Post by ASAPbio Fellow Ana Đorđević
On 2 December 2022, the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Belgrade (Serbia), hosted a lecture concerning open science and preprints. The event was supported by ASAPbio and aimed to raise awareness around preprints and their place within open science among the local Serbian researchers, and to encourage this community to post preprints for their research works.
The lecture was attended by 10 attendees, which consisted of PhD students and postgraduate researchers at the faculty, university professors, and researchers in different roles.
The one-hour lecture was presented by Ana Đorđević, librarian and repository manager at the Faculty of Chemistry and one of the 2022 ASAPbio Fellows. The lecture was part of Ana’s activities during the Fellows program and was prepared in accordance with the ’10-step guide to organizing your preprint event’, which Ana co-created with Iratxe Puebla and the 2022 ASAPbio Fellows João Victor Cabral Costa, Raj Rajeshwar Malinda, Ehssan Moglad, Saeed Shafiei Sabet and Clara Yona.
In the first stage of the lecture, Ana provided an overview of what open science is and how it is promoted at the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Belgrade, placing emphasis on the benefits brought by the establishment of the institutional repository of scientific results, which was launched in 2021. The lecture then covered an introduction to what preprints are and how they have developed over the last decade, noting the increase in use of preprints across disciplines in the last few years. The lecture explored several preprint-related topics: the benefits of preprint use for accelerating the communication of scientific results, the landscape of preprint servers, the value of preprints for researchers, and advice for how to choose preprint servers intended for chemists.
During the second part of the lecture, Prof. Tamara Todorovic (University of Belgrade) elaborated on the value of preprints for individual researchers, and the workflow involved in posting on a preprint server. Prof. Todorovic also shared her experience posting preprints for her own work. This lecture further explored how the use of preprints accelerates science communication.
After the lecture, a discussion session was opened in order to answer questions raised by the attendees and to encourage them to share their personal experience or to comment on the topic.
At the end of the event, preprint stickers provided by ASAPbio were handed out to the attendees.
The slides from the presentation are available here, in Serbian.