 Hello, everyone, and welcome to National Human Genome Research Institute's second event in our new genomics and the media series, Conversations with Science Communicators. My name is Sarah Bates. I'm the communications chief for NHGRI. I'm very excited today to give a short introduction before I turn it over to our moderator and special guest. Preprints, scientific manuscripts that appear online before a formal peer review or publication in a journal or a book. It's one of the biggest topics that public affairs offices and journalists are dealing with now in half or several years. It came to national attention with the COVID-19 pandemic and an influx of preprints. And our special guest today, we're explaining more about what preprints are. But strangely, most of the public doesn't know about this nuance in the scientific publication ecosystem. And yet it's something that is incredibly important to how they understand science news. And it depends on conversations like the one we're going to have today to talk about how we adapt to these new changes in the scientific communications landscape. So this, this event is one in a series of outstanding speakers that we're going to have talk to us here at NHGRI. Each one features a trailblazer and science communication talking about their craft and taking questions from you, the public and journalists and everyone else. This is an expert in communicating about genomics across various media from podcasting to preprints to everything in between. Our goal with these conversations is to talk about different approaches for communicating about the fast paced field of genomics to give you behind the scenes about how people break the news or talk about the news, and as well as to discuss the unique challenges and opportunities that each medium can present. We have an incredible lineup for the series from Dorothy Roberts to Elizabeth Wayne to Joe Palka to Porva Vandevillie. And today, of course, we have our incredible guest, John Inglis, who is the executive director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. So I will turn it over to our moderator to to give a greater introduction for John today. Dr. Chris Dunter is our moderator. She is a senior advisor for the NHGRI director on genomics engagement in head of the Genomics Methods Unit, or EMU, and the NHGRI social behavioral research branch. You may know her as Gold Scientist on Twitter. So please send us your questions on social media. In the meantime, throughout the conversation, Chris and John will be looking out for them. You can hashtag genomics in the media, or you can drop them in the Q&A feature on Zoom. Thank you all for joining us today, and I will turn it over to Dr. Dunter and Inglis. Thank you so much, Sarah, and welcome everyone. Thanks for joining us and welcome Dr. John Inglis. I'm so excited to have a colleague and friend with us today. So John earned his PhD in immunology from Edinburgh University Medical School and he served as an editor of the Lancet before founding the journal Immunology Today. In 1987, he was lured over from across the pond to the U.S. to start up the laboratory press and since then he has founded almost more journals than I can list in the time that we have together. More recently, he and his colleague Richard Sever co-founded two pre-print servers BioArchive and MedArchive, if you've seen those written out, the X and then as a chi, which we are going to talk about at length today. But even if you haven't met John in person before, if you work in genomics, you have almost certainly used a tool that he helped produce or set up. So thank you so much, John, for joining us. It's my pleasure, Chris. Thank you very much for the invitation. I'm looking forward to the conversation. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Absolutely. Yeah. So tell me about you came to the U.S. as we mentioned to set up the Colesbury Library Lab to address and write them the journal Genes of Development was just six months old. And I am going to out myself as old by saying that I certainly remember when every lab had well-worn copies of molecular cloning. The second edition by Tom Manny, August the laboratory man, I see now that that's listed as a collectible as Amazon, which makes me feel even older. So tell us about how you were able to build up the press from that small start to the big enterprise it is today. Well, you know, I was I was thinking the other day that really the reason that I came here is actually because of genomics. The reason was that the director of Colesbury Harbor Laboratory at in 1987 was the very famous James D. Watson, who had been the director of Colesbury Harbor since 1968. But by 1987 was beginning to get into the very early discussions and conceptualization of what eventually became the human genome project. And of course, Jim became the founding director of the of the Institute. And at that point, the laboratory had become a rather complicated place. There were there was a DNA learning center that which which was aimed at high school students. There was an expanding meetings and courses operation. There was the band, the Banbury Center, and Jim had a major hand in all of these developments. And essentially and publishing, of course, had been embedded in the lab's functionality since 1933. But and Jim was the architect of a great deal of that, including the expansion of the meetings and courses which took the which were the seeds for many monographs in important topics in molecular biology. I mean, in the 70s and 80s, a lot of what came out of the lab was the literature of molecular biology and molecular cloning the lab manual was an exemplar of that. There was a course in this new recombinant DNA technology and run taught by a number of a number of people, and it became the basis for this lab manual. At that stage was a very unusual form of media in in molecular biology. But there was an immense hunger to learn what these techniques could do and how to do them. And this was it was literally a cookbook. It was often called a cookbook. It was often called a Bible, the Bible of molecular cloning of molecular biology because it had very detailed step by step instructions on how to do all the things that you needed to do to take advantage of this new set of technologies. And it came out in 1982 a first it was an absolute phenomenon. It spread across the world, I think it really should be recognized as a major vector for the spread of recombinant DNA through all the research communities in the world. And the publications department at the lab was was just that it was a department of the administration. And suddenly they found that they were selling 60,000 copies of this book, which was a huge accomplishment at any time, but particularly in those days. Wow. So publishing was embedded in Cold Spring Harbor and had been for a long time. Jim realized that that this needed more than the attention that he could give to it. So Gene's and development had got started under the guidance of a dear friend of mine and former colleague Steve Prentice who tragically was killed before even the in a car crash before issue of genes and development came out. So now Jim had, you know, a burgeoning book program and I had a journal and he decided to look for someone who would be willing to come and take charge of that. And his search led to me. I remember vividly having dinner at his invitation with him in London, in which we talked about all kinds of things. A vision for a university press with expansion in journals and expansion in books. And I also remember going back and saying to my wife we lived in Cambridge went back on the train and said, How do you like to live in America for a couple of years and she's like, Why the hell would I want to do that. But she is a person of with an adventurous spirit. And so we came to America for a couple of years. You know, our children were eight and six. And we, we were we've been here ever since and very happily. So we've expanded the press has expanded. We have nine journals. We have 200 books in print, we have electronic books, we have books online, and I guess, really, the, the, the logic behind the expansion has always been, what can we do as a publisher that is useful to the community. And everything that we do is run through that metric. For example, we started a journal in 1991 devoted exclusively to PCR at a time when PCR was a new technology it was exposed and developing in a variety of ways. We knew that this would not last, but we thought we'll start it and then we'll see where we go from there and where we went from there was its evolution into genome research. And we have, we had editors of this journal in 1991, which included a promising young man called Eric Green and Rick Maras and Richard Gibbs now all extremely eminent and senior people in the field of genomics and much to our gratification they are still involved they are still committed to the journal they have colleagues now in addition but that's been a tremendous journey for for that particular journal and we are immensely proud of what it has done for and with the genomics community. I'm talking too much about this but it is, it is a story that we're very proud of and the press is a very well established part of the expansiveness of the laboratory and and we contribute to the lab in a whole variety of ways financially but also in terms of reputation, but also in terms of the service that we want our publications to give to the community. Yeah, that's great and of course with genome research the current editor Hilary Sussman is amazing and a good friend so I wanted to call her out to. So we're going to talk more about how you're publishing experience factors in in a little bit. But first I want to alert people to the fact that you've also been an author, and yeah I'm a shy away from controversial areas including your 2008 book on the Genesis Charles Davenport and the history of eugenics so this is an area where our institute has a history program. That is continually working to ensure there's proper context and recognition of harms that were done in the past. So can you comment on what you think is the current state of things I know that book came out in 2008 so it's been a little while. But any any do you want to share any thoughts on how to ensure we don't repeat past mistakes. I mean I think the way someone said you know the way to avoid the the repeat of history is to know the history and I think the lab. The period and the lab was founded in 1890 and there was a period in the 20s when it was the, the locus of the eugenics record office under the guidance of the founding director of one of the institutes that merged eventually to form Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. We, and it's not you know we as an institution want that history to be known, and we have made that known in a variety of ways, our DNA Learning Center which is oriented towards high school students has a very good online project that that illustrates the history of eugenics as seen through the lens of the eugenics record office. The our book, the book that young that Koski and I edited we didn't we didn't write it but we assembled essays from a variety of authorities in both the history and and the analysis and the of of the eugenics movement, and people who were capable of reflecting on what those lessons are for now, and we've we've continued to focus a bit on that we have one of you love Carlson's book the unfit is called the subtitle is the history of a bad idea. And he traces this notion of of families in a human context. We have another book edited by our event or Chakravarty about human genetic variation, which has a variety of really terrific contributions so I think where we are now is that there is an ever increasing recognition that we need to learn the lessons from the past. In fact, Angela Saini's excellent book called superior is is it basically is a warning that we are at risk of, of allowing race science to re enter the conversation. What we have to do is ensure that investigators young scientists and people who are doing science now are aware of the risks, the biases that may be built into the construction of trials the interpretation of data, and that we need to continually remind ourselves that race is not a biological entity but a social construct and and and that needs to be kept very firmly in mind as we go forward. And I think. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, thank you. Absolutely. Yeah, I'm sorry to cut you off there. Yeah, absolutely. We have a group that and we're going to talk about that I know in future installments of the same series, in addition to our goal prediction series so before we leave. I'm sorry, you have Dorothy Roberts on your list of speakers who is farm. I mean she's an authority on this I am definitely not so I will look forward to your to the conversation with her. Yeah, I know she does great work too. So we do have one question from the audience, which gets to what we were talking about a minute ago which is, what sort of review practices were slash are in place with the nine journals published by cold spring Well, they vary from one journal to to another but you know I as you know peer review is in a process of enormous change right now and there are lots of different models there are lots there are lots of experiments going on to try to make peer review more open more transparent and more equitable. And we are looking at all of those experiments and talking to those people are carrying them out. I would say we are not as a publisher we are not in the as far as the journals are concerned we're not in the forefront of doing these these new things we what we're trying to do with each of the communities that the journal serve is get a sense of what the constituencies of these journals want. And I think the genomics community has already signaled that it is perhaps in the forefront of desire for openness, both in terms of the access to content and the way that activities like peer review is is done. So we are exploring we are looking at and considering what to do in terms of evolving our peer peer review processes, but our newest journal, Life Science Alliance, which is a joint venture we're doing with Embo and Rockefeller University, we are, for example, there we are posting the reviews of published papers, alongside the papers on the journal website. We are not the first to do that, but we have been encouraged by the experience of people like Embo who've been doing this for a whole variety of years. But I think what I know we're going to talk about pre prints later but one of the consequences I think of the increased enthusiasm for pre prints is that it's good that enthusiasm is going to have effects on the way that peer review is done at the level of the journal. Yeah, no absolutely and that is what we're going to talk about in just a second but we have one more question that's come in. Do you see cold spring our repress moving toward an open access model and perhaps even an open review model. I think you address that a little. Yes, I could see us going to an open review model. I think one of the, one of the big questions that is always part of the discussion about open review is whether reviewer should be named, or should name themselves, and we have a lot of conversation about that they the concerns about that are the potential career risks, young investigators or to young early career researchers who are concerned, not unreasonably that by being public in their criticism of people who are more senior. There will be some consequences in career terms. I think that's a very real concern. I think we need to have that conversation in the community and it is happening. There are bold individuals out there who say, if you're going to be a scientist you should make your opinions now and publicly and stand behind it and it doesn't matter what stage in your career you're at. Well, that's, it's a point of view often advanced by those who are already senior it that is that is often pointed out, but it's not exclusive to the senior people there are bold pioneers amongst the young people as well and that's really interesting to see. In terms of open access at the moment we have had what is usually called a hybrid model for a decade or more, in which, if an individual author wants to make her paper open access then there is a mechanism for doing that. But the financial basis for our journals currently except for the more recent ones. I'm talking about the four research channels, the financial model is at the moment a subscription model, however, we are just at the beginning of introducing a new way of getting access to Cold Spring Harbor content, which is what we call the Cold Spring Harbor collection. And this is negotiated at an institutional or perhaps consortium level and for an agreed financial cost, then the faculty in that institution or within that consortium will have both the opportunity to read all of the Cold Spring Harbor content including the review journals, free of charge and also the opportunity to publish in all of those journals, including those that are currently subscription journals, they will have that opportunity, free of charge. So we've already done one of these kinds of arrangements with the British Consortium JISC and we are gradually reaching out to more and more institutions with this proposition. And obviously, we've had we've been party to all the discussions that have gone on about open access in fact, I claim to have organized the first con ever conference about open access for publishers at our boundary meeting in 2001, which was a complete and looking back, looking back, I can't believe my naivety and imagine that simply by getting a bunch of people in a room who represent enormous international, you know, companies and others from the not for profit sector that somehow we could make this all work. That was just like magic. Yeah. But I think open access for scientific content is inevitable. And the question is, how can we get there without destroying in the process, many of the journals that our community values most society journals input and not for profits like ours. And we think that for us, this model that we are adopting is the right one, but there are many others as you know, and I know absolutely same time. Yeah, no, absolutely. That's the biggest question right is to figure out the money and everything. So we've talked about pre prints a little so I'm going to go ahead and have us jump into that. And just remind people they can get sending questions in the Cuban a function and we'll be able to see them. So one of the the recent way one of the most recent ways you've revolutionized publishing is to co found a pre print servers bio archive and archive as I mentioned, and an interesting disclosure I should say that I've been involved in bio archive and still screenpapers as an affiliate to this was a massive task I don't know if people who have ever used to understand the true scale of everything that you had to do in setting this up you and Richard, not just infrastructure but culture change like you mentioned and you're meeting funding shifts still going on. Can you give us an update on bio archive and then archive and then where do you see them going the future. And you might want to start by defining pre prints again one more time. So a pre print is very simply a research manuscript that an author decides to distribute publicly through a means generally called the pre print server which is a website devoted to the distribution of pre print, and they do that. Either before, or maybe simultaneously with the submission of that manuscript to a journal. So that that information becomes freely accessible all pre print servers are free to access you don't have to. Well, some of them you have to register for but but generally speaking, the content is available to anyone to look at, and also most I don't think I can think of a pre print server that that charges for the distribution of that content. So, there are pre prints servers now in, I think there are about 50 of them. They serve different disciplines scholarly disciplines they may serve a certain country or certain language. In 2013, when we embarked on this enterprise of bio archive. Basically, there were possibly three pre print servers the most famous and the grandmother of them all being archive, which is of course why bio archive and archive had been has it's celebrating its 30th year this year. And so, if you talk to physicists and mathematicians archive is absolutely central to how we think about sharing their research. And we came. I mean, by so this archive was built on existing practices of sharing manuscripts in in print, people just did that. Not a little bit in biology to but I think not to the same extent. And part of this was because the way the peer review works in say mathematics. It takes, you know, a year or two years you know it's a very very different process. So, so mathematicians and physicists began to share their work in this way and Paul Ginsberg saw the promise of the web as a means of making that distribution and not sharing more efficient. We, when journals went online, which basically in our case was around 1997. Then we started to meet we who were sort of siloed in biomedicine we started to meet people who published in mathematics and physics and so on and because we went to meetings like the one that the National Academy has every couple of years and these people would talk about this about archive. We actually met Paul Ginsberg at a Banbury meeting, and we had a long talk about what he was doing. And I remember thinking at the time that is so not going to work in biomedicine. In that 30 years span, or at least, you know, three or four attempts to introduce pre prints by medicine which did not work. In 2013 and again we come back to genomics in 2013 Richard and I talked about this and thought, you know, now is the time we just that now is the time to try again, and some of them was because of the culture of genomics which had flourished by sharing sharing data sharing with the world, you know early adoption of open access. And we, we just had a feeling that that if nothing else at least genomic science genome scientists would use and appreciate a bio archive and I have to say, with no discussion. In our argument or doubts, Bruce Stoneman the lab president said, I think it's a great idea. Do it. And then I think you were part of a meeting that we had at the biology of genomes meeting in 2013 where we got a bunch of people like you and others. The fact was there and other folks, we'd invited it was a lunchtime meeting we said, this is what we are thinking about what do you think and basically everybody said, terrific go for it. So we did in November of that year. And it was as we predicted the genome scientists and geneticists were early adopters evolutionary biologists were too. And then it has grown and grown so last year, bio archive had posted 38,000 manuscripts. And it's continuing to grow, and then inspired by the momentum of bio archive we we launched med archive in 2019 and we had been very encouraged by the appearance of an op ed piece in the New York Times by Harlin Krumholtz and Eric Topol saying this thing that's happening in biology, medicine needs this too. So, Harlin is one of the co founders of Med Archive. You read that op ed as a volunteer call volunteer right in listening. Absolutely. And I'm sure he would he would recognize that too and and we this so Med Archive is a partnership between Colesping Harbor Yale University where Harlin and his colleague Joe Ross are. And BMJ and BMJ had a clinical pre print server in the 90s, which didn't take so they had a sort of collective and we all had collective interest in doing this. And it's turned out to be a really fabulous partnership because Joe and Harlin bring a very, you know, clinical in the trenches perspective to evaluation of policy and manuscripts. And and Theo and Claire are embedded in a major medical publishing house and scientific publishing is different to medical publishing. So we have a multi a multi plexed sort of approach to this and it's it's it's turning out to be a great project and it too is growing. Yeah. So, so were there ever times as you were setting these both out where you were like, right, that's it. This is too hard. This is just not going to work, or no. No, I honestly don't think so. I mean, we were immensely encouraged. First of all, well, first of all by work I've got started by just co-opting people who are already working here. I mean it was it was just an additional effort, but everybody was really jazzed by being involved in this, you know, this thing and and this noble thing and something that right out of the box people would communicate right to us and say, there is such pleasure to be had in sharing my work without obstacles without hindrances when I want to. And, you know, people were really heartfelt about that and that in itself and talk about providing a service to scientists that which is what we try to do here. That was the most gratifying thing of all I mean some really very moving stories that we heard during that time. So, I think we always thought we could do this. And it was immensely helped when we got initially we got financial help from one of the trustees of Coltsman Harbor, and then the brand new Chan Zuckerberg initiative sought us out and said, you know, tell us about what you're doing and we did and we basically said they would like to fund bio archive and so we enjoyed generous funding from them since 2017 and then they were also kind enough to come in and support met archive last year. So we've been very fortunate we've been able to scale we've been able to hire a dedicated team now. And it's, you know, it's just, it's in all the things that I have been involved in in scientific communication. This is, in many ways, the most gratifying. We are, we are serving the largest number of people and we have seven to eight million downloads a month we have, you know, thousands and thousands of papers every every month and the enthusiasm for this change in the way that scientists share that work this enthusiasm growing all the time. So we have a few questions that are still coming in, and there are a number of them are about media so we're going to get to those in a minute we're going to come to the world media, but I'm going to take one question because it's from my boss assuming that preprints eventually become mainstream how much of that acceptance will be because of institutional cultural change of the current ecosystem versus generational change from younger researchers as they take over leading our ecosystem. Well, as always Eric has very good questions. Frankly, I think it's all of the above. There is absolutely no question that the initial enthusiasm for preprints in biomedicine was led by younger scientists. And you could say that that's because they were the ones who felt most frustrated by the way that the communication system has the traditional publication system has worked. So if you're a young investigator and you have a three year grant. You have to do the work. You have to write it up. You have to get it accepted in a journal which may take a year or longer. That's a huge pressure. And one of the benefits of a pre of posting a preprint is the demonstration to anybody who wants to look like a funding body or a hiring committee or whatever a demonstration of product productivity. It's there. It's got a DIY it's findable it's NIH has agreed that as can be cited in biosketches, which was a crucial moment for me as well. Yeah. That's what we're going to go on and say that Institute funder support, including NIH, but also other other funders. Their, their support for preprints encouragement for preprints that has been absolutely crucial to their growing acceptance and I, you know, I am very wary of saying words like success and so on. We even at 38,000 manuscripts on bio archive last year and another 4000 on med archive, 14,000 on med archive, I should say, even so that's a tiny proportion of all of the research papers that your colleagues at the National Library of Medicine index. So we have a long way to go before that culture change happens, but I'm confident that it will happen and minds are being changed. More people are doing this and learning from it learning that the experience is beneficial. So I think that the momentum will continue but to to answer Eric's question I think we need all of the above. We need, we need institutions, I mean academic institutions, we need funding institutions to continue to be as supportive as they have been. And we certainly need advocacy within the research community itself. And that's particularly true in medicine where this is still very new. And also, in fact, along those same lines, we you together with Richard sever and Mike Eisen proposed an approach that you call plan you for universal we've also gotten a question which is what's the long term funding plan for your preprint servers. And I think maybe that falls into the discussion of plan you. So can you tell us what all's involved you said in your preprint are in your paper which we're going to show a second you said that this would bring about quote free access to the world's output with minimal effort unquote. So tell us a little more about that. Well, so it was, it was the plan you term was partly a sort of little in joke, because, as anyone in scholarly publishing knows, there is an effort largely rooted in Europe called plan s. And it's not even sure clear what s actually stands for but it is plan s which is a mobilization of a consortium of funders to force progress towards open access through the medium of journals. And what struck us was that preprints, which are easy to post free to post it more, if more people did that, then you would have a massive corpus that represents an enormous amount of the world scientific output I mean we have, we have contributions right now on both servers from 140 plus countries. So it is a worldwide phenomenon. And if more people presented their work in this way, then the, at least the authors version of their work would be really available to communities worldwide. Now, the question then becomes, well, but this is the authors version, what about what everybody else thinks of it. And so as a corollary to this proposal, what we said was, if there is a critical mass of information available as preprints, then this allows experimentation in how to peer review is done. The point about a preprint or preprint server is that it just it uncouples the traditional function of a journal, which was those functions traditionally were both selectivity and distribution. What a preprint server does is not to make to have any selectivity, you know, passing some submission requirements that you're very familiar with. So we allow people to distribute first, and then the quality, the assessment, the evaluation, the discussion of significance, all happens after the information is available to everyone. And in that way, at the very least, you can bring in many, many more voices into the conversation about a given piece of work, then you can do through the conventional peer review process, which as you know is limited to three or four people conducted largely specifically, and with with the ability to have public commentary, which we have on the site, and with the use of social media such as Twitter, then you can have a very broad ranging and multi voiced conversation about a given piece of work. So that was really what we were trying to articulate in that article. And, like I said, you the universal, but how are we going to get there. We already have enthusiasm from funders, what we need is mandating preprints from funders and they're already a small number that are doing that. The others have not yet got there, but perhaps they're considering that. The part of plan you is, is that having funders mandate that and that's where the funding comes from is that the funders are mandating it in work that they're already paying for if I understand. Yes, that that's right. And I mean you also asked the question about the long term future of funding for police and service well at the moment we are very fortunate to have philanthropic funding from a funder who sees the connection of science as integral with the doing of science and the funding of science itself and I would be our hope that other funders would see the communication piece as something that they should do the process of preprints, that's something that they should, they should find that they should support. Yeah, exactly. Well, if only people from NIH were listening to this, then no. We're getting lots of questions about the media and preprints so we're going to go to that. So what do you think would happen to the science media ecosystem as we know it. If everything was preprinted first. And I, we have a graphic that we're going to show we've seen some confusion in the time of coven because the, the submissions to met archive, just really ramped up in the time of and you sent most of the submissions that dealt with cove to met archive instead of bio archive so that's part of why it's really rent up there, but but we've seen lots of confusion about whether science can be treated as news whether these preprints can be treated as news, how the media deals with them so so tell us a little bit about how you've seen things happen with the media and preprints. Well, there is no question that COVID changed everything. The data that you're showing there demonstrate that that in January of 2020. In the second half of January, there were 30 papers, 30 manuscripts on Cisco v2. And most of them came from China. So this was the, this was the research community in China signaling to the world what they were learning the very early stages of what became the pandemic. In, in January of 2020 on met archive, we had 250 manuscripts, none of them on COVID. At by May of 2020, we had 2000 manuscripts posted to met archive and a huge proportion as you can see there, even in May it was even bigger than 63%. Huge proportion of them were directly related to pandemic investigations epidemiology and post response. You know all kinds of aspects of the pandemic that that the research community was learning about as it mobilized worldwide to deal with this massive problem. Preprints as news became an important thing. Because the research community was sharing what it was learning with each other through the medium of preprint service, but they are open so everyone was able to read what were on the servers and and crucially you just let me add a second here you added disclaimers at this time to both bio archive and met archive in bright yellow boxes with red tight type that says these have not been peer reviewed right. So that's one of the ways that you were trying to make sure people understand that. We did that on bio archive. We, because we, we learned very quickly that papers were being picked up and circulated, particularly sort of informally on websites that were not necessarily authoritative medical websites but websites that people were reading. So we felt it was important to make that statement about the, that all everything that is posted to a preprint server should be treated with caution, if not skepticism, and we were trying to emphasize that. So, in the early days of in the early months of 2020. So, as you know, the media, the media also mobilized to cover the pandemic, and people like, you know, the wonderful a poor of a mandibili and her colleagues at the times who were specialized specialists in science coverage. They were augmented in many news desks by people who did not have those kinds of background. So, all these stories were, were being written. And it was, it was the case and someone has actually done a study of this that in the early days of the pandemic when stories were printed in news were published in newspapers or reported in the media about work that existed as a preprint, then the source was not it was not explained that the source was not peer reviewed. And there's a young woman in British Columbia who's actually doing graduate work on this phenomenon. And she, she had a paper out last year that showed somewhat surprisingly that even major media did not make this reference. But my contention is that this was in the early days of the pandemic when all the media was scrambling to know how to cover it. And I would say now you can see in in current references to information that comes from preprint servers, you can see in nearly every case that there's reference to the fact that this material has not been peer reviewed. So that's an improvement. I think that's an improvement. There's a greater understanding of what this means. And I think what this means more generally is that the public is beginning to learn that not all scientific communication is the same. And this is a hard and nuanced lesson to get across but I think it is incumbent on journalists to make that point very clear in the stories that they write. And there's also been a lot of discussion about how preprint should be covered. We say right there on the side they should not be reported as established fact. So what we what I certainly personally hope is that journalists will have the opportunity to consult people other than the authors and get opinions about whether something is worthwhile or not does it have obvious flaws. Maybe you still want to write about it, but you want to point out the flaws that other that your circle of trust has has provided to you. So, I mean, the big, the big question comes when you ask, what is an institutional responsibility here should in other words should should institutions press release preprints. And this is a purely personal opinion, I don't think they should. And one of the reasons is that the purpose of a brief press release is to provide clear didactic statements about a particular piece of work, and they are not institutional press releases are not noted for nuance and caveat. And that's what should be attached to preprints nuance and caveat. And so my personal opinion is that the institution should not press release preprinted work but not everyone agrees with that and it's, it's a topic of conversation. Yeah, no, it's very difficult. Our communications team has talked about it quite a bit because it feels like they that I can see that it would feel like they're missing out on a lot of the press on big preprints, whereas, you know, do they have to wait and have for example our Prestima and it's really great about doing animations and, and that kind of those kind of materials around big papers and so that they have to wait and maybe a lot of the news media has already happened and so it won't get be covered as much. It's a really difficult problem in there. So we're getting lots of questions I want to work one in here, someone has asked I work in medical communications and I found that archive endlessly fruitful, fruitful, but given the importance of universal access how can we start to move towards playing language summaries of these papers. Is this something that is planned as a future option for manuscript submissions. Well, this is a question that's been asked many times and I do think that particularly in medicine, I do think that plain language abstracts are valuable for the broad audience. I don't think it's something that we will do we don't have the resources we don't have the expertise. That is not to say that someone couldn't start a service of picking out particularly interesting preprints and providing that plain language. I think that would be a very useful service and probably journalists would like to have access to such a service where it to exist, but it's certainly not part of our roadmap for how we have quite enough on our hands without doing that. I know I've done some journalism a long long time ago, and I know how difficult it is to write for that broad audience so I take my hat off to all of you in the audience who are trying to do that it is a skill and shouldn't be taken likely and it's not something you can generally ask authors to do. Because she were already doing so much and editors are already doing so much and yeah everyone is just throughout the entire ecosystem. So another question that we got in advance. There are fears of being scooped by putting out a preprint. Are there any data related to this. I'm not aware of data, but the whole point, really, of a preprint is that it is an anti scooping mechanisms, you know, I mean the thing goes up at the time when you the author wanted to. There's a date stamp that will show exactly when it was posted, or when it was approved for posting so I mean there's a lot of discussion about this and it's certainly one of the hesitations that always comes up amongst research scientists when they talk about preprints but quite honestly, I think it's a misunderstanding. I think that by posting a preprint you are telling the world that we did this work and this is how we did it, and this is when we decided to share it. There are in fact journals are colleagues at Ember Press, I think we're the first ones to initiate what they call an anti scooping policy in other words, if someone submits research article to their journals, and then during the time that article is being considered for publication, there is a competing article on a preprint server then the existence of that preprint will not influence the editorial decision. And I think that's a that's a great thing for them to do, but I really feel that, as I said, I think that posting a preprint is a way of claiming or showing the world that you the work that you did. And then it's up to the community to evaluate whether your conclusions are justified by the data and the way you did it. Right. Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. I get talks on my archive all the time too and I tell people, I really think that's more field specific as well if I were a human geneticist who had found a certain mutation that underlie the disease I might not be so interested in doing a preprint because I think that could be scooped more easily than if I did you know sequence telomere to telomere for example that's not someone's going to go out and probably scoop us all. But so yeah, I think it's also feel specific to I mean it's what's interesting in talking to physicists who've been, you know, using archive for 30 years and I remember in the early days of bio archive. Someone said to me, someone in Cambridge actually said to me, you know, I don't put everything on archive. So I tried to find out why, you know, what would he put on archive and what wouldn't but he was a bit reluctant to be drawn about. So I think culture change happens slowly. That's what Eric was getting at that's exactly right. So and that's leading us to one of the other questions we got which was can we expect a culture in the future where preface are cited alongside their peer reviewed counterparts. Oh, I think that's happening already. Yeah, I agree. I forgot the number but that's, I mean, I think there is some there's a database that you can look at to look at citations I was amazed I think there is some I may be wrong about the number but it's roughly speaking it's in the tens of thousands. There are tens of thousands of pre of citations to med archive papers already in the literature, which is amazing when you consider that med archive was two years old there are only, you know, like 19,000 manuscripts on the service. So I think the idea and I know there was at the beginning there was discussion among people in scholarly publishing about whether preprint should be cited. People said oh no they should be regarded as a personal communication and not put in the revered reference list at the end of Moscow. But I honestly do not think that that's just a part of the still conversation and this is something this is a decision that is taken by individual publishers or maybe individual journals. I think there is a desire among some to annotate that citation and say, you know, preprint, and you ask well why do you want to do that and the answer is well because it's not peer reviewed, which leads to the obvious question well, what other kinds of citations on what peer reviewed, you know, book chapters, symposium proceedings, you know, websites, websites, yeah, there's a bunch of things. Yeah. So we have one more question I think you've addressed this a little but I wanted to get it across as well. In the past 18 months a growing number of journalists have covered papers posted by archive especially to coven as we talked about. Is this appropriate or useful to the public I think you've talked about that a little but their real question is, how could journalists and in parentheses they say I am one, do a better job in covering or not covering papers posted to bio archive. I think that goes back to what I was saying earlier about consulting people, taking advice, you know, I think that you know this is this is complicated stuff and journalists are generalists they are not specialists so no one would expect a journalist to be able to critically evaluate research manuscript that she finds on bio archive. However, that journalist may well have in her local area, she will have a university or a research institute and I think it's really helpful for journalists to have a group of specialists that she trusts and can go to. Most scientists are really eager to help other people understand what science is and what this means and so on. So I think it's not hard for journalists to develop I use the term circle of trust earlier, but to have input from people. Just to say, this sounds great, but the methodology is flawed, or these guys are, you know, overselling their conclusions. Or maybe they say, you know, this is really terrifically important and it's going to be terribly helpful in investigating this disease, you know that there are all kinds of things that could happen. So that's what I that's what I would strongly recommend is journalists developing a network of people that they can consult. I think a purva mentioned that in her right person with you the last time and she, she certainly has those sorts of people, and I think it's fantastically helpful. Oh, that's so great. Okay, we have about three minutes left so I'm going to ask you one more question and a 30 second answer. How can pre Prince be better used to communicate the impact or successes of research initiatives. Well, I think they are part of the record of achievement of a given, you know, a given initiative we were talking about a particular project, they should be counted as part of the outputs from that research project, and they can be cited they can be, they can be identified they can be found. So they are part of the record of achievement of a particular research group. Yeah, I agree with you and I would also add and I'm not quite sure if so they're asking but there is a section which I end up reviewing a lot of the submissions for the archives called science communication education, and I see a number of people putting in papers there which are not pure science per se but are more about looking at how research initiatives have done like some of the open science things etc. So that that's another place where people could submit to my archive is in that section as well. Yeah, we have that communication section that's right. Well, thank you so much, John and this I think you could tell there was lots of interest in everything that you're doing, and we really appreciate it. I want to mention also that we have our next speakers coming up. I think in a month or two and I chose September 20th, Amy Harmon, another correspondent from the New York Times to covers more science and society will be interviewed as part of the series so I invite everyone to do that and come to those and we can continue some of the discussions that we have with John and again, John. Thank you so much. We really appreciate being here. Thank you very much indeed Chris it's been fun. I really appreciate it and it's been a pleasure to be part of this.