint feedback to join this trial. Why is ASAPbio running this trial? While there is increasing interest in review activities around preprints, the level…
Today, we’re excited to launch the Preprint Reviewer Recruitment Network, a pilot to share researchers’ preprint reviewing experience with journals looking for reviewers or editorial board members. Public preprint feedback has the potential to not only help authors and readers, but also to identify potential reviewers and editorial board members for journals. Unfortunately, finding preprint…
2022-04-27 update: The principles are the focus of a Point of View article in eLife. 2022-01-13 update: The FAST principles have now been posted as a preprint. As Ivan Oransky has noted, ‘science is a proposition and a conversation and an argument’ [1]; feedback and discussion around scientific reports are integral parts of the scientific…
We’re thrilled to announce the speakers for the July 21 #FeedbackASAP meeting! These individuals will discuss why public preprint feedback is needed and what institutions and societies are doing to support it in two plenary sessions at the beginning of the meeting. Time in UTC (duration) Title Description 15:00 (5’) Welcome Kickoff and announcements 15:05…
Blog post by Daniela Saderi and Sarah Greaves In May 2020 a group of publishers and organisations made a direct call in response to the urgent need to openly and rapidly share and review COVID-19 research. More than 2,000 reviewers signed up: their details were shared with the journals or platforms involved, and they were…
![Yearly preprints/all-papers in Microsoft Academic Graph, trend by domain, reproduced from Xie B, Shen Z, and Wang K 2021 [8]](https://asapbio.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screenshot-2021-07-01-at-10.03.25-768x512.png "Yearly preprints/all-papers in Microsoft Academic Graph, trend by domain")
Blog post by Christine Ferguson and Martin Fenner Information overload is the difficulty in understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information about that issue, and is generally associated with the excessive quantity of daily information. – Wikipedia [1] Information overload is a common problem, and it is an old…
This post originally appeared on the Review Commons blog. Review Commons is announcing two new policies today: As of August 1, 2021, Review Commons will require all authors to post their manuscript as a preprint, prior to transfer to an affiliate journal1. In return, all the affiliate journals provide authors with scooping protection from the date of posting of the…
We’re thrilled to announce two new members of the ASAPbio Board of Directors: Osman Aldirdiri, a student and researcher at the University of Khartoum, Sudan, and Thabiso Motaung, a Lecturer at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Both members have participated in the current or former class of ASAPbio Fellows. Thabiso is a microbiologist with…
Today, we’re excited to release a report on shared technology needs for preprints in the life sciences. This represents the culmination of six months of work with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Open Science Program to map missing technologies to enhance preprint-based collaboration and innovation. Preprints in biomedicine have come a long way in a few…
Your comments welcome We would like to hear your feedback and reactions, and we especially encourage readers to annotate specific parts of the report with links to existing technologies or projects that may fulfill some of these needs. We’re using Hypothesis as a tool for social annotation, and you’ll be prompted to register for an…
The use of preprints is growing across different life sciences disciplines. After a slower adoption in the plant and agricultural sciences, we are now seeing more researchers in these fields disseminating their work via preprints. At our webinar on April 29 co-hosted with CABI, we discussed how preprint trends are looking for these disciplines and…
The ASAPbio Community is a global and diverse group of researchers and other stakeholders in science communication. While they bring varied expertise and opinions, they all share an interest and support for the use of preprints. Our Community members had expressed interest in hearing a broader range of perspectives about preprints, beyond the pro-preprint views…
Blog post by Sarah Stryeck and Sandra Franco Iborra We are very happy to announce that the ASAPbio Community Action Group kicked off on March 15th. With this Community Action Group, ASAPbio is looking to support our community members in spreading the word about preprints within their institutions and communities and inspire them to take…
Today, as described in Project Coordinator Jigisha’s Patel opinion piece in The Scientist, we’re pleased to share a series of resources and guidelines emerging from our work on the representation of preprints to broad audiences. These infographics summarize more detailed documents drafted by working groups who considered how to preprint servers, researchers, institutions, and journalists…
Blog post by Sónia Gomes Pereira As scientists, we spend a great deal of time obsessing about a particular subject, sometimes crossing the thin line of what is recommended or healthy… Yet, publishing an article takes several months or even years of revisions, only to – more often than not – result in little changes…
ASAPbio is seeking two new members for our Board of Directors. With these openings, we aim to 1) improve the racial and ethnic diversity of our board, and 2) include the voice of research trainees, such as graduate students and postdocs. We are also interested in increasing representation from outside the US and beyond cell…
We’re thrilled to announce that the 2021 cycle of the ASAPbio Fellow program is now open for applications. Interested in preprints? Looking to develop your own preprint initiative? Keen to connect with others interested in science communication? Then the ASAPbio Fellow program is for you! The ASAPbio Fellows program runs for six months and provides…
On January 14th, 2021, ASAPbio hosted the #PreprintsInThePublicEye: Challenges and Solutions in an Age of Misinformation event. With speakers from the worlds of preprints, academia, and journalism, the event sought to highlight the problem of misinformation and the misrepresentation of research in the context of preprints and COVID-19. We asked, how can we know what…
Blog post by ASAPbio Fellow Mafalda Pimentel Having to isolate due to a pandemic can also have some silver linings. Forcefully away from the bench, I had no more excuses to evade a question I had been increasingly interested in – how are preprints shaping the present and future of science? Not long after I…
Last week we ran Twitter polls for preprint servers, research institutions, researchers and journalists to provide feedback on the outcomes of the Preprints in the Public Eye project. The project aim is to encourage the responsible reporting of research to avoid its misrepresentation or misinterpretation. The project involves stakeholders representing researchers, institutions, preprint servers, publishers…
January 14, 2021. 4pm GMT/ 11am EST/ 8am PST. Covid-19 has brought 2020 to the height of this Age of Misinformation, with particular concerns about the media reporting of research posted as preprints. It has not been all doom and gloom however. This year has provided a strong impetus to develop novel ways to improve…
Post by ASAPbio Fellow Aleksandra Petelski The usage of preprints in the clinical world is drastically increasing, especially during the current COVID-19 pandemic. In this rapidly developing situation, medRxiv already received over 8,000 preprints (and counting) involving COVID-19 at the current time of writing [1]. The use of preprints as a means for science dissemination…
On December 4, 2020, ASAPbio hosted #PreprintSprint presentations, where 16 projects (down from the 21 presented at the kickoff, partially due to mergers and collaborations) updated approximately 100 attendees on what they had accomplished during the sprint. During the 20 days of the sprint, 9 projects started new collaborations, 14 updated their proposal to incorporate feedback,…
Post by Iratxe Puebla, Associate Director, ASAPbio Although it is hard to believe, we are already in the last month of 2020, and with it we have just closed the first cohort of the ASAPbio Fellows program. While we had had an ASAPbio Community for several years, we felt that if we wanted to encourage…
Blog post by the ASAPbio Fellows Giri Athrey and Corrado Nai. The adoption of preprints in the life sciences has increased enormously in the last few years, and preprints have played an important role in the dissemination of the latest findings related to the COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. While preprints are a common form of communication among…
Blog post by ASAPbio Fellows Bradly Alicea, Marco Fumasoni, Yamini Ravichandran & Sarah Stryeck The ASAPBio Fellows program supports early-career researchers and those interested in topics related to the intersection of open science and scientific communication in becoming a resource about preprints for their communities. As part of the program, one working group of Fellows…
On Friday, 2020-11-13, 100 participants gathered at the #PreprintSprint Kickoff to workshop 21 ideas for encouraging more feedback on preprints. While the bulk of the event was spent in breakout sessions, the introductory lightning talks can be found below. Slides can be found here. Project leads are currently integrating ideas and feedback received at the…
Blog post by ASAPbio Fellow Suraj Kannan The recent emergence of preprints in clinical research (most prominently through medRxiv) has raised a number of questions about their potential for benefit/harm. Preprints and preprint servers have existed in various basic and hard science disciplines for the past several decades, and have improved speed of dissemination and…
We’re thrilled to support discussion and feedback to 21 exciting proposals at the Kickoff of the #PreprintSprint on Friday, November 13! At this event, project leads will share their ideas for how to encourage more feedback on preprints, and they will also share what input and resources they need to do that. We hope that…
Organized by: Emily Gurley, PhD and M. Kate Grabowski, PhD; Johns Hopkins University Website or social media links https://ncrc.jhsph.edu/ Current stage of development ongoing project Project duration 1-2 years with longer term potential Project aims Background information on current practices The 2019 Novel Coronavirus Research Compendium (NCRC) is a centralized, publicly available resource that rapidly curates…
Organizer Nokome Bentley, Alexander Ketchakmadze & Colette Doughty from Stencila Website or social media links https://stenci.la/ https://twitter.com/stencila Current stage of development Ongoing project Project duration 1 – 3 months for integrations described here as part of Stencila’s ongoing development Update Our aim for the #PrePrintSprint was to use it as an opportunity to add reviewing…
Organizer Thomas Lemberger, EMBO Website or social media links https://eeb.embo.org Current stage of development EEB is an experimental platform under development and used as sandbox to test ideas about aggregation and human- or machine-mediated curation of preprints. It is linked to EMBO Press and ASAPbio’s Review Commons journal-agnostic preprint review platform and to the SourceData…
Organizer Thomas Lemberger, EMBO Website or social media links https://eeb.embo.org https://reviewcommons.org Current stage of development EEB is an experimental platform under development and used as sandbox to test ideas about aggregation and mining of refereed preprints. Project duration 3 years How has your project changed? In view of the feedback received we have decided to…
Organizer The PubPeer Foundation, represented by Brandon Stell and Boris Barbour Website or social media links https://peeriodicals.com @peeriodicals Current stage of development Ongoing project Project duration Indefinite Update How has your project changed? No changes. Have you integrated any feedback received? We received a useful suggestion to provide case studies for specific Peeriodicals applications to…
Organizer Victor Venema, Grassroots Review Journals, University of Bonn, Germany Website or social media links Concept homepage Development server GIT Future integrations Mastodon Twitter Reddit Current stage of development Main design for the communities (review journals) is ready to be implemented. Multiple communication channels set-up apart from a newsletter/distribution list. Project duration Years, but for…
Organizer Ms Joy Owango (TCC Africa) and Ms Jo Havemann (AfricArXiv) Website or social media links https://www.tcc-africa.org/ https://info.africarxiv.org/ Joy Owango: joy.owango@tcc-africa.orgJohanna Havemann: info@access2perspectives.com // jo@africarxiv.org Current stage of development AfricArXiv is an Open Access portal launched in June 2018, which serves primarily as a preprint repository. Beyond that it serves as a hub and…
Organizers Daniela Saderi (PREreview Co-Founder and Director) and Sarah Greaves (STM Publishing Consultant) Website or social media links OASPA announcement Project website Digital Science Blog Post: “Does creating a rapid reviewer pool improve trust in COVID-19 peer review?” Digital Science Blog Post: “Creating a rapid reviewer pool…..and trying to use it” Poster (Zenodo) Current stage…
Organizer Philip N. Cohen and Micah Altman Website or social media links philipncohen.com micahaltman.com Current stage of development Ready to be implemented Project duration 2 years Update Have you integrated any feedback received? concept of a ‘market’ for peer review clearly resonated with a number of commentator which stimulated a number of reflections on the…
Organizer Felix Richter (Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, University of Oxford) Nicolas Vabret (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York) Website COVID-19 Literature Review Oxford COVID-19 Mount Sinai References: 1 Vabret N, Samstein R, Fernandez N, Merad M; Sinai Immunology Review Project; Trainees; Faculty. Advancing scientific knowledge in times of pandemics. Nat Rev Immunol.…
Organizer PREreview: Antoinette Foster, Monica Granados, Samantha Hindle, Katrina Murphy, Daniela Saderi Simply Secure: Georgia Bullen, Carissa Yao Website or social media links https://prereview.org https://twitter.com/PREreview_ https://github.com/prereview Current stage of development Ongoing / idea Project duration 2 years Update How has your project changed? The Sprint confirmed that our project roadmap is developing along the right…
Organizer Thomas Guillemaud, Denis Bourguet and Marjolaine Hamelin (INRAE, France) Current stage of development Idea Project duration NA given the nature of the project (share and offer of an idea) Update How has your project changed? We refocused on the importance of the evaluation history of preprints. Even the title of the project has changed…
Organizer Dragan Okanovic Website or social media links unfoldresearch.com twitter.com/UnfoldResearch Current stage of development Ongoing project Project duration first phase – 8mth, additional phases – 4yrs+ Update Since the Kickoff, the project’s architecture was mostly rethought, both at the backend implementation side as well as UX side. How has your project changed? It hasn’t changed…
Organizer Directed by Gavin McStay (Staffordshire University), founded by Thomas Krichel (Open Library Society) Website or social media links http://biomed.news Current stage of development Ongoing Project duration Indefinite Project aims Bims is a rapid dissemination system for new papers in PubMed. Bims is powered by human selectors acting as machine teachers.How does this benefit preprints? We expect that PubMed will increase…
Organizer Life Science Editors (Helen Pickersgill, Angela Andersen, Marie Bao, Carol Featherstone, Shawna Hiley, Sabbi Lall, Li-Kuo Su) Website or social media links www.lifescienceeditors.com Current stage of development Idea Project duration Indefinitely Update How has your project changed? We introduced an additional option to incentivize authors to initiate peer review. As an alternative to requesting…
Organizer Kathleen Shearer and Paul Walk, COAR; Herbert Van de Somple, DANS; Martin Klein, Los Alamos National Lab along with several other partners from the repository, preprint and peer review services Website or social media links Current stage of development Ready to be implemented Project duration 2 years Update Since the kickoff, it was affirmed…
Organizer Louis Fisher and Huw Williams (CrowdPeer) Website or social media links www.thecrowdpeer.com https://twitter.com/crowdpeer Current stage of development Ongoing Project Project duration Indefinite Update How has your project changed? Added a code of conduct to guide intended use. Added reviewer guidance section describing what comments are expected within the comments section. Further developed reviewer recognition…
Organizer Chris Baur, Marek Łaska, Chrissy Prater, Michele Avissar-Whiting (Research Square) Website or social media links https://www.researchsquare.com/ Current stage of development Idea Project duration 6-month trial Update Since the Kickoff, we have thought through 1) what a minimal viable product looks like for demonstrating proof of concept and 2) how to concretize what started out…
Organizer Joseph Wade, Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health Website or social media links @wadelab Current stage of development Ready to be implemented Project duration One year initially, but potentially indefinitely. Update How has your project changed? We introduced an additional option to incentivize authors to initiate peer review. As an alternative to…
Organizer Josh Nicholson, co-founder and CEO of scite Website or social media links https://scite.ai/ twitter.com/scite Project duration Ongoing project Project duration Indefinitely Project aims Overview of the challenge to overcome Reviewing and curating preprints openly at scale is challenging. The ideal outcome or output of the project Implementation of the scite Smart Citation badge (https://scite.ai/badge)…
Organizer Daniel Mietchen, School of Data Science, University of Virginia, @EvoMRI Project status ongoing Project duration ongoing Project aims Background Peer review of preprints typically has two main components (a) general comments on parameters like the quality, scope, topicality or structure of the manuscript and (b) comments on details, e.g. inaccuracies, missing references, confusing plot parameters,…
“We have to be the change we want to see… increasing preprint engagement requires a system-wide change in how we value publications and commencing a dialogue that we can all be a part of.” As part of Clinician’s Corner we would like practicing clinicians to share their opinions and experiences on preprint usage within the…
This week marks Open Access Week 2020, which is running with the theme “Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion.” The theme provides a reminder that openness in science communication is a means to other uses rather than just an ultimate goal in itself. The same principle applies to preprints; we…
Community feedback on preprints makes rapid science more robust. Review and commentary can help authors improve their articles; curation can provide readers with helpful context and enhance discoverability. But despite the benefits, barriers to reviewing and curating preprints remain. Potential reviewers and curators see few incentives to organize and comment on preprints, and reviews can…
We’re thrilled to announce a new team of leaders on the ASAPbio board! Effective September 30, 2020, Prachee Avasthi (Associate Professor, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth) will serve as President, James Fraser (Professor, UCSF, and previously ASAPbio Secretary & Treasurer) as Vice President, Iain Cheeseman (Member, Whitehead Institute; Professor of Biology, MIT) as Treasurer,…
A series aimed at opening the dialogue surrounding preprint usage in the clinical community. Run by the ASAPbio Fellows Vanessa Bortoluzzi, Kirsty Ferguson, Suraj Kannan and Aleksandra Petelski. Today, scientific discovery moves at a faster pace than even a decade ago [1]. However, the publishing process required by journals does not seem able to keep…
2021-10-18 correction: In the original version of this post, the data labels for “accepted” and “rejected” re-review rates were swapped. The correct labels now appear below. In late 2019, EMBO and ASAPbio launched Review Commons, a platform for journal-independent peer review that facilitates the posting of a refereed preprint and submission to 17 partner journals.…
Monday, October 19th, 2020 10am New York | 3pm London | 4pm Berlin | 7:30pm Mumbai Scientific manuscripts often spend months, sometimes years, in the hands of a restricted number of reviewers and editors before they are ultimately released to the rest of the scientific community after peer review. In recent years, the growing usage…
Earlier this week we hosted the #PreprintReviewChallenge, a collaborative session where we worked on comments and reviews of preprints. The event was part of Peer Review Week and our goal was to develop the largest collection of public reviews on preprinted research in a day, and of course, also to connect with others with an…
We’ve proud to join the stakeholder group of the Initiative for Open Abstracts, a sister project to Initiative for Open Citations. Making abstracts openly available and machine-readable helps readers discover relevant research. For more on why this is important, see this explainer. Open abstracts are important for preprints as well as published journal articles. The…
Today, we’re pleased to announce the launch of a project on the use of preprints in the media with support from the Open Society Foundations. Premature media coverage was the top concern about preprints in our recent #biopreprints2020 survey, for both those who had published their research as preprints and for those who had not.…
Preprinting helps researchers and the scientific enterprise as a whole by providing increased visibility and access to early results and facilitating feedback that improves papers. While the benefits can be felt on an individual level by readers and authors, the advantages compound at the systemic level to increase the pace and efficiency of discovery. The…
By Willem Halffman, Serge Horbach, Jessica Polka, Tony Ross-Hellauer, and Ludo Waltman Crossposted from Leiden Madtrics Recently the creators of Transpose and the Platform for Responsible Editorial Policies convened an online workshop on infrastructures that provide information on scholarly journals. In this blog post they look back at the workshop and discuss next steps. In…
Join the #PreprintReviewChallenge: Help us create the largest collection of preprint reviews in a day On September 22, ASAPbio will be hosting an online live preprint review event as part of Peer Review Week 2020. We will get together to write constructive comments and reviews on preprints, with the aim to develop the largest collection to date of…
Today, we’re happy to announce a collaboration with TU Graz and the Knowledge Futures group on Doc Maps, a project to create machine-readable ways to describe peer review & editorial processes on articles. As preprints undergo screening checks and pick up peer review from an increasing number of third party sources, it’s becoming more challenging to know…
#PreprintReviewChallenge – 22 September 2020 On September 22 ASAPbio is hosting the #PreprintReviewChallenge as part of Peer Review Week 2020. In a live session hosted online, we will get together to write constructive comments and reviews on preprints, with the aim to develop the largest collection to date of public commentary on preprinted research in…
Tuesday, September 8, 2020 12pm New York | 9am San Francisco | 5pm London | 6pm Berlin | 9:30pm Mumbai About half of biomedical articles are submitted to more than one journal, leading to repeated peer review and publication delays. Review Commons is a free, journal-independent peer review service that allows you to transfer your…
We sometimes get queries about whether preprints can be cited in journal publications, and while we make a brief mention to this in our FAQ, we thought it would be useful to offer a deeper dive. We believe it is important for articles to give credit to any sources the authors used as part of…
Perceived benefits and concerns about preprints – initial survey results We had 546 responses to our survey about the perceived benefits and concerns around preprint – our thanks to everyone who shared their views. We will be taking a deeper dive into the data over the coming weeks but here are some initial takes from the responses: Main perceived…
With contributions from Kathryn Funk, Alice Meadows, Alex Mendonça, Oya Rieger, and Sowmya Swaminathan After our #bioPreprints2020 meeting, a working group of attendees set out to understand how to best increase awareness about preprints among varied groups of stakeholders (such as librarians, journalists, publishers, funders, research administrators, students, clinicians, and more). To accomplish this goal,…
Preprinting not only accelerates the dissemination of science, but also enables early feedback from a broad community. Therefore, it’s no surprise that there are many innovative projects offering feedback, commentary, and peer reviews on preprints. Such feedback can range from the informal (tweets, comments, annotations, or a simple endorsement) to the formal (an editor-organized process…
In late January, ASAPbio, in collaboration with EMBL-EBI and Ithaka S+R, hosted the #bioPreprints2020 workshop to improve the discoverability, reuse, and interoperability of preprints in the life and biomedical sciences. After the meeting, attendees formed working groups to establish draft recommendations for preprint metadata, withdrawal and removal definitions, data availability statements, versioning, and surfacing review…
By Victoria Yan This post originally appeared at ReimagineReview, a registry of innovative peer review projects. Here on ReimagineReview, we envision the constant improvement of peer review through experimentation and research. With concurrent research and outcome reporting, the projects we list have the potential to demonstrate whether their approach has improved peer review. The collective…
Share your views about preprints – take the surveyASAPbio and the attendees of the #biopreprints2020 workshop are looking to get community feedback on the perceived benefits and concerns around preprints. We are seeking perspectives from a wide range of stakeholders involved in research communication to better understand how preprinting is perceived across stakeholder groups and research disciplines. Complete…
Peiling Wang, Professor, University of Tennessee-Knoxville & Dietmar Wolfram, Professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee In a recent open-access (OA) peer-reviewed article1, we report on the rapid growth of open peer review (OPR) journals from 38 in 2001 to 617 in 2019 with a significant increase since 2017 (the dataset2 is available at Zenodo). One of the…
As a step toward combating the systemic anti-Black racism in academia, we paused most of our normal activity on June 10 to participate in #ShutDownSTEM and examine how we can better support Black colleagues. The scientific enterprise, including scientific communication, isn’t equitable (for example, bias and economic barriers limit participation in reading and writing journal…
This survey is closed and preliminary results are available here. While the use of preprints has increased over the last years, preprint awareness and attitudes vary widely across research communities and among stakeholders in research communication. Stakeholders interact with preprints to varying degrees, via different channels and for different purposes; a better understanding of what…
Preprints are in PubMed On the topic of preprints, “how do I find them?” remains one of the most common questions. While several search tools already index preprints, many require researchers to look outside of their normal workflows. On June 9, the National Library of Medicine announced a pilot to include NIH-funded preprints in PubMed and PMC beginning this week.…
Join us to help make scholarly communication in the life sciences more open and efficient by developing best practices for the use of preprints in the media. The position The Project Coordinator is a 6-month temporary role. The Project Coordinator will complete tasks such as: Coordinate online working groups composed of researchers, journalists, and technologists…
On the topic of preprints, “how do I find them?” remains one of the most common questions. While several search tools already index preprints, many require researchers to look outside of their normal workflows. On June 9, the National Library of Medicine announced a pilot to include NIH-funded preprints in PubMed and PMC beginning this…
When we first launched our Preprint FAQ in 2016, the biology preprint landscape looked dramatically different from its present form, both in terms of its usage and prominence among researchers as well as its integration into scholarly communication workflows. While we’ve made periodic updates, the whole package was due for a refresh. We’ve been honored…
Dear all, May has been a busy month for ASAPbio, we have launched new resources related to preprints, and continued to engage with many colleagues in conversations about transparency in peer review and open science; details below. Hello from Iratxe Earlier this month I joined ASAPbio as Associate Director. I am thrilled to be part of…
Transpose is a community database of journal policies on peer review and preprinting developed with major contributions from ASAPbio. Launched almost a year ago after a sprint at the 2018 Scholarly Communications Institute, Transpose includes information on whether peer review is blinded, transparency of reviewer identities and reports, co-reviewing policies, versions of papers that can…
In efforts to tackle the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, research related to SARS-CoV-2 as well as the public health and societal ramifications of COVID-19 is taking place faster and on a larger scale than ever before. Researchers are making use of preprints to freely and quickly disseminate COVID-19 research, and a significant proportion of research related…
We’re thrilled to announce that Iratxe Puebla has joined ASAPbio as our new Associate Director! In this role, Iratxe will develop our newly-announced ASAPbio Fellows program, spearhead community engagement, and create resources and tools that foster awareness of preprints. Following a background in biochemistry research, Iratxe moved into open access editorial roles, first at BMC…
Today, we’re thrilled to announce the ASAPbio Fellow program – a six-month program structured to provide participants with tools and skills to drive discussions about the productive use of preprints in the life sciences, and to become ASAPbio representatives at their institutions or scientific conferences. New on the blog New resource: a directory preprint server policies…
Today, we’re thrilled to announce the ASAPbio Fellow program – a six-month program structured to provide participants with tools and skills to drive discussions about the productive use of preprints in the life sciences, and to become ASAPbio representatives at their institutions or scientific conferences. Participants in the ASAPbio Fellow program will engage in a…
Today, in tandem with the release of a preprint entitled “A systematic examination of preprint platforms for use in the medical and biomedical sciences setting,” we’re happy to present a searchable directory of preprint platforms relevant to life sciences, biomedical, and clinical research. You can use this directory to identify a preprint server that fits…
ASAPbio provided the following response to the OSTP RFI on Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications, Data and Code Resulting From Federally Funded Research (85 FR 12949). The deadline has been extended to May 6. Re: Request for Information: Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications, Data and Code Resulting From Federally Funded Research (85 FR…
The use of preprints has increased rapidly over the last few years, especially in biomedical and life sciences. We’ve been tracking changes in the preprint landscape over time and maintain a page dedicated to this topic. Here are some of the most notable trends over the last year. Adoption and sources The rate of life…
Predatory journals, as defined by COPE in a thoughtful discussion document, are those that operate for profit in a “deceptive or fraudulent way and without any regard for quality assurance.” These journals undermine trust in science by enabling the dissemination of flawed work under false banners of quality. Recently, ICMJE and COPE made recommendations to…
Webinar: Rapid communication of COVID-19 research Tuesday, March 31, 12pm-1:30pm ET (9am PT, 5pm BST, 6pm CEST – see in your time zone) Join ASAPbio and the Knowledge Futures Group for a conversation about new ways of sharing scientific information relevant to the coronavirus pandemic via preprints, rapid peer review, and more. Individual talks will…
This event has passed. Watch recording here. Tuesday, March 31, 12pm-1:30pm ET (9am PT, 5pm BST, 6pm CEST – see in your time zone) Join ASAPbio and the Knowledge Futures Group for a conversation about new ways of sharing scientific information relevant to the coronavirus pandemic via preprints, rapid peer review, and more. Individual…
Dear subscribers, I hope 2020 is treating you well! Since our last update, we’ve been working on a variety of meetings and conference sessions. Here are the highlights. #bioPreprints2020: Building trust in preprints On January 20 and 21, 2020, over 30 representatives from preprint servers, publishers, funders, and organizations working on standards, indexing, and metadata…
On December 9, 2019, ASAPbio, EMBO Press, and 17 affiliate journals launched Review Commons, a platform providing independent peer review prior to journal submission. At two subsequent community meetings (one in-person at the ASCB|EMBO conference and the other online the following week) the Review Commons team shared their motivations, planned workflow, and future vision. We…
Over the past 15 months or so, I’ve been privileged to work closely with Naomi Penfold to advance preprinting in the life science. Now, as she heads to eLife as their Community Manager, I wanted to thank her for some of the incredible work she’s done at ASAPbio. Together with Jamie Kirkham and Fiona Murphy,…
On January 20 and 21, 2020, over 30 representatives from preprint servers, publishers, funders, standards, indexing and metadata infrastructure organisations, and beyond, gathered at EMBL-EBI to develop ambitious but achievable recommendations for metadata and processes that would improve the discoverability, reuse, and interoperability of preprints in the life and biomedical sciences.
By Iratxe Puebla, Facilitation and Integrity Officer, COPE The use of preprints in the life sciences has increased over recent years and has sparked a number of conversations about their use, as well as their potential benefits and challenges. It is fair to say that there are differing views around preprints; while some communities use…
Alice Meadows, Director of Community Engagement, and Jill O’Neill, Director of Content, NISO Preprints have come a long way in the past few years. The granddaddy of digital preprint platforms is, of course, arXiv (launched in 1991). But although it was joined by a handful of others over the years, including SSRN way back in…
The majority of scholarly work in biology is published in English, a language most of the world does not speak. To help remediate this key issue hindering inclusive scientific dialogue, Humberto Debat and Rich Abdill built PanLingua, a multilingual preprint search tool intended to enable search and global access to machine translations of all preprints hosted by bioRxiv.
At the 2019 ASCB|EMBO cell biology meeting, we convened researchers, funders, publishers, and advocates in a panel discussion focused on making use of peer review on preprints. The use of preprints in the biomedical sciences has been increasing exponentially in recent years as it is becoming a common practice in research dissemination. Free from journal brands, preprints enable innovations…
Following a panel discussion about “Who will influence the success of preprints in biology and to what end?” at FORCE2019, we continued the discussion over dinner with the panellists and other community stakeholders.
This October, we organised a panel discussion about “Who will influence the success of preprints in biology and to what end?” at FORCE2019, the annual conference for the FORCE11 community.
This posting is 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, transparent review, and other advances in scholarly communication! About ASAPbio We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that got its start in 2015 as a grassroots group of researchers…
As the year draws to a close, we’d like to invite you to three events about the emerging role of peer review on preprints.
The theme of Peer Review week in 2019 was quality in peer review. However, the quality of most reviews are obscured to researchers because traditional peer review processes are conducted behind closed doors. We identified five active approaches to improving peer review quality through increased transparency and brought practitioners of each together in a community…
Dear subscribers, This month, we share upcoming opportunities to learn, discuss, and influence the future of preprints and transparent peer review. Coming soon: Review Commons We’ve partnered with EMBO to launch a new journal-independent platform that peer-reviews research papers before submission to a journal. Review Commons will provide authors with a Refereed Preprint (using bioRxiv’s…
“We’re inviting researchers across the life and biomedical sciences to help us paint a clearer picture of research practices today. With your input, we will explore which open science practices are becoming established across disciplines and geographies, and which other methods of conducting and communicating research are standing the test of time.” https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/018e6b91/research-practice-survey-an-invitation-to-take-part The familiarity…
A multi-publisher partnership aims to streamline scientific publishing by producing refereed preprints Heidelberg and San Francisco—September 30, 2019—EMBO Press and ASAPbio have partnered to create Review Commons, a platform that peer-reviews research manuscripts in the life sciences before submission to a journal. Papers submitted to Review Commons, which will be launched in December 2019,…
Dear subscribers, This month, we share upcoming opportunities to learn, discuss and influence the future of preprints and transparent peer review. Peer review week event: ReimagineReview community call on revealing quality in peer review through increased transparency The theme of this year’s Peer Review Week, “quality in peer review,” should resonate with anyone—author, referee, or…
September 20, 9am PDT, 12pm EDT, 6pm CEST The theme of this year’s Peer Review Week, “quality in peer review,” should resonate with anyone—author, referee, or reader—invested in the process of formal publication. But how can those without a direct window into the peer review process be assured of its quality, both the entire body…
As part of preparations to launch a new journal-independent peer-reviewing platform in collaboration with ASAPbio, EMBO has recently posted a job ad for the position of Managing Editor. EMBO is seeking a highly motivated scientist with broad and international high-level research experience […] The platform will produce high-quality portable peer-reviews that can be directly used…
Dear subscribers, This month, we present opportunities to discuss bias in peer review and share our latest research activities about preprints. We hope you’ll join us at upcoming events and discussions. Discuss bias in peer review with ReimagineReview Scientific peer review is ideally based solely on the merit of the research; in the real world,…
In conversations about preprints in the UK, the question is often raised: ‘are preprints included in REF?’ In brief: yes. This is most likely to be applicable for any research manuscript that is prepared close to the REF2021 submission deadline, and is deemed to be amongst your best work in the current cycle, but which…
Update: this call has passed. See recording of the talks below. Scientific peer review is ideally based solely on the merit of the research; in the real world, however, it is susceptible to the inherent bias of editors and reviewers. Traditional peer review is performed behind closed doors and the resulting lack of data has…
This blogpost is cross-posted from the ScholCommLab blog (Alice Feerackers, July 29 2019) and provides an update on a current research project by two visiting scholars supported by ASAPbio. “For researchers, there is immense pressure to publish in journals that are highly competitive,” says Naomi Penfold, associate director of the scientist-driven nonprofit ASAPbio. “[This, in turn,]…
Dear subscribers, We hope your summer (or winter, depending on your hemisphere) is off to a great start. Here are some highlights from us in the office from the months since our last update: ReimagineReview Earlier this year, we launched a directory of innovative peer review experiments, both inside and outside of the journal system.…
The Center for Scientific Review (CSR), National Institute of Health are working to improve awareness of the NIH policy (NOT-OD-17-050) that encourages citation of preprints in grant applications and reports. In response to feedback submitted by ASAPbio on May 30, Kristin Kramer, Ph.D., at the Office of Communications for the CSR, stated (June 11, 2019):…
Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of Transpose (@TransposeSCI), a database of journal peer review, co-reviewing, and preprint policies relating to media coverage, licensing, versions, and citation. These policies can often be difficult to find, unclear, or undefined. Our hope is to bring them to light so that authors, readers, reviewers, and other stakeholders…
Over the last year, the Transpose team (which includes ASAPbio staff Naomi Penfold and Jessica Polka and board member Jennifer Lin) have been working to produce a database of journal peer review, co-reviewing, and (detailed) preprint policies. We anticipate the launch of this database along with an interactive website in the coming weeks. In the…
We’ve submitted feedback to the NIH CSR in support of their proposal to improve SRO communications about the use of preprints in grant review
Publishing peer review reports has many benefits, but critics often worry that it’s unlikely to be read or seen. This isn’t true: data suggest that peer review reports can receive 10% or ⅓ of the traffic to the article itself. However, it stands to reason that this number could go up or down depending on…
This post originally appeared on ReimagineReview. ReimagineReview launched one month ago, and it’s been amazing to watch it continue to grow since its inception! This project started from the idea of transforming a spreadsheet of experiments and projects in peer review of scholarly outputs into a practical resource. Our launch was announced in an article in Nature News,…
We are seeking temporary research assistance (online, remote) for a project to survey biomedical preprint servers for current scholarly practices. Apply by April 7.
In this guest post, Olavo Amaral reports the first results from the crowdsourced project to compare quality of reporting between preprints and peer-reviewed articles.
The Center for Open Science is seeking graduate students, post docs, researchers and academic faculty to participate in survey to investigate the factors that affect the perceived credibility and use of preprints.
This post originally appeared on The Scholarly Kitchen on 2019-03-26. Cover image via Eddi Aguirre. The design of critical infrastructure determines what its users can do, and when. For example, the New York City subway system carries 1.7 billion passengers annually, shapes centers of residential and commercial activity, and enables a vibrant culture with its late night…
Those who have been following ASAPbio for a while know that journal policies on preprinting are always in flux. As adoption of preprints—and editors’ comfort with them—increase, these changes are typically positive. However, one potential downside to a rapidly-evolving policy landscape is the potential difficulty authors may face in finding their footing, especially when preprint…
Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of ReimagineReview, a registry of platforms and experiments innovating around peer review. We now have the technology to experiment with peer review and research evaluation in ways that were not possible decades ago. Many such experiments are already underway—both within the traditional journal system and outside of it—that…
The ScholCommLab and ASAPbio are seeking a Visiting Scholar to collaborate with us on a special project about preprint usage and sciences communication.
Dear subscribers, It’s been a while! Here’s what’s been keeping us busy: New team members We’re delighted to welcome five new people to the team! From left to right: Phil Bourne (Professor, University of Virginia), Jennifer Lin (Director of Product Management, Crossref), and Kristen Ratan (Co-founder and Executive Director, Collaborative Knowledge Foundation) have joined the…
We share a listing of 15 different products or services in use or in development for sharing preprints online.
We’re thrilled to share that Naomi Penfold, PhD has joined us as ASAPbio’s new Associate Director, starting today! In this capacity, Naomi will manage and grow the community of ASAPbio ambassadors, create resources to enable advocacy for (and education about) preprints, and drive discussions on best practices. The position is supported by ASAPbio’s newly-formed Member Advisory…
By Jessica Polka (ASAPbio), Donna Okubo (PLOS), and Tim Vollmer (Creative Commons) Today we’re happy to share two new documents that we hope will aid researchers in their decision to share early work as preprints. Even while the practice of publishing preprints continues to grow, we know from our community outreach that there are still…
Preprints in biology have gained incredible momentum over the last few years, with over 2,000 being posted each month. But, in the context of all published papers, these numbers are still tiny: the rate of preprint posting is <3% of the research that is indexed by PubMed. Will the preprinting become the norm only in…
On February 7-9, 2018, editors, publisher, funders, and researchers gathered at HHMI Headquarters in Chevy Chase, MD to discuss innovations in peer review. A clear majority of participants at the meeting agreed that publishing peer review reports (ie, the contents of peer review, whether anonymized or not), would benefit the research community by increasing transparency of…
A July 24 article by Tom Sheldon of the Science Media Centre raised concerns about the use of preprints in the media. Soon after, nine eLife ambassadors (some of which are also ASAPbio ambassadors) responded in a preprint entitled “Maintaining confidence in the reporting of scientific outputs.” Many of the same sentiments are echoed the following…
Dear subscribers, Hope July is treating you well! Here are some recent updates from ASAPbio and the world of preprints and open peer review. We’re hiring (please help us spread the word!) Preprints now appear at Europe PMC A digest of recent preprint and peer review news Job posting: advance the use of preprints in…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.”…
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…
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?…
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’,…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
By Dr. Stuart Taylor, Publishing Director, The Royal Society, London, UK Peer review has been a key part of the research communication system for centuries. Scientists absolutely depend on a research literature that is as reliable, reproducible and trustworthy as possible in order to inform their future work and to help explain other findings. Subjecting…
By Chris Pickett Journal peer review is a critical part of vetting the integrity of the literature, and the research community should do more to value this exercise. Biomedical research is in a period of hypercompetition, and the pressures of hypercompetition force scientists to focus on metrics that define success in the current environment—funding, publications…
Dear subscribers, Hope 2018 is off to a great start for you! We have a few exciting announcements: Save the date: Transparency, Recognition, and Innovation in Peer Review in the Life Sciences On February 7-8, tune in to asapbio.org/peer-review to watch a webcast of a meeting we’re co-hosting with HHMI and Wellcome Trust on how…
By Tony Hyman and Ron Vale Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden Germany (hyman@mpi-cbg.de) and the University of California, San Francisco, United States (ron.vale@ucsf.edu) Rapid changes in communication technology have led to sea changes in publication. The days when John Maddox (1) joined Nature and found submitted manuscripts sitting in piles…
By Ron Vale, Tony Hyman, and Jessica Polka Summary We propose the creation of a scientist-driven, journal-agnostic peer review service that produces an “Evaluated Preprint” and facilitates subsequent publication in a journal.
In preparation for our meeting on Transparency, Recognition, and Innovation in Peer Review in the Life Sciences on February 7-9 at HHMI Headquarters, we’ve collected some recent (and not-so-recent) literature on journal peer review. A full annotated bibliography can be found at the bottom of this post, and we invite any additions via comments. To…
by John Helliwell, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry University of Manchester and DSc Physics University of York (@HelliwellJohn) Introduction For the meeting entitled “Transparency, Reward, and Innovation in Peer Review in the Life Sciences” to be held on Feb. 7-9, 2018 at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland (https://asapbio.org/peer-review) I have been asked by…
by Stephen Curry, Professor of Structural Biology, Imperial College (@Stephen_Curry) As the song goes – and I have in mind the Beatles’ 1963 cover version of Money (that’s all I want) – “the best things in life are free.” But is peer review one of them? The freely given service that many scientists provide as validation…
On July 19, preprint service providers, funders, and researchers gathered in Cambridge, MA and via videoconference for a live-streamed ASAPbio workshop about the evolving preprint ecosystem (see video recording and collaborative notes). The goal of the meeting was to assess outstanding needs in light of recent developments, including CZI’s partnership with bioRxiv. At the meeting,…
Dear subscribers, The preprint ecosystem is growing rapidly. The CZI/bioRxiv partnership will fuel the expansion of the leading preprint server in the life sciences, and many other servers and platforms with varying degrees of disciplinary overlap exist or are planned (arXiv, PeerJ Preprints, preprints.org, OSF Preprints, ChemRxiv, SSRN, SciELO, PsyArxiv, EngArXiv, SocArXiv, Authorea, F1000Research, etc).…
Every month, more and more life scientists are choosing to post a preprint. This decision can give scientists visibility in their field, establish priority of their work in progress, gain recognition by funding agencies, and elicit feedback to improve their manuscript. But once the decision to preprint is made, authors posting to some servers are…
Funding agencies are crucial to the development of the preprint movement. The adoption of preprints by the life sciences community has been accelerated by grant-making policies that recognize these manuscripts as a valid form of scholarly communication. Investments in preprint infrastructure, services, and technologies are thus necessary to build capacity for growth. The latest strong support…
May 10, 2017 update: ASAPbio has announced a four-month suspension of the RFA process to reassess the preprint ecosystem and community needs. Preprints (scientific manuscripts that have been posted prior to completion of peer review) allow for the direct exchange of knowledge between scientists. They constitute a global public good that promotes scientific progress. However,…
Dear subscribers, It’s been a big month for preprints! NIH encourages preprints On March 24, the world’s largest biomedical research agency released a landmark policy on preprints and other interim research products. The notice states that “The NIH encourages investigators to use interim research products, such as preprints, to speed the dissemination and enhance the…
Dear subscribers, Last month, we held a Town Hall meeting for Scientific Societies at NAS in Washington, DC. The meeting featured presentations by representatives of ASAPbio, NIH, and scientific societies who are innovating with preprints and publishing. More information and a video recording of the meeting is available online. At the meeting, Neil Thakur of…
When questions of general relevance about the requirements and process of the Central Service RFA are received, we will post anonymized summaries of these questions and their answers here. Please direct any additional questions to jessica.polka@asapbio.org. Bidders’ information meetings Audio of February 24th, 2017 bidders’ information meeting. The March 29th 9pm EDT meeting had no participants. Q&A Q:…
Date: Thursday, February 23, 2017 Contact: Jessica Polka | Director, ASAPbio | jessica.polka@asapbio.org ASAPbio, a biologist-driven project to promote the productive use of preprints in the life sciences, has received a $1 million, 18-month grant from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust to develop a new service to aggregate life sciences preprints…
Dear subscribers, Since the summer of 2016, ASAPbio has been iterating on a proposal for a “Central Service” for life sciences preprints, a database that would aggregate preprints from multiple sources and make them easier to access by humans and machines. We explain the benefits of such a service in a recent blog post. Yesterday, 11…
Preprints are complete and public manuscripts with associated data shared before undergoing peer review. Physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists post 100,000 preprints per year to arXiv, a scientist-governed preprint server that has been in operation for over a quarter of a century. Preprints in the life sciences are in a more embryonic stage, with less…
May 10, 2017 update: ASAPbio has announced a four-month suspension of the RFA process to reassess the preprint ecosystem and community needs. ASAPbio is releasing a Request for Applications for the development of a Central Service (provisional name) for preprints in the life sciences issued by ASAPbio. This Request is open to all prospective bidders, and…
At the ASAPbio Funders’ Workshop, representatives from a number of funding agencies asked ASAPbio to “develop a proposal describing the governance, infrastructure and standards desired for a preprint service that represents the views of the broadest number of stakeholders.” Following iterative discussions about the technical and organizational aspects of such a project, ASAPbio is now…
Following increased interest in may scientific societies’ positions on the use of preprints in NIH grant applications, several societies have released statements providing their perspectives. ASCB The ASCB leadership, after careful consideration, believes preprints should be able to be included in grant applications and referenced in NIH progress reports, with the proper references so they…
The report from the August 30th ASAPbio Technical Workshop has been published on January 16, 2017 in Rio Journal. Along with a summary of the day’s discussions (which are also available to view online), the report contains a the authors’ synthesis of key principles and recommendations for preprint technology development (found in Table 3):
Dear subscribers, We need your help for an urgent action this week. The NIH released a RFI (request for information) on “including preprints and interim research products in the NIH applications and reports.” ASAPbio, and many individual scientists, responded with arguments in favor of providing scientists with the option, not requirement, of citing preprints in NIH applications/reports as public evidence…
1/19/2017 update: We will close the signature drive at 9pm EST on Sunday, 1/22/2017. Summary The NIH released a RFI (request for information) on “including preprints and interim research products in the NIH applications and reports.” ASAPbio, and many individual scientists, responded with arguments in favor of providing scientists with the option, not requirement, of…
For authors, one of the most exciting potential benefits of preprints is the ability to attract early feedback from broad and diverse sources during the preparation of a scientific manuscript. Preprint journal clubs can provide this input – and a more meaningful review experience for their own members as well. Here are some examples and resources for setting them up. Prachee…
“EMBO Press has now gone one step further to extend scooping protection to the day of posting the preprint version of the manuscript.”
Preprinting in biology is gaining steam, but the process is still far from normal: the upload rate to all preprint servers is about 1% that of PubMed. The most obvious way for individual scientists to help turn the tide is, of course, to preprint their own work. But given that it now takes longer to…
At the ASAPbio Funders’ Workshop in May of 2016, representatives of funding agencies requested that ASAPbio “develop a proposal describing the governance, infrastructure and standards desired for a preprint service that represents the views of the broadest number of stakeholders.” Toward this end, we proposed a model for a “Central Service” (CS) that would aggregate…
Dear ASAPbio subscriber, Tell the NIH what you think about preprints The NIH has recently released a request for information (RFI) on the use of preprints and other interim research products. We encourage all interested parties to respond to the RFI using the submission website by the deadline of December 9th (extended from November 29th).…
Preprints are able to receive a DOI that eventually will link to the published paper
Note: the RFI is now closed. The NIH has announced a policy that encourages the use of preprints. The NIH has recently released a request for information (RFI) on the use of preprints and other interim research products. We encourage all interested parties to respond to the RFI using the submission website by the deadline…
Dear ASAPbio subscriber, Here’s what’s new: We held a successful Technical Workshop to discuss the feasibility of creating a central preprint service. All the notes are online, and you can also view the archived video stream. We’re working on a request for information to identify potential suppliers, their implementation strategies, and their predicted costs and…
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…
Central Service model documents Summary: Background and a draft model Appendix 1: Rationale for a Central Service Appendix 2: Current feedback on Central Service features Current discussions with the community on proposed features of the Central Service Surveys and information from scientists We will continue to engage the scientific community on what services they want to see…
Central Service model documents Summary: Background and a draft model Appendix 1: Rationale for a Central Service Appendix 2: Current feedback on Central Service features Do we need new infrastructure and governance for preprints? Because the preprint server arXiv was born very early in the history of the internet and served its community well, it has become…
ASAPbio is iteratively seeking community feedback on a draft model for a Central Preprint Service. We will integrate community and stakeholder feedback into a proposal, containing several model variants, to funders this fall. Please leave your feedback on utility of the Central Service, its features, and the model described in the Summary in the comment…
This announcement was originally posted on the Simons Foundation website. On June 20, four foundations announced their support for ASAPbio (Accelerating Science and Publication in Biology), a scientist-driven effort with a mission to promote the use of preprints in the life sciences. The combined total provisional funding — from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the…
Tony Hyman and ASAPbio founder Ron Vale have just published a Point of View in eLife building on their earlier blog post. ABSTRACT: The job of a scientist is to make a discovery and then communicate this new knowledge to others. For a scientist to be successful, he or she needs to be able to claim credit…
The following is a message from funding agency representatives who attended our recent Funders’ Workshop. As research funders who attended the ASAPbio Funder’s Workshop for Preprints held at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on May 23-24, 2016, we wish to provide a brief summary of the meeting. This follows the initial Funder’s Perspective drawn…
The Data-Driven Discovery group at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation released a post on Medium today soliciting feedback on proposed changes to their policies on a variety of open access practices. Preprints are discussed as follows: Ideally, all journal articles would first be available as preprints. Preprints are versions of your manuscript that are not…
On May 20, 2016, a Simons Foundation initiative, SFARI, announced that it has changed its policies to support and encourage the use of preprints. The Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) recently made two important changes that we hope will help to accelerate the pace of autism research. First, we changed our grant award letter…
A group of attendees of ASAPbio have published a commentary in the “Policy Forum” section of the journal Science on May 20, 2016. Written by scientists and representatives from journals and funding agencies, the paper serves as a meeting report and summary of opinions on the use of preprints in the life sciences. Correction: This paper contains…
Authored by Jo McEntyre and Phil Bourne Goal: To satisfy the fundamental requirements of establishing scientific priority rapidly and cheaply through providing the ability to publish and access open preprints, balanced with the desire to support open science innovation around publishing workflows. Approach: An internationally supported, open, archive (or platform) for preprints as infrastructure is…
Drafted by ASAPbio How can funders help to validate preprints as a mechanism for communication? In a Commentary in Science published on May 20, 2016, co-authors representing several funding agencies recommended: 1) Publishing an explicit statement encouraging researchers to make early versions of their manuscripts available through acceptable preprint repositories. 2) Permitting the citation of…
Drafted by ASAPbio arXiv arXiv is the most directly comparable model in terms of the database content (preprints). Important elements of arXiv’s success are: single point of ingestion and one-stop shopping for viewing (everyone in the physics community wakes up and searches arXiv), high visibility and quality (a reason why scientists submit to arXiv to…
Drafted by ASAPbio At present, biologists submit very few preprints. However, possible growth to the level of arXiv (100,000 submissions/year) or beyond needs to be considered. This will challenge the IT capacity (including robust data back-up) and quality control screening systems of existing servers as well as heighten the need to integrate this information. While…
Drafted by ASAPbio As a public good, preprints should obey a single data standard that will enable them to reside in a single database. This database should be permanent, well-maintained, free for all to use, and easily accessible and searchable. This preprint service should have an outstanding governance structure that will represent the needs of…
Drafted by ASAPbio Preprints are a global archive of knowledge that serves the public good. Here, we hope to discuss and define the basic functions that scientists and funding agencies seek from a Core Preprint Service. We use the term “Core” to define the basic features that meet these goals and might define a “minimal…
Dear ASAPbio subscriber, Last week, we announced the ASAPbio Funders’ Workshop, a small meeting to be held at NIH on May 24th to coordinate support among private and public funding agencies for preprints in biology. Representatives from existing preprint servers will attend, as will some junior and senior scientists. To ensure that the voice of…
On May 24th, 2016, representatives of funding agencies and existing preprint servers as well as junior and senior scientists will meet at the NIH to coordinate their efforts in providing a preprint service for the biology community. The attendees of this small workshop are listed below. — ASAPbio organizers ASAPbio Funders’ Workshop attendees Needhi Bhalla UC Santa Cruz…
We are writing to inform you about some developments since the first ASAPbio meeting at the HHMI in February. This meeting, which was attended by a diverse group of individuals representing many institutions and followed by a sizable online audience, had an intended goal of learning whether there is increased interest and greater support for…
Angela DePace, Assistant Professor, Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School I believe strongly in open access (mainly because everyone deserves access to the scientific literature, but also because of the immorality of making large profits from free academic labor and the unsustainability of library subscription prices). I also believe in open peer review; I strive to…
Thanks for subscribing to ASAPbio’s newsletter! As part of the followup to last month’s productive meeting, ASAPbio organizers and attendees have been working to spread discussions about preprints to the broader community. Recent articles at Wired, NYTimes, and The Economist have certainly moved the needle in this regard! Please help keep the conversation going by…
Marty Chalfie recently sent the following message to readers of The Worm Breeder’s Gazette: February 19, 2016 Dear Fellow Worm Workers, I have just returned from a very exciting meeting on archiving of manuscripts (preprints) in the biological sciences organized by Daniel Colón Ramos, Jessica Polka, Ron Vale, and Harold Varmus (See asapbio.org for more information),…
Harlan Krumholz, Harold H. Hines Jr. Professor of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine and ASAPbio attendee, is the author of a recent article in NPR entitled “Academic Medical Centers Get An F In Sharing Research Results.” You can watch his 5-minute talk at ASAPbio on preprints and data sharing here.
Take a picture of yourself and/or your coauthors celebrating the submission of a preprint and post it in the comments below (click the icon to at the bottom left of the text field to upload an image). Don’t forget to include a link to the preprint if it’s already available! You can get a link…
If you have any news relevant to ASAP – a change in journal policies, a local event (even in the early stages of organization), a new article, etc, please leave a comment below.
GENETICS and G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics, peer-reviewed, peer-edited journals published by the Genetics Society of America (GSA), are proud to support the posting of preprints. Here, we outline our experience in a draft statement. Since 2012, in response to requests from members of our community, the GSA Journals have supported the posting of preprints. In 2015, we…