Updates and announcements from ASAPbio

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…

Sharing negative results via a preprint: A conversation with Livia Songster

This is the third in our series of posts highlighting the winners of the ASAPbio competition ‘Make your negative result a preprint winner,’ which celebrates the value of using preprints to share negative and inconclusive scientific results. In this post, we hear from Livia Songster (University of California San Diego), the first author of the preprint ‘Woronin…

Sharing negative results via a preprint: a conversation with Lilya Andrianova

This is the second in our series of posts highlighting the winners of the ASAPbio competition ‘Make your negative result a preprint winner,’ which celebrate the value of using preprints to share negative and inconclusive scientific results. In this post, we hear from Lilya Andrianova (University of Exeter Medical School & University of Glasgow), the first author…

Midjourney-generated image of scientists talking holding papers with speech bubbles above them

“Advancing the Culture of Peer Review with Preprints” – a Call to Action

Today, we’re happy to share a preprint written by a subset of the participants in December’s Recognizing Preprint Peer Review Meeting hosted by ASAPbio, HHMI and EMBO. It’s an exciting time for preprint review, with new services, models, and policies providing the foundation for a growing ecosystem. At the same time, the diversity in the…

midjourney-generated illustration of an open book with flasks and biologically-themed patterns springing from it

ASAPbio’s response to the NIH Plan to Enhance Public Access

Last month, the US NIH released a Request for Information (RFI) for feedback on its planned implementation of last year’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) directive to make all US federally-funded research immediately publicly accessible.  In addition to ensuring that “publications resulting from NIH-supported research are made available in PMC without…

Announcing the winners of the ‘Make your negative result a preprint winner’ competition

We are pleased to announce the winners of the ASAPbio competition ‘Make your negative result a preprint winner’, which aimed to highlight the value of sharing negative and inconclusive scientific results via preprints. We know that science advances through a persistent exploration of research questions and approaches, and that this brings with it the fact…

ASAPbio preprint policy toolkit for funders

Preprints help to improve the overall quality, integrity and reproducibility of research outputs, as highlighted in UNESCO’s recommendations on open science. Preprint adoption is increasing across scientific disciplines and geographies thanks to the involvement of multiple players, including researchers, publishers, institutions, societies, and funders. Funders can significantly influence, and benefit from, the preprint landscape by…

Fostering local preprint communities: announcing the ASAPbio Local Hubs

ASAPbio hosts a global community and we regularly organize online events and activities for audiences across the world. At the same time, we recognize that in-person interactions can be invaluable for developing new relationships and the deeper engagement needed for change in science communication. To support and amplify the work that community members do in…

NASA TOPS logo with "let's talk open science" next to it

ASAPbio joins NASA TOPS

ASAPbio is thrilled to join the Transform to Open Science (TOPS) initiative, a NASA project “designed to rapidly transform agencies, organizations, and communities to an inclusive culture of open science.” TOPS is also part of US White House’s Year of Open Science.  Quoting the TOPS website, the initiative’s four goals are to: How ASAPbio is…

Do you have a preprint in progress and want constructive feedback? Submit it for discussion at the ASAPbio-PREreview live-streamed preprint journal clubs

Preprints provide a great avenue for researchers to get feedback on their work from the community. This type of community feedback is particularly valuable when gathered on early preprints, that is, on manuscripts that are still work-in-progress, prior to their submission for journal publication. The feedback from the community can allow authors to get a…

Recommendations for managing preprints in generalist and institutional repositories

As adoption of preprints has grown over recent years, researchers have made use of a variety of platforms to share the early drafts of their manuscripts. In addition to the existing preprint servers, there are also many institutional or generalist repositories where authors can deposit their manuscripts – Zenodo, for example, lists over 6,000 records…

ASAPbio crowd preprint review 2.0 – highlights from our 2022 activities to collaboratively develop public preprint reviews

Last year we ran a trial where we experimented with translating the crowd review model pioneered by the journal Synlett to preprints, and we coordinated activities to develop public reviews on cell biology preprints. The activities resulted in sign up by over 100 researchers, and in 14 public preprint reviews developed through comments contributed by…

The ASAPbio Fellows program: an interview with 2022 Fellow Ruchika Bajaj

ASAPbio wants to support community members who want to learn more about preprints and share information and resources about preprints with their own communities. To empower our community members to be preprint advocates, we started a Fellows program in 2020, a dedicated set of activities around preprints that allows participants to learn more about preprints,…

Recognizing Preprint Peer Review

Today, we’re excited to announce a meeting co-organized with HHMI and EMBO to promote recognition for open dialog on preprints. Learn more and register to watch the livestream on December 1-2 here. Greater recognition for preprint review would build on important momentum: in April, EMBO announced that refereed preprints would fulfill eligibility requirements for its…

ASAPbio’s response to the OSTP Nelson memo

We applaud the recent US White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum on ensuring free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research. The updated policies requiring public access to peer-reviewed publications and research data will bring many benefits to the US and the global research community. We thank the OSTP for…