Should reviewers be expected to review supporting datasets and code?

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

The role of preprints in publishing

Vitek Tracz and Rebecca Lawrence F1000, Middlesex House, 34-42 Cleveland St, London, W1T 4LB, vitek@sciencenow.com, rebecca.lawrence@f1000.com We support the adoption of preprints in biomedicine, as one of a number of innovations that will help to accelerate scientific progress. However, we believe that simply adopting preprints on their own, whilst retaining the existing traditional journal publishing…