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…

EMBO and ASAPbio to launch a pre-journal portable review platform

A multi-publisher partnership aims to streamline scientific publishing by producing refereed preprints  Heidelberg and San Francisco—September 30, 2019—EMBO Press and ASAPbio have partnered to create Review Commons, a platform that peer-reviews research manuscripts in the life sciences before submission to a journal.   Papers submitted to Review Commons, which will be launched in December 2019,…

ReimagineReview community call: Revealing quality in peer review through increased transparency

September 20, 9am PDT, 12pm EDT, 6pm CEST The theme of this year’s Peer Review Week, “quality in peer review,” should resonate with anyone—author, referee, or reader—invested in the process of formal publication. But how can those without a direct window into the peer review process be assured of its quality, both the entire body…

Just published: examining the breadth of journal preprint policies in TRANSPOSE

Those who have been following ASAPbio for a while know that journal policies on preprinting are always in flux. As adoption of preprints—and editors’ comfort with them—increase, these changes are typically positive. However, one potential downside to a rapidly-evolving policy landscape is the potential difficulty authors may face in finding their footing, especially when preprint…

Launching ReimagineReview, a registry of peer review experiments

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of ReimagineReview, a registry of platforms and experiments innovating around peer review. We now have the technology to experiment with peer review and research evaluation in ways that were not possible decades ago. Many such experiments are already underway—both within the traditional journal system and outside of it—that…

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

On February 7-9, 2018, editors, publisher, funders, and researchers gathered at HHMI Headquarters in Chevy Chase, MD to discuss innovations in peer review. A clear majority of participants at the meeting agreed that publishing peer review reports (ie, the contents of peer review, whether anonymized or not), would benefit the research community by increasing transparency of…

Advocating for publishing peer review

By Iain Cheeseman Whitehead Institute Journals play a critical role in the scientific process, refining research through peer review and disseminating it to appropriate communities. At its best, the publishing process is a partnership among editors, staff, authors, reviewers, and readers. Each group has a vested interest in working together to ensure a robust and…

Comparing quality of reporting between preprints and peer-reviewed articles – a crowdsourced initiative

By Olavo B. Amaral Institute of Medical Biochemistry, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil As the preprint movement gains traction in biology, the time is ripe to revisit some aspects of scientific publication that we view as fundamental – first and foremost of which is the peer review process itself. Common concerns about preprints…

How to launch a transformative and sustainable forum for publication and scholarly critiques of research in the life sciences?

By Harinder Singh Director, Division of Immunobiology and the Center for Systems Immunology Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center This perspective is a result of the various insightful commentaries that have been posted on the ASAPbio site in the context of the HHMI/Wellcome/ASAPbio meeting on “Transparency, Recognition and Innovation in Peer Review in the Life Sciences.”…

Preprint QC

By Bernd Pulverer, EMBO As preprint posting takes hold in the biosciences community, we need both quality control and curation to ensure we share results in a reproducible and discoverable manner The EC has taken the bold step – at least on paper – to proclaim a Europe that is by 2020 to be  ‘Open Innovation’,…

Advancing peer review

By Elizabeth Moylan, Senior Editor, Peer Review & Innovation, BMC (part of Springer Nature) At BMC, we’ve always supported innovation in peer review and were one of the first publishers to truly open up peer review in 1999. Fiona Godlee, then Editorial Director for BMC, explained the reasons for this decision, including ethical superiority (reviewers…

New Forum for Peer Reviewed Research in the Biomedical Sciences

By Harinder Singh, Division of Immunobiology and the Center for Systems Immunology, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center Motivation Although major research advances are rapidly being made in the biological and biomedical sciences, the communication of these findings is hampered by existing publication forums. Despite the large and expanding number of journals, there are considerable limitations,…