Blog Category: Guest posts

On July 19, the Medicinal and Aromatics and Traditional Medicine Research Institute, National Center for Research, in Khartoum (Sudan), hosted a workshop about preprints and open science. The event was sponsored by ASAPbio and aimed to raise awareness around preprints among the local community of researchers, help them build skills about a productive use of preprints, and learn more about their place within open science.

On June 7th ASAPbio hosted a workshop in collaboration with IndiaBioscience and Open Access India, to discuss preprints and the value they can add to research assessment frameworks in India. ASAPbio works to drive open and innovative communication in the life sciences and promotes the productive use of preprints.

By Jonny Coates (@JACoates) & Emma Wilson (@ELWilson92) Podcasts have exploded in popularity in recent years, with over 504 million people listening to podcasts across the world, representing an exciting avenue for scientific communication. Similarly, preprints have seen unprecedented usage and become a vital conduit to sharing scientific findings during a global pandemic.

The ASAPbio Fellows program offered by ASAPbio is an excellent opportunity for graduate students, postdocs, and information professionals to learn and become engaged with preprints. Through the 2021 Fellows program, we interacted with researchers across different career stages from various countries and learned about their experience and familiarity (or lack thereof) with preprinting.

In response to the pressure within academic publishing, especially peer review, driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of publishing organisations called on the research community to work together (“COVID-19 Publishers’ Open Letter of Intent �... The community responded quickly, with 2,179 researchers signed up to a volunteer rapid reviewer pool.

Information overload is a common problem, and it is an old problem. It is not a problem of the internet age, and it is not specific to scholarly literature, but the growth of preprints in the last five years presents us with a proximal example of the challenge.