ASAPbio newsletter February 2022

Join the 2022 ASAPbio Fellows program!

The 2022 cohort of the ASAPbio Fellows program is now open for applications! The program will run from April to November and will provide participants with resources, tools and contacts to allow them to drive discussions about the productive use of preprints. This year, we invite Fellows to help us shape our strategic initiatives, participants can join one of the activities below or can develop a preprint project of their choice:

• Preprints in progress campaign
• Crowd preprint review activities
• Visibility and recognition of preprint reviews
• Campaign for awareness and recognition of preprints in India

Applications to the Fellow program are open until March 25. You can find additional information in the program Handbook, or email Iratxe with any questions.

March 3, 5pm London | 6pm Berlin | noon New York | 9am San Francisco

At our next Community Call, we will discuss data sharing with preprints. Many journals have data policies but different communities are still developing their own data-sharing practices for preprints. At the call we’ll hear the perspectives from a researcher and a data repository about the importance of sharing data with preprints and we’ll ask attendees for input on how we can support data sharing at the time of preprint deposition.

Speakers:

• James Fraser, Professor, Dept of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, University of California San Francisco
• Daniella Lowenberg, Product Manager for the data repository Dryad

At ASAPbio we believe that we can further accelerate research by expanding the range of work that is shared via preprints. As part of our collaboration with ICOR (Incentivizing Collaborative and Open Research), we will encourage researchers to preprint ongoing or preliminary work where they would like feedback from other researchers, well in advance of journal submission.

To inform our plans, we are seeking community input on motivations, potential concerns, and the type of feedback authors wish to receive when posting their preprint in advance of journal submission. Please share your views via this survey.

Want to hear more about our plans? Please indicate your interest via the survey form. The survey will remain open until March 18.

Many readers and researchers are unfamiliar with new preprint feedback and review projects. To help readers interpret preprint feedback processes, we introduce Preprint Review Features (PReF), a set of 8 key features for the processes that generate preprint review and feedback. Read more about PreF at the white paper and the accompanying blog post.

PReF is already implemented on ReimagineReview and on the preprint review aggregators EMBO’s Early Evidence Base and eLife’s Sciety. We hope that adopting common language to describe preprint feedback processes can help with intelligibility and discoverability, perhaps making it easier to reuse preprint feedback.

In late summer 2021, COAR and ASAPbio ran a survey to understand practices at institutional and generalists repositories regarding the collection of preprints. The survey highlighted that two thirds of respondents reported hosting preprints and that among those that host preprints, practices and available features vary widely. Read more about the survey results in our blog post.

COAR and ASAPbio plan to convene a working group to better understand challenges around the collection of preprints in institutional and generalist repositories and develop good practice recommendations.

We are pleased to share that we have posted translations to Spanish, French and Portuguese for many of our preprint infographics. These translations were possible thanks to the contributions of the ASAPbio Fellows Ana Dorrego Rivas, Sandra Franco Iborra, Mafalda Pimentel and Pablo Ranea-Robles. All the infographics are available on our Preprint Resource Center: asapbio.org/preprint-info#infographic-translations.

News roundup

'Tracking changes between preprint posting and journal publication during a pandemic’ - An analysis of 180 preprints and their journal publication version reported that there were no major changes to the conclusions for 83% of the studies following peer-reviewed publication. A related study also in PLOS Biology used machine learning and textual analytics and reported that the text in preprints and their journal publication version is broadly similar.

'Howard Hughes Medical Institute funds the preprint review platform Review Commons' - The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has awarded EMBO a grant to support the operation and development of the journal-independent peer review platform Review Commons.

'Preprint highlight: “A Guide to Preprinting for Early Career Researchers' - ASAPbio Fellows Cassandra Ettinger and Madhumala Sadanandappa highlight the main topics covered in their guide to help early career researchers preprint their work and empower them to have meaningful conversations with their colleagues about preprinting. 

'Preprints and open peer review come of age’ - Scott Edmunds, Editor-in-Chief of GigaScience, discusses open peer review and his organization's support for open preprint review initiatives.

'Is a journal interested in your preprint? Separating the wheat from the chaff in journal solicitations to submit' - Iratxe wrote a blog post for Think.Check.Submit with suggestions to help preprint authors scrutinize invitations to submit their next paper to a journal.

Events