ASAPbio Preprint Peer Review Guide Resources
Creators: name: Coates, Jonathon
name: Abdelghani, Rania
name: Clemente, Giuliana
name: Higino, Gracielle
name: Liebsch, Daniela
name: Nidamangala Srinivasa, Ananya
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023
Subjects: preprints
peer review
guide

description: Ready to get started with Preprint Peer Review – An ASAPbio Training Leaflet

Credit: Gracielle Higino, Giuliana Clemente, Rania Abdulghani, Ananya Nidamangala Srinivasa, Daniela Liebsch, Jonny Coates

 

Reading preprints? Interested in reviewing or training reviewers? A brief but comprehensive Preprint Review Brochure developed by 2023 ASAPbio Fellows is ready to get you started with preprint peer review.

Background

In recent years there has been a rise in the adoption of preprints as a means for scientists to share their work rapidly, openly, and on their own terms. The positive response of the community to preprints is helping to tackle several hurdles in scientific publishing, including open access, rapid dissemination, and publication of negative results. With this comes the need for preprint review both as a way to counter disinformation and as a unique opportunity to peer review open science. Moreover, preprint reviews are openly available, vouching for more transparency, and they often gather the view of reviewers with expertise in different backgrounds, better accounting for complex and multidisciplinary research, new developments, and changing paradigms. Preprints allow for experimentation with the format of peer review, such as crowd review, which can give more flexibility for reviewers, who can focus on specific aspects of a scientific work. Importantly, preprint review gives voice to early career researchers (ECRs), who are often excluded from the traditional reviewer pool or do not receive the sufficient credit for their contributions. This comes with a number of incentives for ECRs; in fact preprint review not only helps reduce biases and enhance inclusivity, but it also helps ECRs to engage more with the scientific community, increasing their sense of belonging, and expand their skill set, sharpening their critical thinking and improving their own writing. To promote preprint peer review is therefore an important aspect of the future of scientific communication and community building.

Design 

In addition to a general lack of peer review training for ECRs, many researchers are not familiar with preprint peer review. Although multiple learning resources are available, navigating the many options available might be daunting, especially for junior researchers. To bring preprint peer review to the spotlight and encourage ECRs to engage in this process, while guiding them through it, we have designed a brief and easy-to-digest resource.

Such a resource consists of a curated tri-fold brochure that illustrates the main steps of a preprint review: choosing a preprint, reading the manuscript, writing a preprint review report, and publishing the review. The brochure also includes a checklist, which helps novice reviewers to easily identify the important aspects while evaluating a preprint. The brochure links to additional resources, including the Focussed, Appropriate, Specific, Transparent (FAST) principles, that act as a guideline to good reviewer practice, and other preprint review guides; to access additional resources, readers simply scan the QR code.

This brochure, which raises awareness about peer review and discusses the process with clarity and simplicity, is a good starting point to train any novice reviewer and as such, it can be easily distributed at universities, libraries, scientific venues, in seminars, classes, and online.

The leaflet was refined with input from the community in the form of a short survey and focus group. Overall, the feedback was highly positive with only small alterations being made.

Outlook – what’s to come?

With the resource ready to be distributed, our aim is to share it widely, to translate it in several languages to promote more widespread adoption and have it as both an online version and a printable pdf.

Previous surveys on peer review of young researchers often indicate that one of the most challenging aspects of reviewing is a lack of training. Universities have now started to use preprint review as an exercise to teach students how to review scientific work and publish their reviews as part of their curriculum. Additionally, crowd preprint review clubs are increasing and provide an excellent outlet to more traditional journal clubs, which often don’t share the outcome of discussions with authors. Our guide can thus help both individual researchers and groups to start preprint review but it might also be part of broad peer review training efforts.

We’d love to support such initiatives, and to encourage as many people as possible to use our guide to engage in preprint peer review. Including you! Nothing stops you now.

 

Additional resources

Journal club to preprint review club funding 

About preprints:

https://asapbio.org/preprint-info

https://help.osf.io/article/230-preprint-faqs

Where to find preprints:

https://asapbio.org/preprint-servers

How to Review (preprints):

https://tinyurl.com/4szs6uyn

https://plos.org/resource/how-to-write-a-peer-review/

Publishing preprint reviews:

https://asapbio.org/pyr-resources

https://asapbio.org/how-to-publish-peer-reviews

https://reimaginereview.asapbio.org/

More about Creative Commons licenses:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/