Surveying the landscape of products and services for sharing preprints
We share a listing of 15 different products or services in use or in development for sharing preprints online.
Sharing new educational resources on open licensing for preprints
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…
Responding to concerns about preprints in the media
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…
Comparing quality of reporting between preprints and peer-reviewed articles – a crowdsourced initiative
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…
Preprint journal clubs
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…
10 ways to support preprints (besides posting one)
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…
Some thoughts on ASAPbio
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…
Submission selfies
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…
Community news
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.
Preprints & Scholarly Publishers: A Synergy
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…
Open pre-print peer review: a call for greater transparency in the evaluation of manuscripts
Lachlan Coin, Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia Darya Vanichkina, Centenary Institute, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia Alicia Oshlack, Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne, Australia Transparency and openness are extremely beneficial for science. The immediate and open publication of findings via preprint servers results in rapid dissemination of…
Fix the incentive structure and the preprints will follow
David L. Stern Janelia Research Campus HHMI I have been following the discussion about preprints closely over the past few months and I am won over by the arguments that science papers should be made available freely to everyone as soon as authors feel that the work is complete. Posting papers to preprint servers is…
Open Scholar: Using Existing Infrastructure to Transform Peer Review
Gary McDowell, Future of Research and Tufts University, and Pandelis Perakakis, Mind, Brain and Behaviour Research Centre, University of Granada, Spain Please address any correspondence to garymcdow@gmail.com and peraka@ugr.es In reforming the culture of peer review and moving towards a system that embraces the use and recognition of pre-print servers, we are cognizant of the…
bioRxiv: a progress report
John R. Inglis and Richard Sever, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Please address any correspondence to inglis@cshl.edu and sever@cshl.edu bioRxiv (biorxiv.org) is a not-for-profit, online archiving and distribution service for preprints[1] of research papers in the life sciences. It was launched in November 2013 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution, and receives financial support from…
ASAPbio and Preprints – A Perspective from a Junior Faculty Member
James Fraser, UCSF Can we move towards more open and rapid sharing of scientific results without putting younger scientists careers at risk? Ideally we want evaluation (of candidates for faculty positions, of promotion of Assistant Professors, of graduate students for fellowships, or of grants for funding) to be thorough and based entirely on a careful…
Draft Statement Regarding Pre-Posting of Articles
Developed for Discussion at ASAPbio by The Royal Society, PLOS, eLife, and EMBO Press We are committed to increasing the accessibility of research and ensuring that it is communicated as rapidly as possible. To accelerate this process, we encourage researchers to deposit early versions of articles they intend to submit to a peer-reviewed journal in…
What Defines “Priority of Discovery” in the Life Sciences?
Ronald D. Vale1 and Anthony A. Hyman2 1Dept. of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, University of California San Francisco and The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, San Francisco, USA 2Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany Address correspondence to: vale@ucsf.edu and hyman@mpi-cbg.de Summary A scientist’s job is to make a discovery and then…
Pre-prints: building a practical guide and Q&As for junior scientists
Samuel L. Díaz-Muñoz Center for Genomics and Systems Biology and Department of Biology, New York University Pre-prints of research articles have been proposed as a way to advance scientific progress, establish priority of discovery, and ameliorate some of the current shortcomings of the peer review process. All these traits are intended to accelerate the pace…
Sharing Preprints and Publishing Papers: a Symbiosis
Bernd Pulverer EMBO Press, Meyerhofstrasse 1, Heidelberg, Germany bernd.pulverer@embo.org Print servers allow the efficient sharing and discussion of scientific findings without restriction or delay. Quality assurance through peer review and editorial processes are more important than ever, given the rapid growth and increased complexity of scientific information. I will argue that both processes can work…
Coupling Pre-Prints and Post-Publication Peer Review for Fast, Cheap, Fair, and Effective Science Publishing
Michael Eisen1,2 and Leslie B. Vosshall 3,4 1 Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and 2 Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA. 3 Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior and 4 Howard Hughes Medical Institute, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY. mbeisen@berkeley.edu; leslie@rockefeller.edu Research papers are the primary tangible and lasting output of…