Funding agencies are crucial to the development of the preprint movement. The adoption of preprints by the life sciences community has been accelerated by grant-making policies that recognize these manuscripts as a valid form of scholarly communication. Investments in preprint infrastructure, services, and technologies are thus necessary to build capacity for growth.
The latest strong support for preprints comes from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), which recently announced financial support for bioRxiv, the leading preprint server in the life sciences, along with resources to develop new open source software, including tools for manuscript conversion to XML. ASAPbio applauds the decision by CZI to provide funding for bioRxiv and further technological development, both of which will very positively advance the growth and readability of preprints.
ASAPbio also has advocated for funder investment in these areas. Together with a group of funders, ASAPbio developed plans for a Central Service, an aggregation site of preprint content meeting certain standards, new search tools, and software for XML document conversion. Seven applications were received on the April 30 RFA deadline. In parallel, ASAPbio also commissioned a 30 person task force to develop bylaws for a community-elected Governing Body, which have been released for public comment.
In light of the CZI/bioRxiv partnership that was announced on April 26, ASAPbio and the Funders Consortium have jointly decided to suspend the RFA and Governing Body for a four month period in order to reassess the needs of the scientific community. Since some objectives of the RFA are now being pursued by CZI/bioRxiv, we do not wish to duplicate or compete with their efforts. The need, role and mandate of any Governing Body may also require re-evaluation. During this four month period, we will gather more information from CZI/bioRxiv and engage the broad community of scientists, funders, scientific societies, and publishers to learn more about their opinions and needs. This represents an exciting opportunity to further advance scholarly communication by building upon the CZI/bioRxiv initiative and thus better serve the scientific community. Consistent with our mission, we will aim to bring together various stakeholders for conversations, identify and debate opportunities, and encourage input from open discussions with the community. We will release more information in the next few weeks regarding this planning process. Feel free to contact us with your input, suggestions or questions now or in the future.
We appreciate the support and patience of everyone who has provided feedback on the Central Service governance and RFA process thus far, including the funders who have articulated principles for supporting preprint infrastructure, the RFA respondents who have written thoughtful and in many cases highly collaborative applications, attendees of our technical workshop and other meetings, members of our governance task force, our external reviewers, and many other individuals who have shared their feedback on our draft proposals for infrastructure and governance. We will continue to engage the broader community as we work to advance and accelerate scientific communication.
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