Biologists urged to hug a preprint
Physicists do it; computer scientists, mathematicians and economists do it. And this week, a who’s who of biomedical researchers and publishers is asking what it will take to convince life scientists to do it, too — release their work online before peer review and formal journal publication.
The impetus for the gathering, called ASAPbio (asapbio.org), is the growing frustration of some researchers at the slow pace of publishing in biology journals. The delay can take years, notes Ron Vale, a cell biologist at the University of California, San Francisco. That can seriously affect scientists’ careers because they don’t receive recognition for their work until it is published.
The solution, argues Vale, a co-organizer of ASAPbio, is for biologists to embrace preprints: pre-publication manuscripts posted online. These speed up dissemination, give students and postdocs tangible ways to cite their contributions to the literature, and stimulate discussion and ideas, he says — accelerating and improving life-sciences research.
There are signs that some biologists are ready to follow the lead of their colleagues in the physical sciences, where it is now routine for research to be submitted to the arXiv preprint server — founded 25 years ago — before publication. A life-sciences-only preprint server called bioRxiv started in 2013 and is rapidly growing in popularity (see ‘The growth of bioRxiv’), especially in data-intensive fields such as computational biology and genomics.
It has now seen more than 3,100 posted preprints, says John Inglis, the site’s co-founder and the executive editor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in New York. Other journals, such as the online F1000Research, also encourage the posting of life-sciences manuscripts before peer review.
But preprints are still unfamiliar ground for biologists, Vale says. Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist at the Rockefeller University in New York City, says that if such sites are to become popular in the life sciences, researchers will have to overcome common concerns — for example, that preprints could lead to scientists being scooped by competitors and missing out on credit for ideas. Vale and Vosshall say that such worries are misplaced. “I think most biologists don’t know about preprints, or if they do, they’ve heard of them at a very superficial level, to the point that they don’t really understand them very well,” Vale says.
“There’s no doubt that preprints are happening,” says Harold Varmus, a cancer biologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City and another co-organizer of ASAPbio, held on 16–17 February at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland. “But I don’t think we’ve ever had a conversation among all the constituents about what the effects will be.”
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This is an excerpt of an article that appeared in Nature. Read the original here.