ASAPbio newsletter volume 42

#1: ASAPbio Community Call on 'Posting journal-solicited reviews on preprints'

Publish Your Reviews is an initiative seeking to encourage researchers to post journal-commissioned reviews publicly as comments on preprints whenever the reviewed article is available as a preprint. At our next ASAPbio Community Call on November 17, we’ll learn about the motivations and specifics of Publish Your Reviews, and solicit feedback from attendees on how to address any implications for authors and the confidentiality of journal peer review. Join us to brainstorm about this initiative with:

• James Fraser, ASAPbio Vice President and Professor, UCSF
• Ludo Waltman, Professor of Quantitative Science Studies and Deputy Director at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University

As part of our activities for the Preprint Reviewer Recruitment Network, we are delighted to be partnering with PREreview to host a live-streamed preprint journal club on November 16. This is an opportunity for researchers in the Network to experience a live, collaborative review of a preprint, learn tips on how to review preprints and be publicly recognized for their contributions. 

During the journal club we will collaboratively develop a review which we will post on the PREreview platform. To participate in the live-streamed journal club, please sign up for the Network and we’ll email you a link to register. 

During this 90-minute event for members of the Preprint Reviewer Recruitment Network, we’ll support one another as we make progress on our preprint reviews. Find someone to work with you on your review, solicit feedback on what you’ve written, or get answers to questions about how to pick a preprint, write the review, and where to post it. 

At the end of the event, we’ll post our preprint reviews publicly and get credit for them on our ORCiD and Preprint Reviewer Recruitment Network profiles.
 

As part of the preprint resources we provide in our Preprint resource center, we are proud to host infographics developed by the ASAPbio Fellows. We are pleased to share a couple of important updates about these infographics:

• The infographics are now available in accessible PDF format.
• We have deposited the infographics on zenodo, so they are also accessible there and citable, find the infographics on zenodo here and here. 

Print out the infographics and share them with colleagues! And watch this space for additional infographics in the pipeline by the 2021 Fellows.

I am a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Microbiology & Plant Pathology at the University of California, Riverside, US. I am currently working on a variety of genomic, metagenomic and phylogenomic projects at the interface of both host (insect, amphibian, seaweed and seagrass) and microbe (bacteria, fungi) interactions. 

I am passionate about science communication, open-access and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data practices.

I am an independent freelance consultant in scholarly communications and an open science advocate. I was most recently a member of the team running Europe PMC, before that a journal editor at PLOS for 10 years and initially a postdoc in developmental biology. 

I am excited about publishing innovations like preprints, about promoting effective communication of research throughout the research cycle (not just at the end), and about ensuring the trusted components of scholarly research are findable and linked up in the research ecosystem by using persistent identifiers. 

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Comprehensive Cancer Center Munich, Technical University of Munich, Germany. My research focus is understanding systemic effects of pancreatic cancer during tumour development and progression. 

I am mostly excited about the evaluation of science by scientific discoveries and their benefits to humankind, how to educate scientific field and how to close obvious gaps between scientists and population.

News roundup

'How Open, Early Sharing of Scientific Results Proved Crucial to COVID-19 Response’ - The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has released a video about preprints in biomedicine and the role of preprints in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic (disclosure: it mentions ASAPbio).

'The many shapes of peer review’ - Preprint that summarizes the discussions at a workshop during the Researcher to Reader 2021 conference which explored how preprint review activities could be made more complementary with journal review and leveraged to increase diversity in peer review.

ASAPbio will participate in

Other events

The UK Reproducibility Network, in partnership with the Medical Research Council, are offering free training to researchers who are keen to train their colleagues in using preprints. The all-day workshop will take place on November 16.