Make your voice heard on preprints in biology

Paper on paper publishing is over. Will papers on pre-print servers become the new gold standard for scientific publishing? Image–NYPL Digital Collections

The primary job of a scientist is to discover knowledge and communicate it to the community. Unfortunately, while technology is enabling us to generate data faster and faster, the process of publishing that data seems to be slowing down.

This was a major message of ASCB member Ron Vale’s recent rallying cry (first released on bioRxiv and eventually published in PNAS) that encourages biologists to use preprint servers to dramatically speed up communication of our work. Briefly, preprint servers are online repositories where you can deposit pre-review versions of manuscripts. These versions remain on the server persistently (and they are assigned a DOI) and are available to visitors without charge. This is not a new idea; our colleagues in physics and math have been using this model for decades. That said, while arXiv has had a “Quantitative Biology” section for years, it’s only relatively recently that servers explicitly for biology papers, like BioRxiv and PeerJ Preprints, have appeared. (F1000Research also makes submitted articles immediately available online – though this requires submission to its editorial process and the associated fees.)

Regardless of which server you use, there are three concerns that prevent most biologists from posting using preprints:

1. Acceptance among scientists; “priority of discovery.” It’s ambiguous whether all scientists will view a preprint as a valid form of scholarly communication. If someone publishes a paper in your field, will they have read your preprint and cited it? Will a hiring committee brush off a line item describing your preprint, or will they read it and judge the quality of your scientific work for themselves?
2. Acceptance by journals. Currently, many journals accept articles that have been posted on preprint servers, but not all do (you can check the status of any journal by searching SHERPA/ROMEO). Right now, posting a preprint restricts your journal submission options.
3. Acceptance by funding agencies. Finally, if funding agencies explicitly encouraged preprints to be listed as evidence of productivity on your progress reports and biosketches, you might have additional incentives to use them.

On February 16-17, about 60 representatives from funding agencies, journals, and the international biology community will convene at ASAPbio, a two-day summit at HHMI on the use of preprints in biology. Specifically, we’ll try to find a solution to the three problems listed above, but we’ll also have interesting discussions on the future of preprints – features that can improve them, ways to organize and review them, and how they can better integrate with other publishing and data archiving models.

While the physical meeting will be small by necessity, we want everyone to be involved. Here’s what you can do:

1. Take the 5-minute survey about your opinions on preprints
2. Consider writing a white paper for submission to the Commentary section of the website
3. Tweet with #ASAPbio
4. Watch the livestream on February 16-17 on our website – we’ll be listening for feedback as we go along

Though change will require cooperation with journals and funding agencies, the attitudes of the community – and our trust in each other’s behavior – are probably the most vital ingredients. If you have other ideas on how to achieve this, I’d love to hear them in the comments below.