What are preprints?
Preprints are scientific manuscripts that have not yet undergone journal-organized peer review and are freely available via online preprint repositories. Usually preprints are posted either before or at the same time as submission to a journal. Why post a preprint?
Preprints hold the promise of bringing research back to the reason we all practice science: to test hypotheses and generate new knowledge that will help us tackle many of the scientific challenges in the world. Posting research output in an open repository helps to dissociate the research from the career reward system and flips the focus to science first, publication later. The hope is that this will enable researchers to focus on producing robust data, without feeling pressured to align their research with the interests of a few select journals. In addition, preprints provide an opportunity for authors to gain useful feedback on their work prior to publication, and to also gain control over when their results are seen by the scientific community.
Preprints in the Life Sciences
Preprints have gained widespread popularity in the Physics, Computational Science, Mathematics, Quantitative Finance, Statistics, and Quantitative Biology fields, since the initiation of the online repository arXiv by Paul Ginsparg over 25 years ago. As a result of arXiv’s success, and because of the many frustrations of publishing in the life sciences, a group of scientists launched the ASAPbio initiative to consider the use of preprints in biology. Since the first ASAPbio meeting in February 2016, the awareness and use of preprint repositories has exploded, with ~13,000 manuscripts currently available on bioRxiv, the largest preprint server for biology. Much of this explosion has been catalyzed by life science publishers’ overall acceptance of preprints, and the encouragement gained from funders supporting the citation of preprints as evidence of scientific progression in grant proposals. Despite this growth in preprint awareness and use, we don’t want to stop there as we feel preprints offer even more value than is currently being harnessed. As a pre-peer review manuscript, preprints provide an invaluable opportunity for early career researchers (ECRs) to develop their skills at critically reviewing scientific manuscripts, and they offer the possibility of open community involvement to promote rapid scientific progression. We, amongst others, have therefore suggested that preprints should be incorporated into scientific Journal Clubs (JCs), instead of or in addition to standard JCs that discuss post-peer reviewed articles.
Why Use Preprints in Journal Clubs?
The classic model for scientific JCs is to select a recently published article in your field, present the data to your peers, and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the article. Although this is still a valuable exercise, these articles have already undergone peer review and are, generally speaking, unchangeable. Therefore, your efforts in generating detailed article critique can feel underappreciated as they don’t actually contribute to the improvement of that article. In contrast, the peer review that results from preprint JCs can be emailed to the authors and posted online allowing both the incorporation of these critiques into the final published article, and the stimulation of a wider discussion beyond the walls of your JC. Furthermore, by generating a detailed preprint critique, this more closely resembles the peer review process, providing vital training that is rarely offered to scientists (see Fig. ??? below). Preprint Journal Clubs: Your Opinions Revealed