A critical meeting is taking place starting the evening of February 16, 2016 and into February 17th to discuss the future of scientific publishing and the potential role of preprints in the changing landscape. The meeting will be live streamed here. To learn more, please take a look at the text of the announcement below and accompanying introductory video. We collectively will dictate the outcome and any changes will affect us all. It is imperative that we stay informed, contribute our ideas and make our opinions known.
ASAPbio Announcement:
“Most scientists agree that the research in biology could be accelerated and improved if scientific publishing was made easier, faster, and more transparent. On February 16th and 17th, ~70 members of the science community, young and old, leaders and trainees, and representatives of journals, scientific societies, academic institutions, and funding agencies, will convene at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland to discuss ways in which “preprints” might facilitate this goal.
Preprints allow scientific findings to be posted immediately, without peer review, in a format freely accessible to anyone in the world. They can help scientists receive productive feedback on their work and also could serve as evidence for productivity. While preprints have been a key component of knowledge sharing within the physics community for decades, they are not widely used in biology because they are incompatible with the policies of some journals, not officially acknowledged by many funding agencies, and not clarified with regard to their role in establishing priority of discovery in the biology community. The ASAPbio meeting specifically focuses on how preprints can be used optimally and fairly to: 1) advance progress in the life sciences, and 2) meet the needs of scientists at all stages of their careers and world-wide.
We recognize that the ASAPbio meeting will be composed of a mere ~70 individuals, yet the success of the meeting will be determined ultimately by the opinions and actions of many scientists, representatives of funding agencies, publishers, and others who are not physically present. For that reason, we will stream the meeting online so that all can watch and foster participation.
You are invited to visit ASAPbio.org to take a 3-minute survey to share your opinions on preprints, comment on white papers written by attendees, and register your opinions via Twitter with #ASAPbio. Tune in at ASAPbio.org at 7 pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, February 16th, to watch the opening of the meeting, including a keynote address by Paul Ginsparg, the founder of the physics preprint server arXiv. You can also view a stream of all plenary talks and discussion on February 17th starting at 8 am. Throughout the whole meeting, viewers are encouraged to submit comments and questions on Twitter with the hashtag #ASAPbio.”
Some excellent posts on this topic can also be found in the commentary section.