In preparation for our meeting on Transparency, Recognition, and Innovation in Peer Review in the Life Sciences on February 7-9 at HHMI Headquarters, we’ve collected some recent (and not-so-recent) literature on journal peer review. A full annotated bibliography can be found at the bottom of this post, and we invite any additions via comments.

by John Helliwell, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry University of Manchester and DSc Physics University of York (@HelliwellJohn) Introduction For the meeting entitled “Transparency, Reward, and Innovation in Peer Review in the Life Sciences” ... 7-9, 2018 at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland (https://asapbio.org/peer-review) I have been asked by The Wellcome Trust to open the discussion on the question in my title.

by Stephen Curry, Professor of Structural Biology, Imperial College (@Stephen_Curry) As the song goes – and I have in mind the Beatles’ 1963 cover version of Money (that’s all I want) – “the best things in life are free.” But is peer... The freely given service that many scientists provide as validation and quality control of research papers submitted for publication has its critics.

On July 19, preprint service providers, funders, and researchers gathered in Cambridge, MA and via videoconference for a live-streamed ASAPbio workshop about the evolving preprint ecosystem (see video recording and collaborative notes). The goal of the meeting was to assess outstanding needs in light of recent developments, including CZI’s partnership with bioRxiv.

Dear subscribers, The preprint ecosystem is growing rapidly. The CZI/bioRxiv partnership will fuel the expansion of the leading preprint server in the life sciences, and many other servers and platforms with varying degrees of disciplinary overlap exist or are planned (arXiv, PeerJ Preprints, preprints.org, OS...

Every month, more and more life scientists are choosing to post a preprint. This decision can give scientists visibility in their field, establish priority of their work in progress, gain recognition by funding agencies, and elicit feedback to improve their manuscript.