We’re delighted to announce that we will be continuing our work on preprints and open peer review through 2024 with a combined $250,000 per year in funding committed from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and the Simons Foundation. This generous support will sustain ASAPbio’s mission to accelerate discovery in the life sciences.
The last three years have seen major changes in the preprint landscape. We have seen a strong increase in adoption of preprints in the life sciences, and we have grown a community of advocates to accelerate this change. We’ve hosted important conversations among stakeholders about technology needs and best practices around their use. We have also spearheaded initiatives to drive public review of preprints. None of this would have been possible without the support of the funders in our Member Advisory Group, and we thank them for their partnership.
We are thrilled by the progress so far, but we know that we have not yet garnered the full potential of preprints to accelerate science and its publication. Over the next three years, we’ll be focusing on three main areas, as described in our 2022 roadmap, which also outlines our planned activities for the coming months:
1: Support culture change through community programs and outreach
We will grow our existing community of preprint advocates through new programs and collaborations that empower researchers from varied geographic and disciplinary backgrounds to become champions within their own institutions, fields, and societies.
2: Promote constructive preprint review
We will work to grow the public review of preprints to help authors make their science more robust, to aid readers in understanding the context of a paper, and to facilitate new mechanisms of evaluation and curation.
Aim 3: Expand the usage of preprints to share science earlier
We will promote preprints as a vehicle to share results beyond those submitted to journals, tackling the major source of delay in academic publishing (that is, assembling a “publishable” story) and expanding the number and type of research outputs shared in a highly visible and formally recognized venue.
Simons, HHMI, and CZI comprise our Member Advisory Group, which advises us on our work in raising awareness of preprints. We see great transformative potential in preprints and open review, and with them opportunities to grow the impact of ASAPbio. We are excited to welcome additional members of our Advisory Group as we build new programs and activities. Please contact Executive Director Jessica Polka (jessica.polka@asapbio.org) to learn more.
Photo by Michael Held on Unsplash
