Updates and announcements from ASAPbio

A sneak peak inside the ASAPbio Crowd Preprint Review initiative

This blog post was co-written by Jonny Coates and 2024 ASAPbio Fellows; Josie, Jade & Lamis It’s peer review week and to celebrate, we are releasing a preview of one of the 2024 ASAPbio Fellows projects focused on investigating the ASAPbio Crowd Preprint Review activities.  ASAPbio Crowd Preprint Review The theme of peer review week…

Introducing a Prototype Directory of Organizations and Initiatives in Open Scholarly Communication

By Katie Corker (ASAPbio) & Lisa Cuevas Shaw (COS) Keeping current on organizations and initiatives that are active in the area of open scholarly communication is challenging. Like other parts of the open science community, the open scholarly communications landscape is decentralized, fast-paced, and constantly evolving. To identify both established and emerging organizations and initiatives,…

A hands-on preprint workshop

This blog post was written by Aneth Bella David, a 2023 ASAPbio Fellow, and reports on a recently completed community project. The landscape of scholarly communication is rapidly evolving, with preprints emerging as a transformative tool for research dissemination worldwide. However, in Tanzania like the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa, the adoption of preprints for scholarly…

What Do Researchers Think about Scholarly Publishing? Five Key Takeaways from a New Survey by cOAlition S

A comprehensive and high quality survey of researcher attitudes toward the scholarly publishing process was published last week. The joint product of a consultation with Research Consulting and the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) Leiden, a wide-ranging report on the survey, along with the complete dataset and survey materials, are now available. The…

A crowdsourced kind peer review guide for ECRs in Ecology and Evolution

This is a post written by Gracielle Higino about her community project that was funded in 2023. I was tired of hearing students and colleagues sharing their bad experiences with reviewers. I was tired of working really hard to submit a paper for publication and receiving inconsiderate reviews and editorial decisions. We needed a change…

Scientists sat around a table reviewing preprints with snacks inlcuding apples

Apply for support in converting your journal club to a preprint review club

Traditional journal clubs are present in most labs and departments bringing together early career researchers to discuss and review a chosen article. These groups effectively perform peer review but often don’t share the comments with the authors. This year ASAPbio is launching a fund to support current journal clubs in performing (and sharing) peer reviews…

Composite image of individual smaller screens displaying different 2023 fellows waving to the camera

2023: Another successful year for the ASAPbio Fellows

In 2023 we progressed 38 people through the third installment of the ASAPbio Fellows program. Together this group participated in cohort calls to provide fundamental knowledge and training around preprints in addition to multiple projects, which we celebrate here.  Awareness of preprints in Africa The adoption of preprints across the globe has not been equitable,…

Plan S logo and text reading "towards responsible publishing: a proposal from cOAlition S" against an orange background with an image of a staircase

20 minute action: provide feedback on a funder proposal that would support preprints & open review

Take cOAlition S’s survey by the November 29th deadline to support a new model of publishing cOAlition S, an initiative of more than 2 dozen national funders and charitable organizations, has recently released the “Towards Responsible Publishing” proposal. The two key features of this proposal, as stated in an introductory blog post, are: 1. Authors,…

Spreading preprint awareness locally: growing the Hubs program

Culture change happens within communities. While virtual programs like the ASAPbio Fellows and Community calls link preprint enthusiasts across continents, nothing beats face-to-face interactions. So, as in-person events picked up earlier this year, we created a new program to support discussions about preprints; the ASAPbio Local Hubs program with three community leaders. Here, two of…

close up photograph of a diamond

EU council ‘no pay’ publishing model is realistic

This post originally appeared on Olivier Pourret’s blog and in Indonesian on Dasapta Erwin Irawan’s blog. Authors According to Katharine Sanderson, “publishing-industry representatives warn” that May’s EU Council call for a “no pay” academic publishing model is “unrealistic and lack[ing] detail”. However, the proposal is already being implemented via several approaches:  (i) Authors can publish their work…

grid of cartoon faces representing crowd review participants

Crowd preprint review is back! Sign up to participate in one of several groups led by ASAPbio Fellows 

Interested in honing your peer review skills while providing valuable feedback to preprint authors? Then join one of our preprint review crowds!  Following our two previous cycles of preprint review activities, we are thrilled to announce that ASAPbio will host more crowd preprint review activities in 2023. This year our crowd preprint review activities will…