In this guest post, Olavo Amaral reports the first results from the crowdsourced project to compare quality of reporting between preprints and peer-reviewed articles.
The Center for Open Science is seeking graduate students, post docs, researchers and academic faculty to participate in survey to investigate the factors that affect the perceived credibility and use of preprints.
By Iain Cheeseman Whitehead Institute Journals play a critical role in the scientific process, refining research through peer review and disseminating it to appropriate communities. At its best, the publishing process is a partnership among editors, staff, authors, reviewers, and readers. Each group has a vested interest in working together to ensure a robust and…
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…
By Harinder Singh Director, Division of Immunobiology and the Center for Systems Immunology Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center This perspective is a result of the various insightful commentaries that have been posted on the ASAPbio site in the context of the HHMI/Wellcome/ASAPbio meeting on “Transparency, Recognition and Innovation in Peer Review in the Life Sciences.”…
By Gary McDowell, Future of Research When it comes to peer review and the role that Early Career Researchers (ECRs) play in it, I am of course reminded of the immortal words of Steve McKnight in his President’s Message at the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB, emphasis mine): “the average scientist today…
By Vivian Siegel In my own experience, and I’ve written about this in the past, peer review in the context of journal submission suffers from a number of biases. These include journal-based biases that would be eliminated by a journal agnostic process. I summarize the main points below. We all know reviewers are biased (why?…
By Bernd Pulverer, EMBO As preprint posting takes hold in the biosciences community, we need both quality control and curation to ensure we share results in a reproducible and discoverable manner The EC has taken the bold step – at least on paper – to proclaim a Europe that is by 2020 to be ‘Open Innovation’,…
By Elizabeth Moylan, Senior Editor, Peer Review & Innovation, BMC (part of Springer Nature) At BMC, we’ve always supported innovation in peer review and were one of the first publishers to truly open up peer review in 1999. Fiona Godlee, then Editorial Director for BMC, explained the reasons for this decision, including ethical superiority (reviewers…
By Samantha Hindle and Daniela Saderi, PREreview The image above (DOI) is CC-BY 4.0 licensed and is available for download on Figshare. Preprints are freely available scientific manuscripts that have not yet undergone editorial peer review. They provide data and knowledge that is current, accessible by all, and at a stage where community peer review…
By Damian Pattinson, Research Square Introduction The term ‘peer review’ has come to mean any assessment performed on a manuscript prior to publication. So for any paper submitted to a journal, it ‘undergoes peer review’ and it is published. But in actual fact, the act of preparing a manuscript for publication requires a huge number…
By Harinder Singh, Division of Immunobiology and the Center for Systems Immunology, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center Motivation Although major research advances are rapidly being made in the biological and biomedical sciences, the communication of these findings is hampered by existing publication forums. Despite the large and expanding number of journals, there are considerable limitations,…
By Rebecca Lawrence & Vitek Tracz, F1000, rebecca.lawrence@f1000.com We have been successfully running a service (which we call platforms, to distinguish from traditional research journals), for over 5 years at F1000 that is essentially a preprint coupled with formal, invited (i.e. not crowd-sourced) post publication peer review. We have consequently amassed significant experience of running…
By Robert Kiley, Head of Open Research, Wellcome Introduction In November 2016 Wellcome became the first research funder to launch a publishing platform for the exclusive use of its grantholders. Wellcome Open Research (WOR), run on behalf of Wellcome by Faculty of 1000 (F1000), uses a model of immediate publication followed by invited, post-publication peer…
By Bodo M. Stern and Erin K. O’Shea Howard Hughes Medical Institute Chevy Chase, Maryland Summary Life scientists feel increasing pressure to publish in high-profile journals as they compete for jobs and funding. While academic institutions and funders are often complicit in equating journal placement with impact as they make hiring and funding decisions, we…
By Michael B. Eisen Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, UC Berkeley mbeisen@gmail.com, @mbeisen With the rapid growth of bioRxiv, biomedical research is entering a new era in which papers describing our ideas, experiments, data and discoveries are made available to our colleagues and the public without having undergone peer…
By Chris Pickett Journal peer review is a critical part of vetting the integrity of the literature, and the research community should do more to value this exercise. Biomedical research is in a period of hypercompetition, and the pressures of hypercompetition force scientists to focus on metrics that define success in the current environment—funding, publications…
by John Helliwell, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry University of Manchester and DSc Physics University of York (@HelliwellJohn) Introduction For the meeting entitled “Transparency, Reward, and Innovation in Peer Review in the Life Sciences” to be held on Feb. 7-9, 2018 at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland (https://asapbio.org/peer-review) I have been asked by…
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…
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…