Scientists sat around a table reviewing preprints with snacks inlcuding apples

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

Traaditional 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…

How journals are innovating in peer review through preprints

Image reproduced from Biogeosciences Post by ASAPbio Fellow Aditi Sengupta Preprints are increasingly becoming a tool to support the peer-review process and aid rapid dissemination of research results. The increased transparency in the review process that preprints can support has been welcomed by many journals with many pivoting to an environment of supporting preprints. A…

Banner announcing Review Commons policy update

New policy: Review Commons makes preprint review fully transparent

In a major step toward promoting preprint peer review as a means of increasing transparency and efficiency in scientific publishing, Review Commons is updating its policy: as of 1 June 2022, peer reviews and the authors’ response will be posted by Review Commons to bioRxiv or medRxiv when authors transfer their refereed preprint to the first affiliate journal. By Thomas…

Stock photo of a person arranging sticky notes in an office environment

Developing a taxonomy to describe preprint review processes

By Victoria Yan 2022-01-27 update: This work has now been completed. Please see our blog post announcing PReF. Why develop a preprint review taxonomy? Dozens of projects organizing peer review of preprints are active or being developed. In this landscape full of new possibilities, differentiating among innovative forms of preprint review is challenging. Furthermore, these…

Review commons Extended Scooping Protection: Preprint posted, protected at 17 journals

Review Commons implements new policies on preprints and extended scoop protection

This post originally appeared on the Review Commons blog. Review Commons is announcing two new policies today: As of August 1, 2021, Review Commons will require all authors to post their manuscript as a preprint, prior to transfer to an affiliate journal1. In return, all the affiliate journals provide authors with scooping protection from the date of posting of the…

Call for proposals to encourage preprint curation and peer review

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…

Evaluating Review Commons – the first 9 months

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.…

Systematize information on journal policies and practices – A call to action

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…

Comparing journal-independent review services

Preprinting not only accelerates the dissemination of science, but also enables early feedback from a broad community. Therefore, it’s no surprise that there are many innovative projects offering feedback, commentary, and peer reviews on preprints. Such feedback can range from the informal (tweets, comments, annotations, or a simple endorsement) to the formal (an editor-organized process…

Improving peer review through research

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…

Transpose data reused by Clarivate to increase awareness of journal peer review and preprinting policies

Transpose is a community database of journal policies on peer review and preprinting developed with major contributions from ASAPbio. Launched almost a year ago after a sprint at the 2018 Scholarly Communications Institute, Transpose includes information on whether peer review is blinded, transparency of reviewer identities and reports, co-reviewing policies, versions of papers that can…

Reimagining review in a world of preprints

At the 2019 ASCB|EMBO cell biology meeting, we convened researchers, funders, publishers, and advocates in a panel discussion focused on making use of peer review on preprints.  The use of preprints in the biomedical sciences has been increasing exponentially in recent years as it is becoming a common practice in research dissemination.  Free from journal brands, preprints enable innovations…

Community call recap: revealing quality of peer review through increased transparency

The theme of Peer Review week in 2019 was quality in peer review. However, the quality of most reviews are obscured to researchers because traditional peer review processes are conducted behind closed doors. We identified five active approaches to improving peer review quality through increased transparency and brought practitioners of each together in a community…