Dive Brief:
- BioRxiv, or bio-archive, offers a free online publishing platform for researchers in the life sciences who want an alternative to the months-long process that goes into journal publication, and it’s starting to get more attention.
- The Chronicle of Higher Education reports a group of biologists rallied around “ASAPbio” and how the alternative publishing platform could increase the pace of scientific discovery as well as public access to it.
- ASAPbio is now a movement of researchers advocating the publication of non-peer-reviewed preprints as a secondary path toward publishing, in addition to submission to journals, but early-career scientists don’t seem to trust it and the National Institutes of Health hasn’t created a policy yet on where published preprints will fit into the grant application process.
Dive Insight:
Life sciences researchers are not the first to consider online publishing of papers before they have been peer reviewed. The process results in a type of review, as a world of people have access to them and an opportunity to comment on the research. For young scientists, however, the concern is that preprints don’t offer the cache of traditionally published articles because they don’t come with a seal of approval from other leading researchers in the field.
Mathematics and physics research has been openly shared ahead of traditional publishing for decades now. Academia.edu also allows for unpublished papers to be uploaded. And, besides bioRxiv, there is arXiv.org, which hosts a broader range of research. As the digital age catches up to publishing, the question will be whether a prestige shift away from traditional journals joins it.