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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…

Yearly preprints/all-papers in Microsoft Academic Graph, trend by domain, reproduced from Xie B, Shen Z, and Wang K 2021 [8]

Addressing information overload in scholarly literature

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…

Why do some researchers have reservations about preprints? – ASAPbio March Community Call recap

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…

Resources for preprints in the public eye

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…

#PreprintsInThePublicEye Twitter poll results!

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…

From a “Forgotten Experiment” in the 1960s to today: Clinical Preprints in the Light of History

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…