Research Information - PREPRINTS https://www.researchinformation.info/issue/topic/preprints en Peer review, preprints and a pandemic https://www.researchinformation.info/feature/peer-review-preprints-and-pandemic <div class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/issue/challenges-scholarly-publishing-cycle-20202021" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Challenges in the Scholarly Publishing Cycle 2020/2021</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/issue/december-2020january-2021" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">December 2020/January 2021</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-topic field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Topic tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/issue/topic/peer-review" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">PEER REVIEW</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/issue/topic/covid-19" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Covid-19</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/issue/topic/preprints" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">PREPRINTS</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-intro field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><strong><span id="docs-internal-guid-461b221e-7fff-c293-0bc1-b61cdf2638f4"><span id="docs-internal-guid-461b221e-7fff-c293-0bc1-b61cdf2638f4">Rebecca Pool</span> </span></strong><span id="docs-internal-guid-461b221e-7fff-c293-0bc1-b61cdf2638f4">asks: will coronavirus leave preprints and peer review inextricably entwined?</span></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.researchinformation.info/sites/default/files/content/feature/lead-image/shutterstock_1552777010.jpeg" width="884" height="589" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Even before the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020, staff at MIT Press were noticing a problem with preprint servers. Over time, more and more preprints were being published and drifting into mainstream media, even government, in ways that weren't always helpful and were sometimes even misleading.</p> <p>Then came coronavirus. As Nick Lindsay, director of journals and open access at MIT Press, puts it: 'These issues were exacerbated as the sheer volume of research we were seeing on bioRxiv, medRxiv and other preprint servers was immense. Literally thousands of preprints were going out there with no review, and we started to see some really troubling things take place.'</p> <p>Amid the torrent of data released onto preprint servers, research clangers emerged and withdrawals, retractions and expressions of concern followed. For example, in late January, 2020, a bioRXiv preprint from a group of researchers from the India Institute of Technology reported HIV insertions in the spike of SARS-CoV-2 that were not present in past coronaviruses. The researchers also speculated these had been placed in the virus intentionally. Then around a week later, a ResearchGate preprint from a researcher at the South China University of Technology and colleague, proposed that coronavirus 'probably originated from a laboratory'.</p> <p>In each case, the papers were re-drawn following outrage from the research community. Chinese government and World Health Organisation have since condemned such reports, but these now infamous publications undoubtedly fuelled the already widely-circulating coronavirus conspiracy theories at the time. Herein lies the problem with preprints.</p> <p>'With such examples in mind, myself and Amy Brand [MIT Press director] put our heads together and asked, how can we help here?' says Lindsay. 'As we talked, it became clear that this was a big opportunity to have a positive effect on the public understanding and trust in Science and also offer a service to mainstream media, researchers, scholars and clinicians that needed a preprint verification that wasn't yet happening.'</p> <p>Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 (RR:C19), headed up by Professor Stefano Bertozzi from Public Health at the the University of California Berkeley, quickly followed. Described as an 'open-access overlay journal', the publication aims to accelerate the peer review of Covid-19-related research preprints to advance findings and prevent the dissemination of false or misleading news.</p> <p>To speed up the process, the editorial team, including an army of graduate students, selects potential Covid-19 preprints for review, from preprint servers such as medRxiv, bioRxiv, SSRN, with help from 'Covid Scholar'. This text-mining tool was developed by Berkeley Lab materials scientists to help researchers wade through the mountain of Covid-19 literature.<br />The chosen preprints are then sent out to RR:C19's pool of reviewers, who will answer key questions such as is this preprint reliable and trustworthy, should it be taken seriously, how might it be used to further our knowledge in fighting the pandemic?</p> <p>As Lindsay highlights, this isn't traditional peer review. RR:C19 is trying to balance the need for rigour with rapid response, and as such, preprints should be published, with two finished reviews, within two weeks.</p> <p>'Since we launched RR:C19, we've seen that the preprint servers link [preprints] back to our reviews - so they clearly see a need for review,' highlights Lindsay. 'And publications such as the <em>New York Times</em> are also picking up our reviews and using them as evidence.'</p> <p>For Lindsay and many in scholarly publishing, this wider understanding of the preprint is critical. As he puts it: 'Faculty understand the difference between a preprint and a published article, but for plenty of others it's difficult to understand what the difference actually is... We need to engage in efforts to ensure people understand that there is a profound difference between the preprint and published article.'</p> <p>Nic Marsh, senior researcher at The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), agrees. Since the onset of the pandemic, Marsh has also noted how more and more preprints are being used more broadly than ever before. 'The Public doesn't always know the difference between a peer-reviewed journal and a predatory journal or even a preprint server - if it looks like academic research then it can be really difficult for someone to spot what's high quality and what isn't,' he says.</p> <p>But, as Marsh also points out, pandemic-related preprints have also been more widely used to further research: 'I've seen some really significant findings first published as a preprint and quite senior researchers using this a route to publication. It is important to note that research not published in academic journals is commonly reviewed by peers for publications – and such non-anonymous reviews can be very useful.</p> <h2>Understanding change</h2> <p>Researchers at PRIO seek to understand the processes that bring societies together or split them apart, and in recent months Marsh has been investigating peer review and the societal impact of different forms of Covid-19 research publications. His study, based on a Covid-19 Reddit forum comprising some 300,000 members, indicates that preprints and other non-peer-reviewed publications, such as press releases, are widely read and are now challenging peer-reviewed publications as a means of disseminating research.</p> <p>'With the global pandemic there's a clear need to get information out as quickly as possible,' he says. 'This underlines that even though many publishers have accelerated the publication process, it's still perhaps too slow for a pandemic.'</p> <p>Clearly ongoing debate on the role of peer review in the research lifecycle will continue to hold importance for many years to come. But for now, will the likes of RR:C-19 and similar endeavours such as the rapid review of Covid-19 Registered Report submissions by PeerJ, PLOS Biology and other journals, help to deliver the current need for speed?  Professor Detlef Weigel, director of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology and eLife deputy editor, thinks so.</p> <p>In late 2020, eLife announced that come July 2021, it will only review manuscripts already published as preprints, and will focus its editorial process on producing public reviews to be posted alongside the preprints. The open access publisher's new 'publish, then review' model follows in-house analysis that indicated around 70 per cent of papers under review were already available as preprints.</p> <p>As Weigel says: 'I wouldn't say our move to this model is tied to the pandemic, but certainly the vast volumes of Covid-19 papers appearing on [preprint servers] have pushed us towards this.'</p> <p>Right now, eLife is phasing in public review with authors currently retaining a degree of control over when the review is published. If editors decide a paper is not appropriate for eLife, they will allow authors to postpone the posting of the public review until the paper is published elsewhere, so unfavourable review will not influence eventual publication. Weigel anticipates that within the next 'two years or so', a public preprint review will become the default. And in line with RR-C19's <em>New York Times</em> experience, he adds: 'By allowing reviews to be attached to your preprint you can show a journalist that your work has been reviewed and there's a higher chance that the world will take notice.'</p> <p>In the meantime, eLife has been instructing its editors and reviewers to write reviews for a public audience. 'We've been working very hard on our reviews – reviews for the public need to be written in a different way than those for just the author,' says Weigel. 'New guidelines for review start with an evaluation summary... these are going to be so much easier for someone from outside of research to understand.'</p> <p>Weigel also reckons preprint review will be significantly faster than traditional peer review – and he is certain review quality will not suffer. 'We have a large cadre of senior editors who are committed as well as amazing staff... not all journals have this luxury, which is why we can afford to be bolder,' he says. 'I think initially we will need to work with reviewers to do things differently, but once other journals see that this works well then habits are going to change.'</p> <p>With 'publish then review' in place, Weigel and eLife colleagues hope to eventually create a system of curation around preprints that replaces journal titles as the primary indicator of perceived research quality. 'Of course we believe in peer review and for a while we hope that our [publish then review] model will co-exist with traditional peer review,” says Weigel. “But in 20 years I believe this will all move to the publish then review and curating model,' he adds. 'It's down to culture change and the new generation of scientists, students and postdoctoral researchers are getting used to putting their research onto preprint servers.'</p> <p>But culture change aside, who will pay for these emerging models of preprint review? While MIT Press's Lindsey is keen to extend preprint review to other fields, primarily climate change, he does wonder where future funds will come from. 'The Patrick J McGovern Foundation has been incredibly generous but we are still working on a sustainable business model that will allow us to keep Rapid Reviews going,' he says.</p> <p>And eLife finds itself in a similar predicament - the publisher is a not-for-profit business but has expenses.</p> <p>'How to make money out of all of this really is the elephant in the room,' says Weigel. 'Funders and libraries might say, "these organisations are producing something valuable and we as a community are willing to pay for it" but it's a big hurdle.'</p> <h2>Tradition and transparency</h2> <p>Still, for many in the world of peer review, tradition largely remains, at least for now. In September 2020, the Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP) laid out plans to move all of its owned journals to double anonymous peer review – where the reviewer and author identities are concealed – by the end of 2021.</p> <p>The decision is intended to tackle gender, racial and geographical under-representation in scholarly publishing, and follows positive trials on journals that involved single-anonymous and double-anonymous peer review. IOPP also offers transparent peer review on a number of its journals which gives authors and reviewers the option of publishing an article's peer review content in a discoverable and citable form.</p> <p>'We're not forcing anyone down this route but we felt it was really important to give authors and reviewers the choice to display the review history of the article and have as much transparency in the process as possible,' highlights Marc Gillett, head of publishing operations at IOPP.</p> <p>At the same time, the publisher is intent on driving efficiencies across its peer review process. As Gillett puts it: 'We consistently hear back from authors that the speed of peer review is one of the top things that they pay attention to when considering which journals to submit to.'</p> <p>Given this, IOPP has launched a training and certification programme to support researchers in peer review and has also diversified its reviewer pool to tackle the well-worn issue of reviewer fatigue. However, the rise in preprints is undeniable – physicists have long-published research on preprint server, arXiv - so with this in mind, the publisher has also started trialling an option for authors to list and link to their preprints while a manuscript is under peer review at the journal.</p> <p>And undoubtedly like many, Gillett is also watching eLife's latest 'publish, then review' model with interest. 'It is possible that the nature of peer review will change over the next couple of years as we find new ways for preprint platforms and journals to complement each other, but it's really important that research undergoes some form of peer review,' he says. 'Whether it's a preprint or accepted manuscript, researchers ultimately need to have a trusted method of quality assurance and this is something that we as publishers can deliver.'</p> <p>So, in the time of Covid-19, what next for peer review? Trust was the theme of Peer Review Week 2020, which for Lou Peck, 2020 steering committee co-chair from scholarly communications specialist consultancy The International Bunch, will remain as important as ever. 'The peer review process is built on trust,' she says. 'Trust in those submitting articles, trust in the peer reviewers, trust in the process itself, and the organisations behind it, and finally trust in the published output.'</p> <p>However, Peck also reckons that the pandemic has pushed peer review, and the quality of published work, to the forefront of many people's minds. 'One significant consequence of Covid-19 is that it has highlighted the impact of bad science and fake news, and how valuable peer review is. Publishers, service providers and those in research support have proactively taken steps to offer more support around peer review,' she says.</p> <p>'I believe we've experienced more of a stakeholder community-driven approach, and as a result, I hope we continue to see more collaborative working, as ultimately, we are better together,' she adds.</p> <p>MIT Press' Lindsay concurs, but also believes the pandemic has truly underlined the importance of transparency in peer review. 'Many editorial offices see the anonymity of peer review as something that needs to be preserved in order for people to be forthright and open,' he says. 'But I think those arguments have been outweighed by this need to get quickly legitimate research to other researchers and clinicians. Fingers crossed - we're now looking at an era of more transparent and open peer review.'</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Other tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/peer-review" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Peer review</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-company field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Company:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/company/iop-publishing" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">IOP Publishing</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/company/elife" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">eLife</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/company/mit-press" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">MIT Press</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/company/international-bunch" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">The International Bunch</a></div></div></div> Wed, 06 Jan 2021 09:02:57 +0000 Tim Gillett 17265 at https://www.researchinformation.info Growing share for preprints https://www.researchinformation.info/feature/growing-share-preprints <div class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/issue/aprilmay-2020" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">April/May 2020</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-topic field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Topic tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/issue/topic/preprints" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">PREPRINTS</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/issue/topic/covid-19" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Covid-19</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-intro field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="p1"><strong>Five organisations define, describe, and share their thoughts on a subject that has become something of a hot topic in recent times</strong></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.researchinformation.info/sites/default/files/content/feature/lead-image/Screen%20Shot%202020-04-02%20at%2009.47.23.jpg" width="752" height="501" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><h2 class="p1">Please tell us how you would define a preprint?</h2> <p class="p2"><strong>Tasha Mellins-Cohen, director of publishing, Microbiology Society</strong>: Preprints are a way for researchers to make their work available when they are ready for it to be seen – and reviewed – by people outside of their immediate research group. Authors have always shared early drafts of their work with colleagues so in a way, preprints as we understand them today are a new model for a very traditional phenomenon.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> Here's a link to an editorial I recently wrote about preprints: <a href="https://doi.org/10.1099/mgen.0.000259" target="_blank" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://doi.org/10.1099/mgen.0.000259&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1585899836544000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGHbkLNK-0329rdCjwg8j_MFeM66w">doi.org/10.1099/mgen.0.000259</a></span></p> <p class="p2"><strong>Mirjam Curno, publishing director, Frontiers</strong>: A ‘preprint’ is a scholarly article posted in an openly accessible platform; namely, a specific repository or preprint server.<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span>Typically, submissions occur either prior to, or alongside, peer review, although preprints are also used to share author versions of published articles, in which case they are already peer-reviewed. Clearly, preprints short-circuit the time to publication. On the other hand, however, it means they have not yet been subject to a rigorous peer review process which validates the paper before official publication.</p> <p class="p2"><strong>Amye Kenall, VP of publishing and product, Research Square</strong>: A preprint is the author-submitted version of the manuscript before peer review.</p> <p class="p2"><strong>Michael Foster, managing director for publications, IEEE</strong>: We define a preprint as a draft version of a scholarly or scientific article, the preliminary work by an author prior to formal peer review and publication in an archival journal or proceedings. Authors can now post these types of drafts to TechRxiv.org, a new preprint server for the global technology community developed by IEEE. Authors can post preprints to TechRxiv regardless of where they eventually intend to submit and publish their work. Think of TechRxiv.org as a collaborative hub that facilitates the rapid and open dissemination of early scientific findings in electrical engineering, computer science, and related technologies.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>A preprint server such as TechRxiv.org enables researchers to share early results of their work ahead of formal peer review and publication and gain community feedback on a draft version of their research. We should note that all submissions to TechRxiv.org are screened prior to acceptance by a panel of experts, and although not peer reviewed, the documents are checked for plagiarism and inappropriate content.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p class="p2"><strong> Steph Macdonald, Sarah Sabir, Tim Koder, Pharmagenesis:</strong> Our Open Pharma team would define a preprint as public version of a research manuscript that has not been through formal peer review.</p> <h2 class="p2">After a quiet start, the use of preprints has surged in the last few years. Why? </h2> <p class="p1"><strong>Mellins-Cohen, Microbiology Society</strong>: I suspect that the biggest blocker to uptake of preprints was traditional publishers suggesting that a preprint counted as ‘prior publication’, which meant they would not review or publish preprinted articles. In the last few years most publishers have acknowledged that this view was not aligned with the changing models of scholarly communication and have started to embrace preprints. Other factors to the accelerating uptake of preprints are likely to include increasing awareness of preprints outside of the physics community, which has used and valued arXiv for decades, and the ease of setting up new preprint servers on commercial and not-for-profit platforms (e.g. OSF Preprints).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p class="p2"><strong>Curno, Frontiers</strong>: Researchers increasingly recognise that there are benefits in being able to share their work quickly and disseminate it extensively via the preprint route. This can be either prior to publication, so results are disseminated rapidly alongside the potential to claim ‘first discovery’, or post-publication, which means authors can share their work more widely in case it was published in a subscription journal. Beyond that, the surge in preprints could also be because the research community now regards them as an additional channel through which to publish their work, alongside traditional journals.</p> <p class="p2"><strong>Kenall, Research Square:</strong> In the past few years, preprints in the biomedical sciences have grown significantly. This is likely due to influence from a range of stakeholders. Funders have openly supported preprints or in some cases mandated deposition of a preprint at the time of journal submission. Organisations like ASAPbio have made tremendous efforts in driving researcher education around and visibility of preprints. In the sciences, bioinformaticians and genomics researchers have really led the way, with the need for early sharing in outbreak research being critical in quickly tackling the outbreak (for example with the recent coronavirus) and saving lives. A number of publishers have also updated their policies and now actively encourage their authors to post preprints. I think all of these things have dramatically driven the visibility around preprints. Still, it’s important to keep in mind they are still only representing 2.6 per cent of all published content in the biomedical sciences. We have a long way to go. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p class="p2"><strong>Foster, IEEE</strong>: Preprint servers are just one part of an overall open science movement that strives to disseminate scientific and technical information as quickly and broadly as possible. Many authors want to share and make public the results of their work as soon as possible. With tools available to authors such as preprint servers, authors can now easily share their early research, receive community feedback on their work, and refine their research findings before they submit it to a peer reviewed journal. This may provide an author with a greater likelihood of having his or her article accepted upon submission to a scholarly journal, and could help accelerate the publishing process.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>We have been asked – why did IEEE decide to develop a preprint server? Based on input from our authors, members, and the engineering community, we discovered a need for an openly accessible preprint server specialising in engineering and technology, and one that any researcher would feel comfortable contributing to regardless of their geographic location, affiliation, technical specialty, or even the ultimate intended publisher of the research. With IEEE’s vast global community of authors, members, and IEEE Xplore digital library users, we realised we were ideally positioned to address this challenge with the development of TechRxiv.org. And given our relationships in the scholarly publishing industry, our hope is that other publishers in these fields will eventually join this endeavour.</p> <p class="p2"><strong>Macdonald, Sabir, Koder, Pharmagenesis:</strong> We see three major contributing factors. The first is a general movement away from the ‘Ingelfinger Rule’, a policy stating that research findings would not be considered for publication by a journal if it has been published elsewhere. Journal editors have since revisited this policy and along with greater understanding and awareness of preprints, have moved away from considering these as prior publications. Secondly, updates to policies across universities, journals and funders now include and encourage preprints in their applications and submissions. Finally, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of preprint servers available including servers for discipline-, country-, publisher- and funder-specific research, made possible by advances in server technology and institutional and philanthropic funding. Combined with platforms such as the Open Science Framework, which allows you to search the different servers for articles of interest, research becomes both available and discoverable, an advantage for many authors.</p> <h2 class="p2">Why is there such a big discrepancy in the use of preprints between different disciplines?</h2> <p class="p2"><strong>Mellins-Cohen, Microbiology Society</strong>: The research lifecycle and research outputs themselves differ dramatically between disciplines. In the arts, humanities and social sciences, for example, the text written by an author is their research output: the precise choice of words and phrases matters. By contrast, while articles are important to researchers in the sciences (who need them to capture citations and aid with grant applications and career progression), their protocols, data and analyses are the critical research output. Scientists also seem to be much more focused on the issue of ‘priority’, and issuing a preprint allows them to claim priority even if their article then takes a long time to get through peer review (this is so well accepted that most funding bodies, including UKRI, Wellcome and the US National Institutes of Health, allow researchers to cite preprints in their grant applications). Against that background, it is easy to see why some sciences have embraced preprint servers more enthusiastically than some arts and humanities disciplines.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p class="p2"><strong>Curno, Frontiers</strong>: Some disciplines, such as physics, have had a long history of working in larger collaborative efforts, such as CERN, for example. In an environment like this author credit is distributed across a large number of contributors and often reproducing data is a significant endeavour. Therefore, authors in these communities might perceive less risk of not being credited with the data generation.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p class="p1">In other disciplines, such as medicine for example, there has been hesitation about making non-peer-reviewed results accessible due to the potential consequences of using unverified findings for treatment purposes. Preprints offering unverified insights into the coronavirus are a good example of how this could be problematic, particularly at a time when people are rushing to deliver solutions.</p> <p class="p2"><strong>Kenall, Research Square</strong>: As mentioned earlier, there is a particular urgency in some fields, such as in outbreak related research. The cultures of different fields differ quite a bit, as do the journal policies in these fields. Funders in some fields have been more supportive of preprints than others as well. Gates and Wellcome both mandate deposition of preprints during public health emergencies. Biomedical funders like the NIH also encourage the use of preprints on grant applications.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p class="p2"><strong>Macdonald, Sabir, Koder, Pharmagenesis</strong>: While researchers in engineering and physical sciences have been engaging with preprints for almost two decades, their uptake has been slower in other disciplines – most notably in clinical research. In addition to the universal risk of research being ‘scooped’, many medical researchers remain concerned over the potential risks to public health in publishing research that has not undergone formal peer review. As preprints are available open access, there a risk of unvetted information being misinterpreted and misunderstood by healthcare professionals and the general public alike. Beyond the risk for medical science generally, the pharma industry must also take care to avoid any sense of promoting off-label use of medicines. The dissemination of so-called ‘bad science’ also poses a risk to the public’s trust in medical research, a concern for academia and pharma alike.</p> <h2 class="p2">How do preprints benefit the research community?</h2> <p class="p2"><strong>Mellins-Cohen, Microbiology Society</strong>: I’ve already mentioned that preprints allow authors to establish priority for the work they have done by providing a public record: that gives the authors credit and allows them to accrue citations to their work even before formal publication. Then there is the increased visibility: preprints are open access by their nature, meaning that they are easy for other researchers to find and cite as well as being available more rapidly than traditional publication routes. Lastly, preprints can supplement traditional peer review by allowing a wide circle of peers to discover the work and contact the author with suggestions for improvements that might be made before the final version is published.</p> <p class="p2"><strong>Curno, Frontiers</strong>: There are benefits to preprints; wider and more rapid dissemination of results, and easier and unrestricted access, for example. Once published in preprint, authors may receive feedback from a wider circle beyond what they might expect during peer review, although the quality of this feedback cannot, of course, be guaranteed. From an editors’ perspective, preprints offer an opportunity to scout for new work of interest to their respective fields and invite submissions to their journal. A number of journals have partnerships with preprints. Our platform at Frontiers, for example, allows authors to easily submit papers from bioRxiv or medRxiv straight to our system for peer review.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p class="p2"><strong>Kenall, Research Square</strong>: First and foremost, they present an opportunity to make research better. Research has become increasingly multidisciplinary and more niche. Two reviewers rarely can do the job of thoroughly validating a research article. Making one’s submitted manuscript available from the start of (preferably before) the peer review process opens the door to feedback from a wider range of researchers. Having worked in the publishing industry, I’m also well aware of the difficulty of finding reviewers. The reader comes to the article not because an editor has asked him or her to but because he/she is genuinely interested in the research. Surely this is an excellent person to provide feedback on the manuscript? Of course, they also allow researchers to share their findings immediately, without waiting an average of 150 days in peer review. Peer review is extremely valuable in validating research, but it takes time. In some cases, an author might need to share their work early for practical reasons – to cite on a grant application, eg. But in cases of international public health emergencies, research cannot wait 150 days. It’s important we have a mechanism for immediate sharing.</p> <p class="p2"><strong>Macdonald, Sabir, Koder, Pharmagenesis</strong>: With the current publication process being notably slow, the most obvious benefit of preprints to the research community is the early and rapid dissemination of research results, thereby accelerating scientific advances. As demonstrated by the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, it is clear that the broader access to scientific research through preprints has allowed the scientific community to work collaboratively to combat the virus, minimising repetitive research efforts and improving patient care. Preprint servers allow research to be shared widely, and open licences allow researchers from across the world access to the latest advances, which in turn allows for more constructive feedback and even increased citations. In studies where research is time-sensitive or in areas where there is a lot of competition, it allows researchers a way to ‘time-stamp’ their research as soon as it has been discovered. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p class="p2">What are the biggest challenges for publishers around the rise in preprints?</p> <p class="p2"><strong>Mellins-Cohen, Microbiology Society</strong>: There’s the easy answer, that publishers of journals who refuse to consider preprinted articles are cutting themselves off from the next generation of researchers. And then there’s the hard answer, which is that preprints are the leading edge of a desire to publish differently, and if we don’t listen to our communities and engage with those desires, publishers risk becoming increasingly irrelevant.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> Here's a link to a recent editorial I wrote about preprints: </span></p> <p class="p2"><strong>Curno, Frontiers</strong>: Publishers have to decide whether to see pre-prints as prior publications and whether in principal, they will publish research that is already in the public domain. The decision they take may also depend on which copyright terms the preprint was published under; there may be a conflict between the publisher’s license and that of the preprint platform. Similarly, some journals have banned submissions based on preprints in order to discourage this practise based on their perception of risk to patients. Beyond that, there are challenges about linking articles to pre-prints to collate impact data such as citations, and how to deal with preprints if an article is retracted. A particularly interesting challenge for publishers is whether and how they are implicated in managing the potentially negative impact research published in pre-prints could have if taken out of context. The research community is aware the findings are unvalidated, but is the wider population, including the media? If findings where misinterpreted, or mistakenly used to inform government policy for example, the validity and reputation of all research could be questioned.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p class="p1"><strong>Kenall, Research Square:</strong> I don’t see these two ecosystems as at odds. Indeed, I think they work in collaboration. Peer review through a journal provides a method of validation (albeit not a perfect one) and a valuable level of curation in our world of information overload. The challenge will be in the ability to work together to ease the user journey for the author and in ensuring there is no duplication of resources.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p class="p1"><strong>Foster, IEEE:</strong> I would restate this as an opportunity for publishers in a few ways. 1) to invite more authors from around the world into the process, 2) to receive more submissions from authors who are in the early stages of their careers, 3) to help raise awareness of an author’s work as early as possible, 4) to help expedite the peer review and publishing process for scholarly journals with more polished submissions, and 5) to make the lifecycle of research communications richer and more transparent.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p class="p1">This is made possible through the addition of data, code, and other research artifacts to the archival records, and through machine-linking of the various different versions of articles, e.g. conference proceeding, preprint, and the archival journal version of record.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p class="p2"><strong>Macdonald, Sabir, Koder, Pharmagenesis</strong>: Preprints not only provide researchers with a faster route of communication than traditional peer-reviewed publication, but also offer an alternative route to open access without the associated article processing costs. As preprints become more popular some authors may opt not to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals at all. Publishers will have to adapt in order to retain article submissions, demonstrating the value added by their peer review, editorial and other publishing processes, and providing authors with viable open access routes.</p> <h2 class="p2">Where do we go from here? What will the preprints landscape look like in 10 years’ time?</h2> <p class="p2"><strong>Mellins-Cohen, Microbiology Society</strong>: Let me go find my crystal ball… At a guess, we’ll see some consolidation of existing niche preprint servers into larger disciplinary servers, as well as the launch of additional disciplinary and institutional servers for specific communities, but also a proliferation of services built on top of preprint servers.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> <p class="p1"><strong>Curno, Frontiers:</strong> This may depend on the transition to open access and more technology-driven publishing services, which could speed up publication. Either of these could make preprints redundant as they would undermine its main benefit; rapid and unrestricted dissemination. On the other hand, if there is a clear shift in researcher evaluation (some funders allow preprints to be used in grant applications) and a de-emphasis on peer review as a validation method, it is possible preprints may become more prominent. However, like other well established and long-running industries, publishing moves relatively slowly. It could be that 10 years is too short a timeframe for any significant change to occur in the preprint landscape. There are a number of areas that preprints do need to address to become more prominent. For example: impact data reconciliation, quality control, and AI-ready formats to enable enhanced text and data-mining in the future.</p> <p class="p2"><strong>Kenall, Research Square</strong>: I don’t see these two ecosystems as at odds. Indeed, I think they work in collaboration. Peer review through a journal provides a method of validation (albeit not a perfect one) and a valuable level of curation in our world of information overload. The challenge will be in the ability to work together to ease the user journey for the author and in ensuring there is no duplication of resources.</p> <p class="p2"><strong>Foster, IEEE</strong>: I think the open science movement overall will continue to accelerate as more information will be available faster and more broadly than ever before – and that encompasses preprints, data, code, as well as the final peer reviewed articles. IEEE strives to continue to support the varying needs of all of our authors and the scientific community by providing and developing the resources needed to continue to drive global innovation now and in the future.</p> <p class="p2"><strong>Macdonald, Sabir, Koder, Pharmagenesis:</strong> As the demand for timely access to research outputs grows so will the scholarly community’s engagement with preprints. The clear benefits of preprints in response to public health crises have again been demonstrated in the COVID-19 outbreak. When an inflammatory article suggesting that COVID-19 was engineered by humans was posted to bioRxiv, the scientific community rallied together and the article was quickly withdrawn, demonstrating that even when ‘bad science’ is made public, there are clear steps in place to contain any potential damage. It will be interesting to see whether the use of preprint servers, such as bioRxiv and medRxiv, continues after the COVID-19 crisis is over. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Other tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/feature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Feature</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-company field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Company:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/company/microbiology-society" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Microbiology Society</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/company/frontiers" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Frontiers</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/company/research-square" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Research Square</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/company/ieee" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">IEEE</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/company/pharmagenesis" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Pharmagenesis</a></div></div></div> Thu, 02 Apr 2020 09:05:54 +0000 Tim Gillett 17153 at https://www.researchinformation.info Document sharing speeds up research https://www.researchinformation.info/feature/document-sharing-speeds-research <div class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/issue/decemberjanuary-2007" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">December/January 2007</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-topic field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Topic tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/issue/topic/preprints" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">PREPRINTS</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-intro field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><em>Tino Hannay</em> &amp; <em>Hilary Spencer</em> of Nature Publishing Group explain why this publishing company has launched a free preprint service for biologists, chemists and earth scientists</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.researchinformation.info/sites/default/files/content/feature/lead-image/RIDec07Preprints_0.jpg" width="240" height="180" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Science, perhaps more than any other human endeavour, depends on the sharing of information and ideas. This takes place by a variety of means, from informal chats and letters, to large, well-orchestrated conferences and peer-reviewed journals. The internet and the web have left their mark on all of these activities. One-to-one discussions of the kind previously pursued verbally or through posted letters are now more often conducted by email. The one-to-many dissemination of information by conferences and journals has been greatly facilitated by the downloadable PDF and the webcast. Such developments, particularly over the last 10-15 years, have created a cumulative effect in science that is nothing short of revolutionary. </p> <p>But to see this as an endpoint is to miss the web’s most important characteristic of all: it is an environment ideally suited to facilitating many-to-many discussions. Which scientist has not dreamt of overcoming the constraints of geography and time by getting just the right group of brains into a room to discuss a pressing challenge, or debate a counter-intuitive result? Well, now we can do exactly that, except that this group no longer needs to come together at the same location and instant in the physical world, they need only to frequent the same website. In addition, broad scientific discourse no longer needs to take place over timescales of months and years, but rather hours and days.</p> <p>Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is working on a number of initiatives to exploit this feature for the benefit of science. One of our most recent projects is Nature Precedings (precedings.nature.com), an open documentsharing website for scientists in the biological, chemical and earth sciences.</p> <p>Nature Precedings is perhaps most easily understood as a preprint server that allows scientists to upload non-peer-reviewed (or pre-peer-review) documents so that they can be discovered, downloaded, read, and cited by other researchers. In this way, it is similar to arXiv.org, a website that has been providing an indispensable service to physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists for over 15 years. In contrast to arXiv.org, however, Nature Precedings serves scientific fields in which the open and early exchange of research findings has yet to take root. Running a preprint server might seem like a bold, or even quixotic, goal for a publishing company, but we strongly believe that such open and early exchange of information between researchers is in the best interests of science as a whole, and NPG exists to enable such activities. </p> <p>NPG has developed Nature Precedings with a series of partner institutions, including the British Library, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), Science Commons and the Wellcome Trust. The service is provided free-of-charge to authors and readers alike, and NPG claims no special rights over the content (which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution License). We have committed to keeping the content openly available and our partners will help to guarantee this by ‘mirroring’ Nature Precedings documents on their servers, where they will also be available free-of-charge. </p> <p>Early results in biology, chemistry and the earth sciences are often described in posters and presentations so Nature Precedings accepts a range of document types in addition to manuscripts. All contributions are screened by curators, who check for new submissions regularly throughout the day. They ensure that anything accepted is from a suitablyqualified scientist, that it coherently reports findings in an appropriate subject area (e.g., not in clinical medicine or physics), and that there are no obvious technical errors or omissions in the document or its associated metadata. These criteria are obviously much less stringent than those applied to NPG’s peer-reviewed journals.</p> <p>Also unlike our journals, Nature Precedings does not aim to highlight the very best research, but to provide a snapshot of current activity in the fields that it covers and help balance the situations where delays of several months between writing-up and publishing really do impede progress. The service should be most useful for researchers reading within their own areas of expertise so that they are well equipped to judge for themselves the merits (or otherwise) of non-peer-reviewed work.</p> <p>Readers can leave comments (which are moderated) and can vote for contributions they consider particularly noteworthy. When work appearing in Nature Precedings is later published elsewhere, especially in peerreviewed form, there is a mechanism for authors and readers to provide links to the new version. Contributing authors can also upload new versions of previously-released documents. The older versions remain online and are separately citable, but readers are advised of the availability of the newer version.</p> <p><strong>Addressing author concerns</strong></p> <p>Even if open information sharing is in the interests of science as a whole, individual researchers do not necessarily have an incentive to participate. We recognise that modern science is such a competitive environment that the service needs to appeal not only to researchers’ altruism but also their self-interest. One worry is that early dissemination of findings might enable another research group to publish similar results in a peer-reviewed journal.</p> <p>Nature Precedings attempts to address such concerns by making early findings citable. Documents are cited not merely by referencing a URL, but by using Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and Handles, the same global system used to provide online citability for the peerreviewed literature. Nature Precedings can therefore be viewed as a system for claiming priority rather than surrendering it. Any future peer-reviewed papers based on work released on Nature Precedings can cite the original work – and in our opinion ought to do so. </p> <p>This notion of citability and comparison with journals leads to another potential concern: that some readers will mistake nonpeer-reviewed content on Nature Precedings with manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals. Although Nature Precedings contains manuscripts similar to those found in peerreviewed journals, they are not ‘reviewed’ by ‘editors’ or ‘published’, but ‘screened’ by ‘curators’ and ‘posted’. Although these are only language differences, they help to set readers’ expectations. Furthermore, as people generally become familiar with services such as discussion boards, social networking sites and wikis, this distinction will become more intuitive. The site also contains many references to the fact that the content is not peer-reviewed. To our knowledge, no one has yet been seriously misled. But we are not complacent, not least because our own reputation is at risk, and we are constantly on the lookout for ways to clarify this issue further. For this reason, too, Nature Precedings does not currently accept documents focusing on clinical or therapeutic claims as the stakes arising from misinformation are obviously much higher there than in basic research.</p> <p><strong>Meeting potential threats</strong></p> <p>Some people have wondered why a highly successful journal publisher would embark on a project that seems to undermine the traditional publishing model. Aren’t preprint servers and open commenting systems a potent long-term threat to journals and the traditional models of peer-review on which they depend? In our view, they are not. In physics, a strong preprint culture and arXiv. org have co-existed peacefully for many years with peer-reviewed journals, including some of NPG’s own titles such as Nature and Nature Physics. We don’t believe that a competent publisher that is confident in the value it adds through editing and peer-review has anything to fear from the exchange of preprints between scientists.</p> <p>But suppose we are wrong and that the sharing of preprints is the first step to eroding journal publications in their current form. That would be an even more compelling reason to create a service like Nature Precedings. If the foundations of our business are going to be torn up then to stick our heads in the sand would be folly. Better to reinvent the world ourselves –and understand quickly how we can add value in new ways – than leave this to others. Even if our ultimate destination is out of sight, those leading the charge get a much better view of the road ahead than those reluctantly bringing up the rear.</p> <p><em>Timo Hannay is NPG’s publishing director for Nature.com and is based in London. Hilary Spencer is product development manager for Nature Precedings and works in New York.</em></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tintbox-headline field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tintbox-text field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div> Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000 europaadmin 15853 at https://www.researchinformation.info
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