The following is a message from funding agency representatives who attended our recent Funders’ Workshop. As research funders who attended the ASAPbio Funder’s Workshop for Preprints held at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on May 23-24, 2016, we wish to provide a brief summary of the meeting.

The Data-Driven Discovery group at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation released a post on Medium today soliciting feedback on proposed changes to their policies on a variety of open access practices. Preprints are discussed as follows: You can read more and provide input at the post.

On May 20, 2016, a Simons Foundation initiative, SFARI, announced that it has changed its policies to support and encourage the use of preprints. The Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) recently made two important changes that we hope will help to accelerate the pace of autism research.

A group of attendees of ASAPbio have published a commentary in the “Policy Forum” section of the journal Science on May 20, 2016. Written by scientists and representatives from journals and funding agencies, the paper serves as a meeting report and summary of opinions on the use of preprints in the life sciences.

Authored by Jo McEntyre and Phil Bourne Goal: To satisfy the fundamental requirements of establishing scientific priority rapidly and cheaply through providing the ability to publish and access open preprints, balanced with the desire to support open... Approach: An internationally supported, open, archive (or platform) for preprints as infrastructure is ideal because (a) should the use of preprints become widespread, there is potential to reap long-term open science benefits, as is the case for pub...

Drafted by ASAPbio How can funders help to validate preprints as a mechanism for communication? In a Commentary in Science published on May 20, 2016, co-authors representing several funding agencies recommended: 1) Publishing an explicit statement encouraging researchers to make early versions of their manuscripts available through acceptable p...