Updates and announcements from ASAPbio
The ASAPbio Community is a global and diverse group of researchers and other stakeholders in science communication. While they bring varied expertise and opinions, they all share an interest and support for the use of preprints. Our Community members had expressed interest in hearing a broader range of perspectives about preprints, beyond the pro-preprint views…
Blog post by Sarah Stryeck and Sandra Franco Iborra We are very happy to announce that the ASAPbio Community Action Group kicked off on March 15th. With this Community Action Group, ASAPbio is looking to support our community members in spreading the word about preprints within their institutions and communities and inspire them to take…
Today, as described in Project Coordinator Jigisha’s Patel opinion piece in The Scientist, we’re pleased to share a series of resources and guidelines emerging from our work on the representation of preprints to broad audiences. These infographics summarize more detailed documents drafted by working groups who considered how to preprint servers, researchers, institutions, and journalists…
ASAPbio is seeking two new members for our Board of Directors. With these openings, we aim to 1) improve the racial and ethnic diversity of our board, and 2) include the voice of research trainees, such as graduate students and postdocs. We are also interested in increasing representation from outside the US and beyond cell…
We’re thrilled to announce that the 2021 cycle of the ASAPbio Fellow program is now open for applications. Interested in preprints? Looking to develop your own preprint initiative? Keen to connect with others interested in science communication? Then the ASAPbio Fellow program is for you! The ASAPbio Fellows program runs for six months and provides…
On January 14th, 2021, ASAPbio hosted the #PreprintsInThePublicEye: Challenges and Solutions in an Age of Misinformation event. With speakers from the worlds of preprints, academia, and journalism, the event sought to highlight the problem of misinformation and the misrepresentation of research in the context of preprints and COVID-19. We asked, how can we know what…
Last week we ran Twitter polls for preprint servers, research institutions, researchers and journalists to provide feedback on the outcomes of the Preprints in the Public Eye project. The project aim is to encourage the responsible reporting of research to avoid its misrepresentation or misinterpretation. The project involves stakeholders representing researchers, institutions, preprint servers, publishers…
January 14, 2021. 4pm GMT/ 11am EST/ 8am PST. Covid-19 has brought 2020 to the height of this Age of Misinformation, with particular concerns about the media reporting of research posted as preprints. It has not been all doom and gloom however. This year has provided a strong impetus to develop novel ways to improve…
On December 4, 2020, ASAPbio hosted #PreprintSprint presentations, where 16 projects (down from the 21 presented at the kickoff, partially due to mergers and collaborations) updated approximately 100 attendees on what they had accomplished during the sprint. During the 20 days of the sprint, 9 projects started new collaborations, 14 updated their proposal to incorporate feedback,…
Post by Iratxe Puebla, Associate Director, ASAPbio Although it is hard to believe, we are already in the last month of 2020, and with it we have just closed the first cohort of the ASAPbio Fellows program. While we had had an ASAPbio Community for several years, we felt that if we wanted to encourage…
We’re thrilled to support discussion and feedback to 21 exciting proposals at the Kickoff of the #PreprintSprint on Friday, November 13! At this event, project leads will share their ideas for how to encourage more feedback on preprints, and they will also share what input and resources they need to do that. We hope that…
Community feedback on preprints makes rapid science more robust. Review and commentary can help authors improve their articles; curation can provide readers with helpful context and enhance discoverability. But despite the benefits, barriers to reviewing and curating preprints remain. Potential reviewers and curators see few incentives to organize and comment on preprints, and reviews can…
We’re thrilled to announce a new team of leaders on the ASAPbio board! Effective September 30, 2020, Prachee Avasthi (Associate Professor, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth) will serve as President, James Fraser (Professor, UCSF, and previously ASAPbio Secretary & Treasurer) as Vice President, Iain Cheeseman (Member, Whitehead Institute; Professor of Biology, MIT) as Treasurer,…
2021-10-18 correction: In the original version of this post, the data labels for “accepted” and “rejected” re-review rates were swapped. The correct labels now appear below. In late 2019, EMBO and ASAPbio launched Review Commons, a platform for journal-independent peer review that facilitates the posting of a refereed preprint and submission to 17 partner journals.…
Monday, October 19th, 2020 10am New York | 3pm London | 4pm Berlin | 7:30pm Mumbai Scientific manuscripts often spend months, sometimes years, in the hands of a restricted number of reviewers and editors before they are ultimately released to the rest of the scientific community after peer review. In recent years, the growing usage…
We’ve proud to join the stakeholder group of the Initiative for Open Abstracts, a sister project to Initiative for Open Citations. Making abstracts openly available and machine-readable helps readers discover relevant research. For more on why this is important, see this explainer. Open abstracts are important for preprints as well as published journal articles. The…
Today, we’re pleased to announce the launch of a project on the use of preprints in the media with support from the Open Society Foundations. Premature media coverage was the top concern about preprints in our recent #biopreprints2020 survey, for both those who had published their research as preprints and for those who had not.…
By Willem Halffman, Serge Horbach, Jessica Polka, Tony Ross-Hellauer, and Ludo Waltman Crossposted from Leiden Madtrics Recently the creators of Transpose and the Platform for Responsible Editorial Policies convened an online workshop on infrastructures that provide information on scholarly journals. In this blog post they look back at the workshop and discuss next steps. In…
Join the #PreprintReviewChallenge: Help us create the largest collection of preprint reviews in a day On September 22, ASAPbio will be hosting an online live preprint review event as part of Peer Review Week 2020. We will get together to write constructive comments and reviews on preprints, with the aim to develop the largest collection to date of…
Today, we’re happy to announce a collaboration with TU Graz and the Knowledge Futures group on Doc Maps, a project to create machine-readable ways to describe peer review & editorial processes on articles. As preprints undergo screening checks and pick up peer review from an increasing number of third party sources, it’s becoming more challenging to know…