Dear subscribers, Since the summer of 2016, ASAPbio has been iterating on a proposal for a “Central Service” for life sciences preprints, a database that would aggregate preprints from multiple sources and make them easier to access by human... We explain the benefits of such a service in a recent blog post.

Preprints are complete and public manuscripts with associated data shared before undergoing peer review. Physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists post 100,000 preprints per year to arXiv, a scientist-governed preprint server that has been in operation for over a quarter of a century.

At the ASAPbio Funders’ Workshop, representatives from a number of funding agencies asked ASAPbio to “develop a proposal describing the governance, infrastructure and standards desired for a preprint service that represents the views of the broad... To guide this effort, a group of funders have independently formulated the following principles that will shape the Central Service.

Following increased interest in may scientific societies’ positions on the use of preprints in NIH grant applications, several societies have released statements providing their perspectives. The ASCB leadership, after careful consideration, believes preprints should be able to be included in grant applications and referenced in NIH progress reports, with the proper references so they are not confused with peer reviewed published papers.

The report from the August 30th ASAPbio Technical Workshop has been published on January 16, 2017 in Rio Journal. Along with a summary of the day’s discussions (which are also available to view online), the report contains a the authors’ synthesis of key principles and recommendations for preprint technology development (found in Table 3): General princ...

Dear subscribers, We need your help for an urgent action this week. The NIH released a RFI (request for information) on “including preprints and interim research products in the NIH applications and reports.”  ASAPbio, and many individual scientists, responded with arguments in favor of provid...