January 20-21, 2020
EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, UK

(This workshop has now happened: please see the meeting report)

Preprints offer an opportunity to advance science through accelerating communication and supporting discourse that enables research integrity and reproducibility. At the January 2020 ASAPbio workshop, co-organised with Jo McEntyre and Maria Levchenko (EMBL-EBI), and Oya Rieger (Ithaka S+R), we aim to develop an agreed set of ambitious, but achievable best practices for metadata and processes that would support discoverability, reuse, and interoperability of preprints. Implementing these best practices would build trust in preprints and encourage their broader community adoption as first-class research outputs that are ready for use, evaluation, and curation by the research and editorial community. We further aim to produce a roadmap for how services may begin to implement these practices.

The purpose of this workshop is to:

  • Exchange information about the current and future state of preprint platform operations 
  • Develop consensus (or understand divergent visions) on practices and initiatives that could improve discoverability, reuse, and community trust in preprints
  • Develop recommendations to address opportunities, challenges and constraints with respect to implementing these practices and initiatives
  • Produce an actionable roadmap for implementing these (ambitious but achievable) recommendations
  • Continue to build relationships among the people bringing preprints to biology and welcome newcomers

While this workshop will not be livestreamed, meeting notes will be public and outputs will be published openly.

For the purpose of this workshop, we are using ‘preprints’ to describe life sciences and biomedical research content that is shared openly before peer-review on online platforms, and typically in the format of complete research manuscripts.

Background information from previous ASAPbio meetings

Agenda and schedule

Live notes (Google document)

Participants

We are convening practitioners in preprint services, publishing operations and infrastructure, research funders, and contributors with knowledge of technical standards and/or life science/biomedical research experience.

Confirmed participants are:

  • Jeff Beck, NIH National Library of Medicine (USA)
  • Theo Bloom, BMJ and MedRxiv
  • Rachel Burley, Research Square
  • Tom Demeranville, ORCID
  • Kevin Dolby, Medical Research Council (UK)
  • Jim Entwood, Cornell University and arXiv
  • Kathryn Funk, NIH National Library of Medicine (USA) and PubMed Central
  • Brooks Hanson, American Geophysical Union and ESSOAr
  • Melissa Harrison, eLife
  • Hannah Hope, Wellcome Trust
  • Michele Ide-Smith, Europe PMC
  • John Inglis, CSHL, BioRxiv and MedRxiv
  • Jamie Kirkham, University of Manchester
  • Rachael Lammey, Crossref
  • Maria Levchenko, EMBL-EBI and Europe PMC (co-organiser)
  • Emily Marchant, Cambridge University Press
  • Michael Markie, F1000Research
  • Johanna McEntyre, EMBL-EBI and Europe PMC (co-organiser)
  • Alice Meadows, NISO
  • Alex Mendonca, Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and SciELO Preprints
  • Mate Palfy, Company of Biologists
  • Michael Parkin, Europe PMC
  • Naomi Penfold, ASAPbio (lead organiser)
  • Nici Pfeiffer, Center for Open Science
  • Jessica Polka, ASAPbio (co-organiser)
  • Iratxe Puebla, PLOS and representative of COPE
  • Oya Rieger, Ithaka S+R and arXiv (co-organiser)
  • Martyn Rittman, Preprints.org
  • Richard Sever, CSHL, BioRxiv and MedRxiv
  • Sowmya Swaminathan, Nature Research, Springer Nature
  • Dario Taraborelli, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
  • Emily White, Focused Ultrasound Foundation and FoCUS Archive