Become a crowd preprint reviewer and support public feedback on preprints

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…

Survey: how early would you preprint and what feedback would you like?

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…

Delving deeper into preprints in institutional and generalist repositories

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…

Preprint highlight: “A Guide to Preprinting for Early Career Researchers”

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…

‘It’s good for you and it’s good for the science’ – The impact of preprints for early career researchers webinar recap

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…

Introducing Preprints and Publishing in the Life and Biomedical Sciences: a course on preprints and the journal publication process

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…

Urging the Australian Research Council to revise its preprint policies

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…

Tackling information overload: identifying relevant preprints and reviewers

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…

Stock photo of a person arranging sticky notes in an office environment

Developing a taxonomy to describe preprint review processes

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…

ASAPbio Preprint Reviewer Recruitment network featuring logos of Review Commons, GigaScience, GigaByte, PeerJ, Proc B, JCB, MBoC, PLOS, eLife, and SAGE

Announcing the Preprint Reviewer Recruitment Network

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…

FAST principles board

FAST principles to foster a positive preprint feedback culture

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…