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…
“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…
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…
#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…
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,…