 Welcome to everyone who is joining us today for our first ECR Wednesday webinar hosted by Eliath to give Early Career Researchers a platform to discuss issues important to you and your research career. We are delighted to be joined today by four experienced researchers, our three panellists who will be introduced shortly as well as the chair for today's webinar, Emanuel Beer. Emanuel is a junior team leader at the University College London and a founding member of the Eliath Early Career Advisory Group. We'll hear more from her in a second. But first allow me Naomi to give a warm welcome to all of you joining us individually, as well as those of you watching in a group. Hello to the Institute of Neurosites at the University of Oregon and to the postdocs attending the Crossroads event at the Stowers Institute. Many thanks to Sonia Sen, Swami Venkatesh and Lisa Hodges for making those live streams possible. If you'd like to live stream the next webinar, feel free to get in touch with us. We'd love to help. I'll pass over now to Emanuel, who will introduce the panellists and say a little more about what these webinars will be about. Hi everyone, so my name is Emanuel. I'm originally from Belgium and I've, despite my eight years in the UK, I've kept my French accent and I apologize for that. So I hope you'll still be able to understand me. So I've been on the Early Career Advisory Group at Eliath for almost three years now and I was initially approached when I was a postdoc at the Gordon Institute in Cambridge, UK. And the idea was, Eliath had just been founded and they needed early career scientists to give ideas and brainstorm with them, alongside with them, about the major challenges that we all face, either as postdocs, as students, PhD students, or even when we step up from the postdoc and go, if we're lucky enough, and move on to the next step and set up our own groups. So what are the main challenges and how could Eliath support those challenges for Early Career? That was the aim of the group when it was initially set up. I'm not on my own in this group. I'm there with 14 others, extremely talented international scientists. We meet each other together once a year, usually in November, and this year's meeting is coming up in two weeks time. And we all together discuss new issues that we face, new ideas that we may have, and we also vocalise that to Eliath. And together we try to come up with some new initiative that will support the Early Career community. And I believe this is really working. This is why I'm still there and why I'm here today. And this, like today, what's happening right now is one of the best demonstrations that whatever we say is taken into account. So last year at the General Assembly meeting, the 14 of us discussed the possibility of having 1,000 hours that would really be relevant for the Early Career scientist. And this is it. This is happening. And I must say this would never have been born without the tremendous work of Naomi, who was really linking the ICAC group and the Eliath group together. OK, so that said, I think we're all here to discuss something that's really, really becoming important and increasingly present in our life science daily and in our research. And this is preprints. So I think we all need to know a little bit about what these are, why they are important, why and how we could all benefit from those if we haven't yet. And then we will also have a lot of questions, hopefully, and answers and wrap up into a panel discussion. But first, I would like to introduce all the panel people that are together with me today. The first one, ladies first, of course, is Jessica. So Jessica is a research fellow at Harvard, and she has been there since 2013. So Jessica, correct me if I'm wrong, but you are investigating interest cellular organization in bacteria. She's a visiting postdoc, but now she's mainly her main activity is being the director of ASAP bio. And I think Jessica, when maybe it's your turn, we would all be very lucky if you could hear a little bit more about you, about ASAP bio, because I've never heard about this myself. Then we have Buzz. Buzz is at Princeton since 2014. And Buzz is at the interface between biology and physics, some real science for people like me, like biologists. And his research is exploring how biology can provide answer to our energy sustainability or a crisis. And by applying physics principles, genetic engineering and novel high throughput methods. And then finally, we have Nikolai. Nikolai Haai. You are an assistant professor also in Boston, if I read correctly. And you are a biologist. You are interested in the regulation of protein synthesis by a specialized ribosome and how this is coordinated with metabolism, cell growth and differentiation. So to all of us who are listening and joining us today, welcome, very warm welcome, and please ask your question throughout the webinar. And the way we'll deal with this question is that we'll wait that all the presenters are done with their little introduction and then we'll address questions. If you have questions that you want to share, please use our Twitter account, which is using the hashtag ECR Wednesday. ECR stands for Early Career Researcher. So we all address the question at the end of the discussion. So you can also raise your hand through the hand icon on the webinar panel, if you want to draw our attention, or if you are happy to speak on the webinar. So let's just go ahead now. And the first speaker today, Jessica. Yes, all right. Are you able to hear me now? Yes, we are. I'm going to see your slides, yeah. Okay, okay, so are you able to see my slides now? Yes. Okay, wonderful. All right, let me just go full screen. Okay, so as I think most of us who are aware of or who are on this webinar may know, a preprint is a way of communicating your research results. Before those results are formally published in journal. And so preprints are essentially defined as a manuscript that is posted online before or also during journal organized peer review. So this is distinct from a manuscript that might be the author's last version or a final version of record from a journal. It's sort of draft. And certainly people can post them long before submitting to a journal, but frequently in practice we are posting them around the same time as the submission date. And what I think is so exciting about preprints in comparison to or in addition to other ways of thinking about opening up the scientific process and making our data more available earlier is that they are very much compatible with journals. Especially because there's been a long tradition of the use of preprints in physics. So essentially around the same time that one might be submitting to a journal, you can also just submit your manuscript to a preprint server. And we can talk about what those are in a moment. And at the same time, you can begin to get feedback on it while it's still under review at the journal. So this is definitely not a new concept. Starting in 1991, Archives, which is a website at Cornell University Library, which hosts about 100,000 manuscripts per year, has been sort of the place for people to exchange information in the physics, computer science, mathematics world. There is also a section of archives for biology that has been actually operating for over a decade. But recently, there are several other servers, most prominently bio-archives and also peer-to-peer preprints, which are functioning especially for specific content areas. So for example, bio-archives is just for biology. And what I think is so exciting is that over the last couple of years, we've really seen an explosive growth of preprints. So here in blue, you can see the archive g-bios section, which has been growing steadily over the years. But really, bio-archives has really taken off. And there's also other sites, like f1.0 research, the winower, preprints.org, fakeshare. Of course, peer-to-peer preprints, these are all contributing to this growth of preprints too. So I think this is really becoming a very exciting way of communicating results. And we may be asking, well, why would I want to do this? So I just want to outline a few of the major benefits. So first, preprints are open access, and they're immediately accessible so that anyone in the world can read them without having to worry about access limitations based on embargoes, et cetera. It is public disclosure of recent invisible work for your PCPs of fellowship or jobs. So the idea being that you can go ahead and share the information that describes your recent scientific advancements with people who otherwise might not be able to see them. And this, especially for those of us who are trying to progress through early career stages, who may have a limited body of work, this is a really great boom from demonstrating our ability to progress. We can get more feedback on our work. Instead of just receiving feedback from two or three anonymous peer reviewers, we can share them this work with the world and really get input not only from people within our specific fields, but maybe people with specific expertise about a part of the manuscript, people who wouldn't otherwise be reviewing it. We can control when the work is made public. In other words, I think that there's recently been a lot of attention paid to the vagaries of peer review in terms of manuscripts getting submitted to a journal, then perhaps rejected, submitted to another journal, et cetera, especially in cases where one lab is competing with another. It can be extremely valuable to have transparency in the process to show who knew what when and at what time. Finally, I think the most important thing besides all of these individual benefits that we can enjoy as individual scientists, making work available is the foundation of science. All discoveries depend on previous knowledge. If we don't share our work, we're limiting the feature process of science. When our manuscripts are going through multiple cycles of review for vision, perhaps getting bounced around for months or maybe even years, that is a loss for the progress of human knowledge. I think that pre-printing can really accelerate science. I'm going to just go over three concerns that I hear most commonly with pre-print. The first one is that some have to be trusted to share work before peer review. That if we create a way for people to share their results before review, we'll end up with a lot of essentially garbage. I think that the experience of physicists has shown that this is a relatively minor concern. There's a million manuscripts on archives. The majority of them are of high quality. It's creating processes work in order to keep out material that clearly doesn't belong there. Moreover, I think that even those of us in biology recognize that we are already sharing un-peer-reviewed work with one another all the time. We go to poster sessions. We put up our posters. We give talks and meetings. The reason that people don't look garbage up in these settings is because you have to stand next to it and you have to essentially stake your reputation on the work. Therefore, I think that the process of pre-printing is not going to become immediately trashed in the same way that people don't put up trash on posters. The second concern is that journals won't accept my pre-print. In fact, I would say that the majority of journals at this point have quite liberal policies on accepting pre-prints, especially those that have dealt with physicists for a long time, including some of the broader journals like Nature Science, et cetera. I think that, of course, E-Life is extremely friendly to pre-prints as well. You can find a list of all journal policies on Wikipedia. What's great about this resource, which anyone can update, is that it also will link back to the original policies. Finally, the third major concern is that if I post a pre-print, I'm going to get scooped. In other words, I'm putting my work out there in public, but not in an obviously well-respected form. We have had some conversations with Paul Ginsburg, who is a physicist, the founder of Archive, about scooping. He says that in physics, this can't happen because archive postings are basically accepted as these priority claims. In other words, archive is the place that everyone is looking for research. Then he goes on to say that basically what we're worried about is using information or ideas without proper attribution. This is really the moral and ethical concern. In order to change our culture about this, is that bio has been circulating some draft statements at our first meeting, which I'll mention in a moment. The idea being that we would like to encourage scientists to feel that they will cite pre-prints that are relevant to their work, much as they would cite a relevant paper. In other words, that acknowledging the citation is good scholarship, and we would like to have a way for scientists to say that they will do this. We'll work on this in the future. Despite some of these concerns, I think that pre-printing is typically a very positive experience. We ran a survey at our website, and the majority of people say that pre-printing is a very positive experience. Based on this, we held a meeting at HHMI in Isabaya. I should back up a moment and say we are a group of scientists. An additional organizer recently is James Fraser at UCSF, who recently came out with a great floss podcast, by the way, on pre-prints. You should check it out. We came together and decided to try to organize a group of junior and senior scientists journals, funders together, and to really talk about this issue. We used the statements like the one that you saw to take the temperature of the room. We asked people whether they would endorse a statement like that, etc. You can read more about this on our website. We emerged from this meeting with a sense that pre-prints could really become a valuable addition to our system of communicating research. Now, moving forward, we recognize that you can't just have a meeting and say, you know, declare victory, but rather this is a very long process of working to work with funding agencies, university promotion committees, journals about creating policies that are clear and friendly to pre-prints. Perhaps more importantly, I think that we need to think about ways to engage each other and other scientists, because this is really a cultural issue. If you're interested in becoming more involved with Isabaya, with this community organized group, please visit our website. We are looking for people to act as ambassadors. In other words, people who are going to be willing to talk about pre-prints in their local institutions and as they travel around the meetings. You can sign up for that at ASAPbio.org slash ambassadors. I want to highlight one really recent exciting development. The NIH has just released a request for information on pre-prints that essentially asks for community opinions on how pre-prints are used and how they could benefit communications. So, if you have a little bit of time before November 29th, I would highly recommend submitting a response. You don't have to answer all the questions. Responses don't have to have a minimal length. It's a very easy way of making your voice heard. So, with that, I think I'm going to give the presentation back to Emmanuel, or who should I? To me, yeah, indeed. Thank you so much, Jessica. That was absolutely brilliant. It's so much clearer, at least for me. So, I was, yeah, sorry. We have a little bit of a poll question now coming. I'll put this comment on one thing before the poll question. One thing is about concern number two. It's totally true because we are actually under review in one of the journals that you have listed, and we had already submitted our paper to Bioarchive six months before. Oh, cool. Yeah, so it is absolutely true. It can happen for real. So, no, the first question on this quick poll is, have you ever posted a preprint? And please choose one of the following answer. Yes, no or I'm not sure. Great. Well, whoo. It's a lot of you who haven't. I can only encourage you to do it anyway. No moving on to our next speaker, Buzz. Buzz, are you still with us? I am. Yes, I am. Great. Well, Buzz, could you please tell us a little bit about your view on preprints, please? Yes, absolutely. First of all, I really enjoyed Jessica's talk about preprints, and I felt that that was a wonderfully coherent overarching explanation of the whole field. You can tell she's the director. I know. My interest in preprints was, it really started out very pragmatically. You know, as an early career investigator, I felt that there was a hell of a lot of pressure to get my work out to the public, to the scientific community as quickly as possible. And I found myself being very frustrated initially with the glacial pace of traditional publishing. And I'd known about Jessica's interest in preprints for a long time. And as a physicist, I'd always been aware of them. But I'd never really taken advantage of them before that. And I thought, let's just give this a shot. There's absolutely nothing to lose. Doing that first preprint was one of the most wonderful experiences I'd ever had. It's a completely decoupled writing a piece of work, doing experiments, the existence of the work from having it being published in a traditional venue. And I felt like it was, if anything, it was sort of deeply sort of psychologically satisfying, you know, at the very least. Then, you know, I decided this was such a great experience. I'd do it for every piece of work. And, you know, again, it starts with frustration, but it gives you all these other, it gives you all these other wonderful benefits. I was trying to describe this to Naomi, the organizer of the panel, when she first contacted me about appearing here. And I think I was sort of trying to describe the experience in a sort of roundabout way. And she came up with this wonderful phrase of accelerating professionalism to describe the story I was telling her. But I thought I could share that with you. We came out with this new technology for making a whole gene of knockout collections really quickly. And we sort of essentially, we had like a finished package sort of months before publication. And we came to submit it to a journal. And the same day we did that, we submitted it to Bioarchive. And the moment it comes out, it can be seen worldwide. And we immediately found that we had a receptive audience for it. And getting that feedback, sort of figure out what were the strengths of it, what were the weaknesses were wonderful. And that sort of that interest led us to say, well, led us to ask the question much, much sooner. What's the next paper we're going to do? Where can we focus our research efforts? Six, seven months ahead of where we would have been otherwise. And also forced us to ask the question, are we going to release more of this, more of this technique to the public? Or that, for instance, we intended on patenting, or applying for patents for. So, again, it forced us to ask that question, do we go through the patenting process? And by doing it so far ahead of time, we were able to come at it in a much more, in a much calmer way, in a much more considered way that I think we would have done otherwise. By doing that, it forced us to ask ourselves, what's unique about this technique? How does it compare with other techniques in the field? And again, not from the point of view of, in a wonderfully honest, pragmatic way, an experience we wouldn't have gotten otherwise. And that whole chain of events took us from an initial pre-print through provisional patents, through protocol papers, through software release. And then having that sort of basis of work that sort of came out of that initial pre-print, it makes us competitive for grants months and months and months ahead of where we would have been otherwise, which I think is a wonderful thing. Even except for making other projects as well. So, I can't recommend the thing more. I'd recommend that everybody do it. And they view this as a way to sort of help solidify their scientific thinking process as well. And I think that's really all I have to share about it. I'd say everybody is attending. You know, try and do that. And I feel like we should, I'm happy to take questions. So, I was talking to Naomi yesterday in preparation for this. And she said, maybe we should sort of break the ice of asking questions. So, what started your interest in pre-prints? I know mine was sort of almost mercenary, but I think you were the first person who I ever met in biology who did pre-prints. It was so wonderful. Oh, really? Oh, wow. I had been following... So, I had been following printing as a way of... I was very interested always in these new ways of communicating research. Peer Jay, at the journal, seems very interesting to me. And so, I, you know, when bioarchives came online at the same time by Peer Jay, pre-prints was operating, I had a five project that I was working on, and I hadn't invested that much time and energy into it, but I wanted to wrap it up and kind of make it, you know, write it up as much as possible. That was really the first project that I posted in the sense that, you know, I felt that it would not be the only publication out of my postdoc, and so, therefore, it felt a little bit easier to begin with that. But, you know, since I've just had such good experiences with all the pre-prints we've posted so far, it's definitely something that I would recommend to everyone. Oh, that's fantastic. I think... I'm sorry. Go on. Oh, no, no. I'm sorry. I felt like you were going to say something, so please go ahead. Oh, no. I mean, I think, you know, I think one thing that I'm curious to hear about, Buzz and Nikolai, is how you guys get feedback from any pre-prints. Is it primarily through comments on, first of all, I guess which pre-prints servers are you using? And then, you know, what other, you know, do you see comments through the pre-prints server? Website or do you get comments informally? How does that work? I think... I think the bioarchive website, and those comments have been incredibly civil, constructive, and polite, and that is something that really stands in a stark contrast with some of the anonymous peer reviews that we've received. Similarly to Buzz, it also had overwhelmingly positive initial experience with the bioarchive. Within months of submitting my pre-print, I had received multiple comments from the most prospective experts in the field. There weren't just comments from graduate students browsing this new thing, but they came from the very founders of the field, and they were very, very constructive and thoughtful. And we actually had an engaging discussion on the website of the bioarchive itself. And then normally I receive many more comments by email as well of people who don't want to have the discussion in public, so it's a combination of both. But similarly to Buzz, pre-prints were not a new concept to me with the appearance of the bioarchive, because I had posted multiple math and physics papers on the archive before that. And I certainly was more hesitant of the papers because for me the key question as to whether a pre-print server is useful and whether it can establish priority in the community is how visible those pre-prints are. Because if the only people who see the pre-print are your three competitors and the random fourth guy, that's certainly a recipe for disaster. But on the other hand, if the pre-print is being seen by thousands and thousands of leading members of the community, there's nobody who can possibly scoop you because they're going to undermine their own reputation. And what very quickly became clear to me with my own pre-print that I posted on the bioarchive and that was viewed over 9,000 times by now. And more globally looking at the statistics for other pre-prints is that pre-prints in biology do get tremendous amounts of visibility. In some ways they get more visibility than even papers published in traditional peer-reviewed journals. And my own experience is that even now that my paper has been published in cell reports for more than a year, there are still 100-200 new downloads from the bioarchive pre-print every month. So even if my paper is published in a peer-reviewed journal, having a pre-print in pre-print is the visibility of your work. And if the organizers give me a chance to share my screen, I can show some more static data in the distributions for a number of HTML views and video downloads. But without showing the data, what the data do show is that there are hundreds of bioarchive pre-prints that have been downloaded over a thousand times and that have been viewed many, many, many thousand times as HTML views. So I have come to think that if you have a truly exciting piece of work, putting it on the bioarchive is going to generate a tremendous amount of visibility and traffic and your work will be well known. If your work is not so exciting perhaps, it will be viewed very highly, but then the question is, does it really matter? Will it be very different even if that work is being published in a peer-reviewed journal? So from that perspective, I think that bioarchive has just as Jessica emphasized it very, very much agree with her. I think that bioarchive is not a substitute for peer review or a sidestep in peer-review. I sometimes hear this in editorials and they cringe because I think that bioarchive is embracing peer-review. I received peer-review by the most respected members of the community within months of submitting my paper on bioarchive and that was visible to everybody. If that's not peer-review, I don't know what else to call it. And in general, I feel that pre-prints very much facilitate and increase the quality of peer-review rather than undermine it. They work fantastically well with the existing system. They just add this new dimension, which is much, much faster than what we've had so far. And they have all the other wonderful qualities that Jessica articulated so well. So instead of repeating more these phrases, I would rather hear your questions and address any remaining doubts that you may have that bioarchives are the way to go. Sorry. Can you tell us a little bit more about how, in the meantime, pre-prints are used in physics? Because I think it's really amusing. I don't interact with that many physicists, but when I do, I think that they are the... Yeah, it's kind of interesting to hear their reactions are infantile connotations on pre-prints. Virtually both the only website that most physicists track every day for new scientific work is the archive. Because they know that everything important is going to come out first there. And there are certainly heuristics that are being used for filtering out which of the many pre-prints to read, and one obvious heuristic is the PI, from which laboratory a particular piece of work comes out. But how strangely that heuristic is being enforced obviously varies a lot from researcher to researcher. But it is certainly the case that for the physics community the appearance of a pre-print on the archive is the announcement of the work and has to mean publication in most cases. And there was this wonderful analysis published recently on the archive showing that within the set of papers that were ultimately published in a few leading physics journals the subset that was published to the bio-archive first was cited much, much more frequently than the subset that were published only in the journal and never deposited on the bio-archive. And the other thing that was quite startling about their analysis was the peak of citations of papers that appear first on the bio-archive was just at the date when those papers appeared in print from peer-reviewed journals. So which suggests that the community has read the papers, internalized them, thought about them and incorporated them in their own thinking and analysis before these papers have received the official stamp of anonymous peer-reviewed. And I am quite optimistic that biology is moving in that direction. I see so much inertia and so much enthusiasm that it is very likely, in my opinion, that we will adopt the same culture. Yeah, I really hope so. I think the biggest barrier is really just how new pre-prints are as a concept. I think when I talk to people about them I was talking to a group of post-docs for a responsible cognitive research course. They are obligated to be there and therefore not self-selected anyway. But 90% had never heard of pre-prints. I think that the curve is growing very, very fast. But I think in order to maintain this rate or increase this rate we need to be more vocal. I think Twitter, for example, on Twitter everybody is talking about pre-prints. I'll be sharing pre-prints, etc. But I think that that's also sort of a self-selected group of people. I agree with that. I'm actually of the opinion that if everybody knew what pre-prints really are, everybody would be using them. There are just so many overwhelmingly positive reasons to use them as opposed to a few downsides. And I do think that in the biology community there is much frustration with the slow rate of traditional peer review. There is a lot of attire to make our work freely available even if published behind the paywalls of a prestigious journal. So all of these things are there. Perhaps the main break and misconception that is stopping many people from adopting pre-prints is the idea that they will not be credited. Somehow their competitor will see their work and they will publish it in the journal first and they will get the credit for that. I'll mention just one anecdote and then I'll give a broader argument to that. But one anecdote is that much of the highly publicized legal proceedings over the rights over CRISPR, Dowdon versus Fen Zhang, and so on, would have been tremendously simplified if Fen Zhang had a pre-print posted to document that indeed he had those ideas at the time when he claims he did. And they say that they're given a chance to show my screen. Yes, you should be able to show your screen with us now. Oh, so great. I saw it, now I can't see it. It was there. It will come back, don't worry. We just have some technical difficulties but thanks for carrying on. But yeah, it's going to come back, Nicol, I don't worry. Okay, so I'll finish my argument then without it. So one prominent example where having a pre-print which has a public timestamp, a credible timestamp would have tremendously simplified the legal proceedings as opposed to having notebooks that nobody can possibly authenticate when they existed and when they were created. So that's one part. The other aspect is if for people who might be worried that the work will be seen on the bio-archive but not cited and they may not be credited, I would ask my colleagues to think doesn't the same thing happen with peer-de-read papers? Has it happened to you that you've published a paper perhaps not in Nature in another journal and you really thought somebody should have cited it and they didn't cite it? So there is no publication venue that is immune of not crediting your work. It's really a quantitative probability of how likely it is that you will be credited and the more visibility your work gets the higher the probability that you will be credited. The piece of data that I'm just about to show you demonstrates in a fairly convincing way that pre-prints can increase visibility. So from that perspective, I think that pre-prints can only increase the probability of we receiving credit for our work rather than being the other way around. That's a very good point, Nicolai. And I think on that note, and because the word frustration has been said so many times, I just wanted to make one slight comment is that we all started this because of the love of science. When I was very, very young, many, many years ago, I thought that you would just go into the lab, do some experiment and then share the result with the people who love the science as much as you do. And I think this is getting as close as that idea as possible. So it's no time for us to move on to the next poll, a voting poll. So we're going to have two together because we missed one after both, sorry about that. So the first of the two is, how often do you visit by archive? So just choose your answer. Never once a month, once a fortnight, once a week or more than once a week. OK. Well, it is less dramatic than the first vote, I must say. There is still improvement there, room for improvement. OK, and our third poll. So this is the third one. Would you recommend preprint? Sorry, would you comment on preprint about your research in your field? Yes you do, yes you do sometimes. Maybe you would. No you never do or you don't know. No, not that. OK, so maybe. I thought that at this point maybe people would know a little bit more about maybe. All right, so I think it's time for us to start to wrap up and go into questions. So Naomi. So can I just make a little ad? Sure, go ahead. So it's actually quite possible to get prints delivered to you instead of having to repeatedly check by archive.org or any other preprint sites. So most preprint servers are indexed on Google Scholar. So if you sign up for Google Scholar alerts to be delivered to your email, they will include preprint. And also there's a couple new great search engines including one called Free PubMed where you can set up an RSS feed of all preprint servers in biology and then you can in return get that delivered to you. And the open science framework is also building a search tool as well. So I just wanted to note that you don't have to go to the website to keep up today with preprint. Excellent point, thank you so much for that. So it's Naomi's turn with everybody's questions and we have quite a few, so let's go and start with that. This is fantastic. We've had lots of questions come through. Thank you to everyone who brought bed with us through the middle of that webinar. We had some technical glitches, so I appreciate all of your patience and thank you to panellists who are fantastic at carrying on. So we've got lots of questions to ask. What I'll do is I'll feed the questions to Emmanuel and the panellist if you'd like to step up and answer if you feel it's appropriate to answer because I think we'll carry on like that. We have lots to answer so this is brilliant. If you want to send a question in, there's a question box on the webinar software that you can use. It's probably the best at now at the moment. You could also tweet to Elife Careers, but we're more likely to see a question in the question box. So that would be fantastic. Okay, so I will pass back to Emmanuel to go through some of these questions. Thank you. So the first question is how far are we to index preprints on PubMed or PMC Europe? And that comes from... Yes. Because I worked all sorry about the pronunciation. Anybody want to jump in for that one? Jessica? Yeah, so I think that, you know, I think there's a long history of the National Library of Medicine in the US being willing to consider only articles that have been peer reviewed. So I think that, you know, preprints are probably not going to be being appearing on the US PubMed soon, certainly. But I think that that doesn't mean that they can't be discoverable to scientists. As I just mentioned, I think that Google scholars are doing a great job of making these visible. And many biologists I know are already using Google scholars as well. I think that, you know, if you believe that NIH should have adopt policies or consider preprints more strongly, I think the NIH RFI, which I mentioned earlier, I think it is open for everyone to comment, would be a great menu in which to indicate your feelings about how preprints are used in your field and could be used. Great. Anybody else to comment on this? I'll just add that Google scholar is a terrific tool that does index our preprints. Good. I agree. Oh, I'm sorry. No, no, go ahead. Just a second, Nicolai's point, just now and from earlier on, I think Google scholar is a wonderful tool for preprints in part because it can associate, say, a preprint with a peer-reviewed article that's behind a paywall. So what I've done for articles is take the final version of the manuscript and then upload it to the preprint server after the text has been finalized so that you can circumvent the paywall in essence. Essentially, yes. Like, nobody's called me on it. So I think that's a wonderful way that you can get your work out more publicly to a broader audience, especially if... Something that is said for most journals does not even violate their copyrights because even if they don't allow you to share their formatted version, most journals do allow you to share your formatted version coming from your manuscript. And if you use latex to typeset it, in fact, it might look much better than the published work. Exactly. And if you think about it, that's how PubMed Central works in many cases as well. So I don't see that there's in any way a problem about doing that. And it means, say, if your work is biotechnologically relevant, it's much more accessible to say people in startups who can't afford journal subscriptions, for instance. Which I think is a wonderful thing. You know, we as academics and universities have access to this enormous world of peer-reviewed and literature thanks to our libraries. Most of the world doesn't have that. Especially people who are doing really interesting sort of commercially relevant stuff. And just one more short edition. Beyond Google Scala, Google itself ranks very, very highly everything published in the preference. And I don't know about others, but I use Google a lot to search for things. So that's very useful. Yeah, I do that too, actually. So our next question is, do preprints affect smaller labs versus larger labs differently? Anybody for that one? I'll take this one. So I'll just interpret larger meaning more established with larger visibility. For them, the reputation of the laboratory and the principal investigator can certainly add more visibility to a preprint. And can certainly reduce the probability of the idea being stolen in some way. But on the other hand, I have seen very many examples of preprints coming from not so influential, not so well-established labs that are exciting enough and that get picked up by the community and via the Twitter, via the social networks, via email. These papers are still downloaded many, many thousands of times. They are cited frequently, even as a preprint. So the probability of your work being visible as a preprint clearly depends on how famous the lab is, which by the way is true for nature paper too. But if the work itself is intriguing enough and strong enough, I think that it can be noticed on its own, right, without having famous authors. Yeah, that certainly, I think Nicolette's point is completely correct, that during peer review, sometimes some have said that peer review is sometimes dependent upon connections between the PI of the lab and editors and people in the field. And so it may be easier for a more established person to find a friendly reception during peer review. And with preprints, at least those junior people are able to get their work out in a siteable way. So in that sense I really think it is kind of late leveling the playing field a little bit. I completely agree with you, Jessica. I think that preprints are sort of a wonderfully democratising tool for sort of allowing small labs to sort of capture the eyeballs of the world. And I've always felt that having that initial release, or maybe even second release as a preprint, remember you can always come back and amend a preprint in a way that you can't do with a peer reviewed paper. Is that it gives you a sort of multiple bites of the cherry of getting people's attention, which I think for a young lab that's trying to establish itself is much more important than it would be, say, for an established lab, which already has the community's attention. Right, thank you guys. This is very clear and I hope this is answering Liz's question. So we know we're going to move to our final follow question. So this is the last question for today. Would you read your commentaries that highlight recent notable preprints? Yes, no, or unnatural? Well, this is a pretty, I'm sorry, I have access to the results a few seconds before everybody else, but this is a pretty clear answer. Okay. Well, this is great. So carrying on now with the questions, we've got a question from Twitter. So Gunther on Twitter is asking, what is the benefit of publishing in a journal after posting to Bioarchive? That actually is a question. I can just jump in really quickly and say that I think journals are playing a really important role in our scientific ecosystem in the sense that another peer review is, you know, at least, well, let me put it this way. Peer review that is organized in a less biased way than perhaps somebody asking their friends, or I think that is still a very valuable thing. And journals provide an essential way of stamping credibility on papers. I think that we as humans need metrics and heuristics for understanding what to read and what to pay attention to. I think that in the future we can figure out other ways of doing this, but from the perspective of Lauren Bale and Tony Hyman, who wrote a really, really wonderful article, I think they shared in E-Life, about the separation of publication into the steps of disclosure and the call for validation. The idea being that you can disclose work in a preprint and then have it evaluated or validated in a journal. Those are kind of separate things. You know, I think that right now those steps are kind of wrapped up together, but there's real value in removing them. But I'll look at the other panel if I get in the room. I think you put that in such a lovely way, Jessica. Like I realized with going through the whole preprint experience that sort of in the past when journal scientific information was disseminated on paper, journals were in charge of publicising it, stamping it with credibility, and then disseminating it in terms of a printed volume. With electronic media for the past 20 years or so, we behaved as if that system still existed. The journals were in charge of credibility, publicity, and dissemination as well. Now, though, with things like preprints, we can completely decouple those things. A preprint can be the initial dissemination method. I think the role for the journals now is to act almost as curators of that vast amount of information that comes out. They can help us as scientists sort of sort out the small amount, probably of stuff that shouldn't be out there. They can also sort of highlight things that everybody should have their eyeballs on. I think that's an amazingly valuable service. There's far more information in the world from the scientific community than any one person, especially a practising scientist who has to be in the lab, writing grants, could possibly assimilate. I think their role is actually, preprints help really define their role, I think much more clearly now than they did say five years ago, than their role was defined five years ago. Great point, Bas, and this is so well supported by the results from the last poll. Everybody expressed desire to read commentaries highlighting a preprint, and they think that's one of the functions a journal can serve. Exactly, we were recently invited to submit an article to a journal, and I think in part it was on the sort of strength of the response to the preprints. So you can see that maybe the journals are actually using them now as a way to sort of figure out what do we take. They are, I've heard that close journal recently reported editors because a job is specifically to go through bioarchive and choose papers to be reviewed by close genetics and invite the authors to submit them to the close genetics. I think that's like such an amazingly wonderful thing. You have access to this wealth of information now about a paper. You don't have to sort of use your gut. Is this going to resonate with people or not? You have actually actionable metrics now. It can also support peer review as well if you think about it. Traditionally I think peer review has been sort of almost a very harried process for the reviewers. They're cut off from all of their sources of information about this thing. Now they can see what potentially thousands of viewers have said about it, how they decide to download it, how they read it. So I think this actually has the potential to just dramatically strengthen peer review actually and dramatically improve the credibility of scientific work going forwards. Thank you so much Beth for that. I think that's a very important point. It's like reshaping the entire publishing world and everybody that is at stake of that including the reviewers. So in the interest of time we're just going to finish by asking each of you guys one question. So this is a question from Adrianna and she says, preprints are great with the caveats that have been mentioned but do you think that preprints will eventually retrieve the current system of journal submission or peer review or how would you reconcile the two ways of sharing science with one being peer reviewed and the other one who isn't in terms of equal acceptance for jobs, fellowship, etc. So just because of interest of time I need a yes or no from each of you, Beth, Jessica and Nicolai. Who starts? So can we clarify one of the questions, will preprints replace peer review or will peer review and preprints replace journals? I think both the reconciliation, I think the main question is really how do you reconcile the two like in the same world and how would that impact on acceptance and like fellowships, publications, grants, you know, like being the first author of the big papers still is one of the major metrics, one of these days. I don't think I can say that in yes or no but I can say it in one sentence if I can try. Okay, John, one sentence, less than a minute. It's important to be able to show interim progress of our research yet peer review is still a really important process for the validation and growth of science and we need to make peer review, I would love in the future for peer review to be a more dynamic process so that we can continue to improve work and build upon work over time. Great, well done, Nicolai, yes or no? Preprints are certainly compatible with peer review. We need peer review, it's here to stay with us. So I see the journal system currently mostly consistent with preprints and we can certainly enhance their compatibility in the future. There are forward-looking journals that already allow the direct submission of preprints for peer review but yes, I do see them even now as being compatible, that's my short answer and in the future I can see them being even more compatible and I want to emphasise again one popular misconception that the preprints sidestep peer review. I vehemently deny that, they do not sidestep peer review, we need peer review. I love preprints, I love peer review, I want both of them to stay with us. Thank you so much for that and just one sentence, yes or no? I think they're naturally complementary. We don't have to stop with that, I'm very very sorry, I would love to hear the argument but really we are running short on time, I'm so sorry. So I know as you think everybody for being so supportive, being here sharing your enthusiasm and your knowledge of preprints, everybody for attending and asking all your questions, we're going to be in touch about this and please guys be in touch with us about this as well. Use our Twitter with the hashtag ECR Wednesday at ELIVEcareers as much as possible because that means we can see them. Okay. Thank you, just to add we are live and cutting off the next hour, the panel is fully joining us there so there are lots of questions that did not get answered. We're very sorry about that, please do post those on Twitter and we'll try to do that for you as well and I hope we can get your questions answered one way or the other. We may be able to follow up with a panelist as well by email, some were very specific. So thank you for joining us and we'll say goodbye from here and we'll see you on Twitter. Bye bye.