I do like the idea of a CS that will aggregate content from the growing (which is positive in itself) number of preprint entities – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preprint

I did watch the talks from the #ASAPbio meeting back in Feb. and some of them again over the last 2 days.

As a strong supporter of OA, I’m clearly all for preprints. I’ve co-authored two life sciences ones myself and I’m not even a researcher _per se_.

My main concern at present with regards to preprints is *the lack of uptake generally* compared to the success of arXiv/physics & maths etc. About 8,000 preprints a month.

IMO, the situation is not that different with regards to Institutional Repositories (IR) and green OA. Lot’s of IRs but uptake is generally low and generally, only about 15% of content is OA.

Unless mandated to do so, researchers (unfortunately) generally tend not to be concerned about whether or not their papers are made OA either through the green or gold routes. Other than the physics/maths field, researchers tend not to embrace using preprints.

All in all, at this stage, I’m less concerned about whether or not their is a CS or not, but more about things that can be done to encourage/reward researchers to embrace preprints !

I am not well versed in the technical side, but it seems to me that word as an input format is a really bad idea. Doesn’t that mean that figures will be of poor quality?

I still strongly favor the arXiv model with 1 pre-print server for biology that is its own CS, that is stably funded by some common fund of users, government, and private philanthropy, and that is a not-for-profit entity. The ASAPbio community will have more control over the governance of this server, how the content is served up and quality-controlled, how and if there is commenting and PPPR, etc. The only service out there that meets these criteria at the moment is bioRxiv. I think we as a community need to settle on a single CS (bioRxiv or a new entity as imagined above) in the expectation that all or most of the other new independent pre-print servers will fail in a few years.

I do like the idea of a CS that will aggregate
content from the growing (which is positive in itself) number of
preprint entities – (See the Wikipedia preprint page).

I did watch the talks from the #ASAPbio meeting back in Feb. and some of them again over the last 2 days.

As
a strong supporter of OA, I’m clearly all for preprints. I’ve
co-authored three life sciences ones myself and I’m not even a
researcher _per se_.

My main concern over the years and still with
regards to preprints is *the lack of uptake* generally compared to the
success of arXiv/physics & maths etc. About 8,000 preprints a month.

IMO,
the situation is not that different with regards to Institutional
Repositories (IR) and green OA. Lot’s of IRs but uptake is generally low
plus only about 15% of content is OA.

Unless mandated to do so,
researchers (unfortunately) generally tend not to be concerned about
whether or not their papers are made OA either through the green or gold
routes. Other than the physics/maths field, researchers tend not to
embrace using preprints.

All in all, at this stage, I’m less
concerned about whether or not their is a CS, but more about what can be
done to encourage/reward researchers to post preprints !