Updates and announcements from ASAPbio
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…
Tuesday, September 8, 2020 12pm New York | 9am San Francisco | 5pm London | 6pm Berlin | 9:30pm Mumbai About half of biomedical articles are submitted to more than one journal, leading to repeated peer review and publication delays. Review Commons is a free, journal-independent peer review service that allows you to transfer your…
Perceived benefits and concerns about preprints – initial survey results We had 546 responses to our survey about the perceived benefits and concerns around preprint – our thanks to everyone who shared their views. We will be taking a deeper dive into the data over the coming weeks but here are some initial takes from the responses: Main perceived…
With contributions from Kathryn Funk, Alice Meadows, Alex Mendonça, Oya Rieger, and Sowmya Swaminathan After our #bioPreprints2020 meeting, a working group of attendees set out to understand how to best increase awareness about preprints among varied groups of stakeholders (such as librarians, journalists, publishers, funders, research administrators, students, clinicians, and more). To accomplish this goal,…
In late January, ASAPbio, in collaboration with EMBL-EBI and Ithaka S+R, hosted the #bioPreprints2020 workshop to improve the discoverability, reuse, and interoperability of preprints in the life and biomedical sciences. After the meeting, attendees formed working groups to establish draft recommendations for preprint metadata, withdrawal and removal definitions, data availability statements, versioning, and surfacing review…
By Victoria Yan This post originally appeared at ReimagineReview, a registry of innovative peer review projects. Here on ReimagineReview, we envision the constant improvement of peer review through experimentation and research. With concurrent research and outcome reporting, the projects we list have the potential to demonstrate whether their approach has improved peer review. The collective…