ASAPbio newsletter March 2022

Apply to become a 2022 ASAPbio Fellow by March 25

The 2022 ASAPbio Fellows program is still open for applications! We call on anyone with an interest in open science to join the program to learn more about preprints, where they fit in science communication, and contribute to a preprint project. This year, we invite Fellows to develop a project of their choice or help us drive forward our strategic initiatives below:

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

Read more about the Fellows program at asapbio.org/fellows or in this piece at FEBS Network. Applications to the Fellow program are open until March 25.

ASAPbio and ICOR (Incentivizing Collaborative and Open Research) are collaborating on a project to encourage researchers to preprint ongoing or preliminary work where they would like feedback from other researchers, well in advance of journal submission.

We would like community input on the 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 by March 18.

We are looking for a part-time Communications Assistant to help us share our work on preprints and open peer review with the life sciences community. The role provides an opportunity to engage with open science and develop communication skills, and might be especially well-suited for students or postdocs.

Read more about the role and how to apply at asapbio.org/job-posting-asapbio-communications-assistant.

ASAPbio Community Action Group - recap after one year and plans ahead

The ASAPbio Community Action Group has reached its first-year mark and a few weeks ago the group brainstormed what areas they would like to work on during 2022. The Community Action Group co-Chair Sarah Stryeck summarized the group's achievements in 2021 and plans for 2022 in a blog post: asapbio.org/asapbio-community-action-group-recap-and-plans-ahead.

We invite community members interested in contributing to the activities to join the Community Action Group; the next group call will take place on March 21, if you are interested in joining the group or attending the next call, please contact Iratxe.

News roundup

'SciELO Preprints discoverable in Europe PMC' -  Preprints are now indexed in Europe PMC with over 1000 preprints from that server available in their original language - Portuguese, Spanish, or English-, an important step to support the visibility of multilingual preprints. Europe PMC is hosting a live demo on April 13.

'Preprint Feedback is Here – Let’s Make it Constructive and FAST' - Sandra Franco Iborra, Jessica Polka and Iratxe Puebla discuss the FAST principles for preprint feedback in this blog post in The Scholarly Kitchen.

'India gets 1st preprint server back — ‘IndiaRxiv’ aims to be one-stop shop for domestic research' - IndiaRxiv was relaunched on February 24. The preprint server is hosted on the Society for Promotion of Horticulture’s webserver and will use the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Preprints Systems software.

'Let's make our reviews open, starting now' - In this Upstream blog post Iratxe calls for the community to leave the review black box behind and open up our reviews now.

Events