Over the last year, the Transpose team (which includes ASAPbio staff Naomi Penfold and Jessica Polka and board member Jennifer Lin) have been working to produce a database of journal peer review, co-reviewing, and (detailed) preprint policies. We anticipate the launch of this database along with an interactive website in the coming weeks. In the…
Publishing peer review reports has many benefits, but critics often worry that it’s unlikely to be read or seen. This isn’t true: data suggest that peer review reports can receive 10% or ⅓ of the traffic to the article itself. However, it stands to reason that this number could go up or down depending on…
This post originally appeared on The Scholarly Kitchen on 2019-03-26. Cover image via Eddi Aguirre. The design of critical infrastructure determines what its users can do, and when. For example, the New York City subway system carries 1.7 billion passengers annually, shapes centers of residential and commercial activity, and enables a vibrant culture with its late night…
Dear subscribers, It’s been a while! Here’s what’s been keeping us busy: New team members We’re delighted to welcome five new people to the team! From left to right: Phil Bourne (Professor, University of Virginia), Jennifer Lin (Director of Product Management, Crossref), and Kristen Ratan (Co-founder and Executive Director, Collaborative Knowledge Foundation) have joined the…
The publication of peer review is not a new idea, but it has yet to become widespread among journals in the life sciences. We’ve compiled here reports from journals with experience with this practice. If you have any additional questions or contributions, please email jessica.polka@asapbio.org. How is the publication of peer review reports related to…
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…
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…
Dear subscribers, This month, we summarize a recent meeting on peer review and present two requests: Support for open reports (signed or not): summary of the HHMI/Wellcome/ASAPbio Peer Review meeting On February 7-9, 2018, a group of approximately 90 junior and senior scientists, publishers, editors, and funders convened at HHMI Headquarters in Chevy Chase, MD…
On February 7-9, 2018, a group of approximately 90 junior and senior scientists, publishers, editors, and funders convened at HHMI Headquarters in Chevy Chase, MD for a meeting on Transparency, Recognition, and Innovation in Peer Review in the Life Sciences, organized by Wellcome, ASAPbio, and HHMI. Agenda and outcomes The event kicked off on…
By Gary McDowell, Future of Research When it comes to peer review and the role that Early Career Researchers (ECRs) play in it, I am of course reminded of the immortal words of Steve McKnight in his President’s Message at the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB, emphasis mine): “the average scientist today…
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…
By Samantha Hindle and Daniela Saderi, PREreview The image above (DOI) is CC-BY 4.0 licensed and is available for download on Figshare. Preprints are freely available scientific manuscripts that have not yet undergone editorial peer review. They provide data and knowledge that is current, accessible by all, and at a stage where community peer review…
By Rebecca Lawrence & Vitek Tracz, F1000, rebecca.lawrence@f1000.com We have been successfully running a service (which we call platforms, to distinguish from traditional research journals), for over 5 years at F1000 that is essentially a preprint coupled with formal, invited (i.e. not crowd-sourced) post publication peer review. We have consequently amassed significant experience of running…
By Michael B. Eisen Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, UC Berkeley mbeisen@gmail.com, @mbeisen With the rapid growth of bioRxiv, biomedical research is entering a new era in which papers describing our ideas, experiments, data and discoveries are made available to our colleagues and the public without having undergone peer…
Dear subscribers, Hope 2018 is off to a great start for you! We have a few exciting announcements: Save the date: Transparency, Recognition, and Innovation in Peer Review in the Life Sciences On February 7-8, tune in to asapbio.org/peer-review to watch a webcast of a meeting we’re co-hosting with HHMI and Wellcome Trust on how…
By Tony Hyman and Ron Vale Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden Germany (hyman@mpi-cbg.de) and the University of California, San Francisco, United States (ron.vale@ucsf.edu) Rapid changes in communication technology have led to sea changes in publication. The days when John Maddox (1) joined Nature and found submitted manuscripts sitting in piles…
By Ron Vale, Tony Hyman, and Jessica Polka Summary We propose the creation of a scientist-driven, journal-agnostic peer review service that produces an “Evaluated Preprint” and facilitates subsequent publication in a journal.
In preparation for our meeting on Transparency, Recognition, and Innovation in Peer Review in the Life Sciences on February 7-9 at HHMI Headquarters, we’ve collected some recent (and not-so-recent) literature on journal peer review. A full annotated bibliography can be found at the bottom of this post, and we invite any additions via comments. To…
by John Helliwell, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry University of Manchester and DSc Physics University of York (@HelliwellJohn) Introduction For the meeting entitled “Transparency, Reward, and Innovation in Peer Review in the Life Sciences” to be held on Feb. 7-9, 2018 at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland (https://asapbio.org/peer-review) I have been asked by…
by Stephen Curry, Professor of Structural Biology, Imperial College (@Stephen_Curry) As the song goes – and I have in mind the Beatles’ 1963 cover version of Money (that’s all I want) – “the best things in life are free.” But is peer review one of them? The freely given service that many scientists provide as validation…