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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…