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 public commentary on preprinted research in a single day. We are delighted to have PREreview, preLights, Peer Community In, Review Commons and PubPeer as part of the event to interact with participants.
The event will include:
- Maurine Neiman, editor at Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B and Thomas Lemberger from EMBO, will provide editorial tips on how to write constructive reviews
- Review preprints! – Work on preprint reviews and comments
- Opportunities for networking
- Group discussion to review tally of reviews and share feedback
Interested? Read more about the event here, and join us in this collaborative effort to build trust in research.
Review Commons webinar
Tuesday, September 8, 2020
12pm New York | 9am San Francisco | 5pm London | 6pm Berlin | 9:30pm Mumbai
Review Commons, a collaborative project between EMBO and ASAPbio, is a free, journal-independent peer review service that allows you to transfer your manuscript and its reviews to one of 17 participating journals for consideration, and also to post your refereed preprint to bioRxiv. Join this event to learn more about the service from its creators and users.
Schedule
- Why Review Commons: Ron Vale (HHMI)/Maria Leptin (EMBO)
- The mechanics of Review Commons: Thomas Lemberger/Sara Monaco (EMBO)
- Evaluating Review Commons: Thomas Lemberger/Sara Monaco (EMBO)
- Panel: Author, Reviewer, and Affiliate Editor perspectives: Gira Bhabha (NYU), Rita Tewari (U of Nottingham), & Maureen Murphy (Wistar Institute)
- Open discussion
Citing preprints
Should and can preprints be cited? We sometimes get queries about preprint citation so we have offered a deeper dive in a dedicated blog post.
Preprints are legitimate research outputs and deserve fair attribution in the context of citation practice. We discuss the importance of giving credit via citation when a preprint is used or built upon by others for their own research, different aspects of journal policies around preprint citation, the format to use, and the need for further transparency in editorial policies for preprint citation.
Announcing Doc Maps: a framework for describing editorial events
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 to what extent they have been scrutinized (and what that process looks like). The same has always been true of most journal articles, which often clearly do not display their peer review status, much less details of the process.
To learn more, see the press release here.
Meet the ASAPbio Fellows
The ASAPbio Fellows have been selected to participate in a six-month program that provides them with tools and skills to drive discussions about the productive use of preprints in the life sciences, and to become ASAPbio representatives for their communities. Each month, we feature a few of them so you can get to know them better. Read more about the program here.
Suraj Kannan
What is your current role? Tell us a bit about your line of research.
I’m currently an MD/PhD student in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. My research interests are in cardiac tissue engineering and regenerative medicine – I’m particularly interested in the use pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiac tissues for clinical application. My PhD work is focused on improving the maturation status of these engineered cardiac tissues for better clinical utility. A lot of my research revolves around using single-cell RNA-sequencing, and so I get a nice mix of in vivo and in vitro wet lab biology as well as computational biology. I hope to wrap up my PhD in the next year or so, and then get back to my clinical rotations!
What are you excited about in science communication?
I’ve been particularly thrilled by the emergence of multiple platforms for publicizing and critiquing studies. There’s no reason that peer review should be closed-off and hidden, and these platforms demonstrate the ideal of peer review as a living, breathing, shared process within the scientific community. From my personal perspective, I’ve also learned so much just by trawling preLights or the comments from various preprint journal clubs – hearing other people’s thoughts on a paper is a great way to be exposed to new ideas.
Why did you choose to participate in the ASAPio Fellows program?Perhaps I am a bit on the extreme end, but I think that the current journal-driven peer review system has led to a strange ecosystem that favours the pursuit of “flashy” or “exciting” science at the cost of high quality research. I firmly believe that the combination of preprints (to enable rapid dissemination) and open peer review will lead to a better focus on quality science and improve incentives within the scientific community. Of course, it is one thing for me to complain about these issues on Twitter and quite another to take concrete steps towards implementing new publication structures. I have long admired ASAPbio’s progress on these fronts, and joined the Fellows program so I could get more involved in initiatives to promote preprints and open peer review.
Ask me about…?
- My favourite organ? The heart. (There are other organs?)
- Favourite single cell RNA-seq pipeline? Whooooo boy, I could go on for hours. Of course, the real answer is always “it depends on your project.”
- Favourite music? At heart, I’m a blues and jazz guy, but I’ve definitely been getting in neosoul and Instagram rock (for want of a better term) recently – check out Mateus Asato, Kazuki Isogai, Melanie Faye, or Polyphia, Covet, and Ichika Nito if you want something a bit more band-like! (And also send me your music recs too).
Kirsty Ferguson
What is your current role? Tell us a bit about your line of research
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine, University of Edinburgh, working on the molecular drivers of cancer stem cells in an aggressive adult brain cancer called glioblastoma. Using normal neural stem cells and patient-derived cancer stem cells, I am investigating the role of a key neurodevelopmental transcription factor on self-renewal.
What are you excited about in science communication?
I think the uptake of preprints in recent months will be a catalyst for changing how science is communicated. It is exciting to see how the publication system is becoming more open and inclusive, and how new platforms are enabling early career researchers to contribute to a change in the status quo.
Why did you choose to participate in the ASAPbio Fellows program?
I chose to participate in the ASAPBio Fellows program to increase my knowledge around preprints and open science communication. It is important for researchers to understand, and help to improve, the scientific publishing process – this program is increasing my own awareness and will enable me to have productive discussions with others around open science. It is also great to meet and learn from researchers from around the world.
Ask me about…
Brains, photography, mental health and baking!
Humberto Debat
What is your current role? Tell us a bit about your line of research
I am a research scientist at the Institute of Plant Pathology at the Center for Agricultural Research of the National Institute of Agricultural Technology of Argentina, INTA. I obtained my training at the National University of Córdoba, Argentina and at the University of Ajou in South Korea. At our lab, we study the interface of viruses and crops from a holobiome perspective. I am interested in the development of novel approaches to reduce losses associated with plant diseases and passionate about understanding an expanding global virosphere.What are you excited about in science communication?
I am interested in open science practices and consider open access to scientific knowledge a Human right. I am an advocate on the use of preprints in the life sciences. I am interested in multilingual scholar communications and I have co-developed a tool dubbed PanLingua to search and provide access to automatically translated full versions of all bioRxiv preprints. I am excited about, collaborative and community driven scholarly communications, non-commercially rooted and academy lead models where scientific literature is free to read and free to publish. I am interested in the asymmetries of scholar communications from a geopolitical perspective. More recently I have been involved in assessing how to improve scientific meetings and make conferences more equitable, effective and environmentally sustainable.
Why did you choose to participate in the ASAPbio Fellows program?
I chose to participate in the ASAPbio Fellows program to learn about initiatives to promote open and reproducible science and to discuss with a broad and diverse community how to improve scholarly communications. In turn, I believe this program will provide me tools to try to encourage and boost good practices in science at a regional level.
Ask me about…
Why I think scholarly communications should be a right and not a market, and why scientific conferences should shift immediately to virtual. Also, ask me about dogs, wine from Mendoza and asados.
News roundup
Europe PMC: unlocking the potential of COVID-19 preprints – Europe PMC is now indexing the full text for preprints related to the COVID-19 pandemic and SARS-CoV-2 virus.
‘How the COVID-19 crisis has prompted a revolution in scientific publishing‘ -Dario Taraborelli(Chan Zuckerberg Initiative)discusses the role that preprints have played in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the opportunities they bring for open community review and greater collaboration in research.
‘Is the rush to understand COVID-19 making us more confused about COVID-19?‘ – the piece in Deseret News discusses the flow of COVID-19 research shared via preprints, the risk of misinformation and mitigation approaches, and the need to acknowledge scientific discovery as an iterative process.
Get Involved in Peer Review Week 2020 – ASAPbio will be participating in Peer Review Week, which is taking place 21-25 September 2020. The theme this year is Trust in Peer Review and there are many ways to get involved, visit the Peer Review Week website for details.
Events
ASAPbio will participate in
Jessica will chair the panel discussion ‘Remodeling peer review in light of preprints’ on September 30 as part of the PEERE virtual conference.
Iratxe will participate in the SSP New Directions in Scholarly Publishing virtual seminar, October 1, session ‘Preprints: Testing Science’s Need for Speed Limits’.
