 Welcome everybody, I can see people are spooling into the Zoom room, you're all very, very welcome to join us for this research square company webinar. Welcome everybody, we'll be waiting just for a few moments to get started today but my name's Gareth and we're joined for our event this afternoon, this morning, this evening, the middle of the night, depending upon your time zone. I'm joined by Michelle Avisar-Wighting. Michelle, how are you doing today? I'm doing wonderful, I'm excited to see everybody. Fantastic, yes, well as I mentioned already we're going to be talking and we're going to get started in just a few minutes, the ins and outs of preprint servers, understanding preprint servers to enhance your career and also your institutions career, the reputation, the standing, the position of your institution. This is my name, this is Research Square Company, this is another in our series of global webinar events. We're joined by Michelle Avisar-Wighting, a guru of preprint servers and preprints with us this morning, this evening, this afternoon and everybody, you're so very welcome to this event. I hope that you're coming in and you're having no problems to connect with us today. You're all very welcome to join us. If you have questions over the course of our event together today, you'll be most welcome to put them in the chat box. This is our Q&A session at the end of our time together but of course don't be shy, please feel free to put any of your questions into the chat box at any time. I'll be monitoring the chat throughout our event today, posting helpful links, useful comments and other information into the chat box. Of course, this is Research Square Company, our global webinar. Absolutely, yes, let's start. People should learn to sign in on time as happens in other Zoom events. Absolutely great comment. Thank you for that. We are getting started right now. I just wanted to say to everybody, if you have comments, if you have feedback, don't hesitate to post them in the chat box as we get going with our presentation today. If you have questions and outs of preprint servers, understanding them to enhance your career and just to further annoy Martin as we get started with our presentation today. We're going to ask our participants as we go through the first few slides to just tell us a few things about yourself. First question, why don't you get us started? How many papers have you published? Can we help you with one of your current articles with one of your articles that you're currently working on? Could we help you? Do you have a paper that needs assistance? Do you have a paper ready that might need some expert editing support? So absolutely, please tell us a little bit about yourselves. How many papers have you published? Can we help? Of course we can. We're AJE, we're Research Square Company. Where in the world are you? Thank you for raising your hand, Paulette. Like if you have a comment, if you have a question, do put it there into the chat box. We'll have time for comments and questions a little bit later on in our event today. So Michelle's here. We're going to get going in just one second. I do promise you that, Martin. How many papers have you published? Can we help? I'm sure we can. We'll talk more about that a little bit later as well. Where in the world are you? Where in the world are you? And I can see Mohammed says one of his papers was published today, which is fantastic. Congratulations to you, Mohammed, and welcome everybody else to our event. Thank you so much for joining us. How many papers have you published? Can we help? Do you have a paper ready potentially for editing? We need some support with journal selection and where in the world are you? Very important. Gareth is my name. I was an academic for 20 years or so. I know I don't look that old, but I worked in the UK, in Ireland, in America, and also in Hungary. Published a bunch of papers in my career. Also working still as a journal editor. I work as a journal editor, as well as my work with Research Square Company. So I hope in collaboration with Michelle, who's going to do most of the work in our event today, I must say, but nevertheless, we are able, we hope, to answer any of the questions that you may have about preprint servers, about preprints, or about writing and publishing. In general, across the course of your career. So Gareth is my name. I'm delighted to be joined in this research square company event by Michelle Avisar Whiting. Michelle, how are you doing today? Are you well? Doing great and excited to talk to everyone today. I'll give you a little background on myself. Michelle Avisar Whiting. I am the editor-in-chief of the Research Square preprint platform. I hail from Providence, Rhode Island, which is a tiny little state at the top of the United States northeast. I went to Brown University to get my degree in medical science. So I used to study epigenetics, microRNA alterations, methylation of, in the context of cancer and also toxicology. So those are a couple of my papers there. Now, you know, it's been 10 years since I've been in research and now I've gone meta. So now I do sometimes research on research and my recent publications have been not about cancer and toxicology, but about problems or interesting issues in the scholarly publishing world. So, and sometimes I go on podcasts. So hopefully we can find a link somewhere and plug that so people can go and listen to me talk about controversial topics, which I think everyone always loves. That's me. It's the controversies that make it really interesting. Thanks, Michelle. We're going to be just saying a few things to get started. Thank you everybody for contributing information about yourselves. We continue to encourage you to tell us how many papers have you published? And can we help with any of the papers that you've got in the pipeline, maybe with editing services, translation services, Spanish, Portuguese, potentially. And also, could we provide you with any access to our preprint server. We'll talk about that also in a moment where in the world are you from so this is what we're going to talk about this afternoon this evening this morning in our presentation. So first of all, I'm going to spend just a few minutes giving a background, talking a little bit about what a preprint server is, and then Michelle's going to come back and give us the content, the real content of this presentation today and talk to everybody. So thank you again for joining us a little bit about what's unique about research square what's unique about the research square company preprint platform so that's what you can expect. Thank you again everybody for joining us. Thank you for telling us a little bit about yourselves and a bit about your background. And again, let me emphasize we're going to make a recording of this presentation available to everybody of course if you'd like a certificate. Do get in touch with me I'll be happy to provide you with a certificate of attendance at this event and any questions, any comments, any feedback we welcome those as well so do put those into the chat box and we'll be back a little bit later to have an open q amp a session so just to get started. We'll talk just for a few minutes now about what a preprint server is Martin you'll be delighted to hear that we're actually getting going what is a preprint server well here's the academic publishing cycle that hamster will that we all go round and around all the time from ideas to funding to data journal selection paper writing submission peer review and publication and as Michelle will talk about a little bit later on in this event preprint platforms enable you to accelerate a number of areas in the publication cycle where you can get ahead of the competition you can get ahead of the game, you can get your data out there on to a platform where other people can look at it you can help with journal selection preprint platforms help editors they help authors to determine where the paper should get published submission as well happens if you have a look at our preprint platform or integrated with lots of journals you can go from uploading a preprint into the submission process itself and of course the main reason that people use preprint platforms to put their work out there to get preprints back on their work from the community prior to peer review so accelerating that final stage in particular that peer review and eventual publication stage at the end of the process journal selection we'll talk about this in a little bit more detail as well I'm sure many of you have questions about journal selection. It's one of the most important steps of the publishing process and we find, actually, that even though authors put lots of time and energy into doing great research and lots of time and energy and into editing and writing their papers. They don't often put a lot of time and energy and effort into journal selection. We do recommend that you have a think about journal selection before you begin with the writing process with your papers, but by using a preprint you can accelerate this stage of the publishing process as well because you can put your work on to the research square preprint platform. People will look at it journal editors may very well come to you and invite you to use their journal for your publication inquiries as well a very good way of speeding up your submission experience saving valuable time thinking about journal selection the use of preprint servers. We are suggesting that these kinds of steps that you can take as an author can accelerate the process so we have insider recommendations from us pre submission inquiries talking to editors either inside of or outside of preprint servers getting your target journal selected effectively will provide you with email templates after this presentation for going through and doing all of those steps and stages I'm sure that you're asking yourselves what are preprint servers while they're online repositories for academic work as Michelle will discuss in just a moment. They can be used before peer review and online publication and you can get corrections from the community feedback from your peers. Other people working in your research area that almost always improve both the quality of the research and its eventual chances of publication you can share your work fast with other interested researchers you can get often peer review comments even on the platform that may be used by the journal in the process and as I've mentioned already those journal editors people like me out there in the community are looking at preprint servers for suitable topics for their journals so very important people will have and I'm sure that will cover this in our Q&A coming up a little bit later a number of concerns about the use of preprint servers we hope in this session today to tell you a little bit more information about what these servers are what they do what's unique about our one the research square preprint platform and how we can allay your concerns about the potential use of these platforms, we understand that you have only got one career, you're doing research so make sure that that research reaches the widest possible readership the widest possible community of like minded researchers and we're going to convince you I'm sure in this session today that using a preprint server is actually the best step forward for you so let's think about what we're learning so far while we switch over and I'm going to stop my screen share in just a second how many papers have you published, can we help, perhaps you have a paper ready to go and where in the world are you located so with that like and with that short introduction, I'm going to pass the controls of this event over to my colleague Michelle, I'm going to mute myself I'm sure that you're very relieved to hear that and she's going to pick up the reins and take things over from here Michelle thanks. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about preprints and the history of preprints let's start with the history. We can't talk about the history of preprints without talking about the archive, the original as the kids call it these days the og. So let's talk a little bit about history of preprints which I think there's little debates started with the web based repository for physics papers, and this was established in 1991. It came to be called archive. This has been an extremely successful project all these years. It has become the standard behavior for physicists and mathematicians and other people in hard sciences to share their work with the community before they even consider submitting it to a journal. And because of that archive gets a staggering 16,000 submissions per month nowadays. This year actually in January, it passed the 2 million preprints marker so this was a huge milestone a huge success from for preprints, which have now started to as we will talk about, come into their own with other fields. This took a long time for the practice to sort of spread to other disciplines. There were a number of efforts that started and kind of fizzled out, and there was no real proliferation in preprint servers, and certainly little uptake amongologists and medical sciences which I'm sure we have many of in this crowd, until after 2015 or so as you can see by this graph. And I've heard people point to the Zika virus crisis as the catalyst here seems it's always a virus that catalyzes these as this was the point where publishers and funders funding organizations started supporting and encouraging the practice of preprinting so you had welcome and the NIH starting to accept preprints in grant applications for example then we could start to see many journals creating preprint permissive policies by around 2016. So a lot has changed in 30 years. In 1991, it was around 3000 preprints that were posted, you know, each year, and in 2020 that number was well over 200,000. And it's only in the last five years or so that we have seen the skew of disciplines away from that the original of physics and mathematics start to change with the dawn of the life science and medical preprint. And you can see that represented here in the bottom graph by the purple line. So here's a graph from Europe PMC this is an aggregator of life science research papers, and they started indexing preprints in 2018. What you can see is that basically the pandemic has made a giant change in the trajectory for preprints you see what happened to the trendline in 2020 and early 2020. You know, every server including ours was inundated with COVID-19 preprints. There was a period of time here in which preprints were coming out so quickly that people would post a preprint, and then it would be cited by another preprint within days of getting posted and then they would watch this happen in real time and so researchers, and then the rest of society by extension, really reap the benefit of this new warp speed kind of science and you can actually see here by if you eyeball the graph that research started overtaking bio archive with respect to volume. Last year. So we passed 100,000 preprint mark. And for those of you who haven't heard of bio archive. It's the biology preprint server that launched in 2013. And and well perhaps it's not the first biology preprint server. It's certainly the most successful. I mentioned that a few years ago, journals started embracing preprints. Maybe you're thinking, hey, isn't it odd for journals who have established their importance for all academic progress by being the ones who publish the latest research. Isn't it odd for them to encourage authors to publish their work somewhere else first. And then both undermine the journal and violate some norms, and you're right. Some of you may have heard of the Engel finger rule this this man over here is from Engel finger, which rule that he created when he was editor for the New England Journal of medicine explicitly forbids simultaneous submission, or prior publication of a paper in another medium before it's published in an academic journal. This has been an edict of science publishing for decades. And so preprints have presented a serious challenge to that norm. The big publishers and many smaller journals to have come to the decision have come to the conclusion recently that retaining a hard line against preprints against this kind of prior publishing is really not an author friendly approach, and it would only hurt their business in the end so better find ways of working together and feel confident that they the journal are still providing an indispensable service to authors, which they are. In the last few years, we've got, you know, the plus family of journals, providing easy deposition of papers to bio archive and met archive. We have preprints with the Lancet via preprint server called SSRN. And we have elife last year actually requiring preprint deposition for submission to the journal. So these are big moves. And now we've gone even beyond just the friendly relationship to I think, well, we should consider a true partnership there's some very interesting initiatives from the publisher embo, and the preprint advocacy group ASAP bio to review articles posted on bio and archive and post the reviews to the preprint server. So the authors can then revise their article and submit it to a journal. And now there are a number of participating journals that will actually accept the reviews as is. And there are a whole list of other journals that will take them in to take the reviews into consideration in their editorial process. Elife has also started doing a similar thing. Now that all of their submissions must be preprints first, the reviews get posted on the preprint for every submitted article, and they also curated by elife's new preprint review aggregator is called Society I linked here or I showed an image of it here in the bottom right. And these are all things that I think would have been quite difficult to imagine just a few years ago. So suddenly we're seeing a lot of changes in this direction with academic publishing. And all that has emerged is this concept of the overlay journal, which I would say is deeper than a partnership. I'm just going to use the term in measurement. This is a term from psychology, because this is a really like a blurring of the boundaries between a preprint and a journal where the journal doesn't separately publish the paper once it's been reviewed. The preprint already exists on archive, and they merely endorse the accepted version of the preprint and point back to it. And then maybe they will mirror the abstract on the journal site. And I really like this model because it's very simple. It doesn't create a redundant do I, and it keeps the versions centralized so everything is in the same place, but you still have that preprint peer review peer reviews are usually open and the endorsement from the journal which is still an important requirement for most institutions. Okay, so I've talked now generally about preprints. Now I want to focus a little bit on our preprint server in particular research square and the many things that make it unique and special. Let's quickly review the case for preprints will go back a little. What is the point of this, and it's primarily about speed and control posting a preprint is an act of personal sovereignty. You know, I've done this work. I'm ready for the world to see it and scrutinize it and having a preprint means your work can be shared iterated on scrutinized replicated and potentially even built on all during the months or years that it turns through the various peer review and editorial journals. And these things can and should happen in parallel. There is no reason why this shouldn't be the norm for all disciplines, as it has been for physics for so long. So this parallel system is the foundation of how in review was built. And just to clarify here because this is often a point of confusion, research square refers to the preprint platform itself that online place where all of the preprints are housed and in review refers to the service that allows authors who are submitting their papers for publication to simultaneously post a preprint to research square. So they don't have to do anything, anything else they just opt into the service and their preprint gets posted on research square as they're submitting their work to the journal. And obviously, the main value proposition here is speed. Of course, early sharing means early primacy. That's an earlier claim to the work that you've done. And then the flow chart here breaks down how this works. So an author opts into in review here at the top, while they're completing their submission to the journal. And then after the manuscript passes the journals QC process the files and the metadata, they're automatically pulled in to our platform research squares ecosystem, where they undergo our own screening, which I'll talk more about in a minute, and they get converted to HTML. And they get posted as a preprint. And as you all know too well, that you know this side takes two to three days. And the other side, typically takes months. And often the outcome is not publication. You know that's the ideal outcome, but needing to restart the process again at another journal. So somebody here in the chat shared that their work has been with the editor for, where their paper has been with the editor for 30 weeks. So that's, you know, that's a perfect segue to what I'm talking about here. Early sharing is early primacy. Okay. Okay, so here's what it looks like when an author who encounters this offer while they're submitting their paper. Right now it's all over 600 springer nature journals that have this offering. So this is what they see. It explains that explains what a preprint is. It explains that preprints are given a DOI posted online permanently on the research square platform, and that it will display. If it's under consideration, it will display the editorial status of your paper. It lists some of the potential benefits. It lets you know that if the journal accepts your manuscript, the preprint and the version of record at the journal get linked together. And then the author can decide if they want to do this or not. And, you know, it's around 25% of authors opt in at this stage. And then we have another smaller percentage of people who think about it a little bit and make the decision a few days later to pre to preprint their paper from the research dashboard. There are currently 619 journals implemented in this service as of this week. And we expect many more to join on this year. So that's very exciting. You know all told now we've posted over 135,000 preprints that came in via the in review route across many different disciplines but you can see here. It's quite heavily dominated by medicine and life sciences. Okay, we are like this group. We are a global platform is something we're very proud of this. This is what our top left, what our global authorship and readership looks like with the darker areas representing more people, obviously. So this is one way in which we're notably different from bio archive, for example, because our geographical distribution of authors is broadly reflective of springer nature's authorship. So that means that we have more research coming from China and India and places that also tend not to be as well represented on other preprint servers like Ethiopia and Turkey. On the other hand, our readership, the bottom left has heavy representation in North America and Europe, Australia, Brazil, as well as in all of the places that are posting the most. So here you can see our cumulative volume on the right. We're now well over 170,000 individual preprints for that includes the versions of preprints that we also host. Okay, so now you have opted into in review your manuscript past the journals QC process, you didn't have to do anything else. The relevant files and metadata have been automatically pulled into research square past our screen got converted to HTML, and it's been posted as a preprint and it looks something like this. So what I want to do now is just take a little walk around the preprint article page, how, how to find important information on these pages and what enhancements research square provides. And what you're seeing now is an exclusive view of our new article page. Okay, it's not exclusive. If you go to any of our preprints right now you can click on the top and see a link to, you know, view the new, the new view, the brand new preprint page for you that we have. And this is a pretty standard in review preprint here, you can see it's currently under review at scientific reports. And after the title and the author list there's a disclaimer in red telling you it's a preprint, it hasn't been peer reviewed by a journal, and that's followed by an abstract and keywords, and then the full text in collapsible sections. And one important feature of our platform that sets it apart from any other preprint server, including those that do have some more tight integrations with journals. It's this section right here that I that I have put in a red box. It's the peer review timeline, which displays information about when the paper was submitted. When an editor was assigned when reviewers were invited when reviews were received, etc. So this gives you both the author and the readers a whole new level of insight into the status of a manuscript. This is a brand new thing. And another important feature, which our preprint platform shares with with some but not all preprint servers is a comment functionality so that readers can post their questions reviews as Gareth said, you can you get commentary get feedback from the community this is under the best circumstance I'm not going to say that this happens in every preprint. But there is work that an author can do to generate discussion, go online and say hey I have a preprint of I'm welcome you know I'm welcoming feedback and I'd like engagement on this preprint and that often helps to draw people in and get them to comment or get them to email you if they're not comfortable commenting on the site. This is a way to leave short commentary on the preprint some people even leave a proper review in the comment section, and then the author is alerted to that, and then they can come back and respond to it. And here's an example of a very successful preprint that was directly submitted to our platform, you can see that its status is now published, meaning it was published in a journal. There's a link here to the version of record at the journal, in this case, nature immunology, and this is important for several reasons. One of which is to direct people to the most recent version of the article for citation, a lot of people want the citations to aggregate not on the preprint, but on the version of record once they publish it. But remember that early sharing also means earlier citations, and it's becoming quite normal as I mentioned earlier in the conversation for preprints to get cited. And on our platform, you can see those citations represented here, make it bigger via dimensions. This is a counter of citations, and also a really innovative newer citation aggregator called site and site shows you a citation count based on an AI and artificial citation based analysis of the context in which it was cited, so whether it was confirmatory, contrasting or neutral. So now you don't just have a sense of the number of citations but also the way in which the paper was cited. I could give you an entire talk about site alone, but you should really check it out for yourself. It's a really remarkable piece of software. And I'm very happy that we were able to integrate it into our platform. Another thing that sets research square apart from other preprint platforms is the author dashboard experience you might have heard me say dashboard before this is what I mean. So there is a whole aspect to our platform that has less to do with your preprint, and more to do with your manuscript itself in fact you have a dashboard without having a preprint at all. And it's also showing you progress at the journal and other insights into your paper that might be helpful so, for example, on the dashboard you get more granular view of the progress through the peer review process. On the journals, you even have the reviews showing up themselves but this really depends on the journal. And you have automated language quality score assuming you have uploaded a doc file that our automation can read, then you'll get a read out of the language quality score also an artificial intelligence based tool. And you can get some automated assistance with editing. If your paper could use some improvement with English grammar spelling and phrasing. So this is all built in to the to the research square dashboard. Okay, are you getting tired of hearing all the ways that research squares unique. Well, I can't see any of you so I'll assume that you're doing what Gareth is doing shaking your heads vigorously cheering for more. Okay. So I'll tell you one more thing that we offer on our platform. This is professional assessments, professional assessments for reporting quality specifically and this is both on the methods of the paper and the data itself the statistical reporting. So both of these are thorough checks that are based on industry established standards for you know what we would call rigorous reporting. Right and this is important to facilitate reproducibility and comprehensibility, frankly, of the paper. So passing those assessments earns a badge on the preprint for all to see I've pointed to them here in red. And another sort of, this is a trust signal for the paper, along its journey to validation, which never ends, by the way, we know that this doesn't end, even a peer review that we have to keep aggregating these trust signals we have to keep building on on our on our work and ensure that other people can build on it and that it can be validated and then it can be reproduced and replicated. I'm going to shift gears a little bit. I want to say a few things about how our platform is unique from the more editorial perspective, which is the piece that I'm responsible for, and the one that is near and dear to my heart so As we moved through 2020 with the pandemic heating up and tons of preprints getting posted as I told you and COVID research getting fast tracked by journals, you know, some concerns started emerging. Actually, a lot of concerns about whether this trend is a healthy one for our information landscape. I think some of these concerns were warranted, and I don't dismiss them. Instead, I try to think of ways that we can improve on our policies, our procedures, and our product, the platform to meet these concerns head on, instead of just dismissing them and saying, Oh, that's not a problem at all. And I'll show you what I mean. So the first level of oversight is our screening protocol. I've mentioned this a couple of times it has to go through preprint has to go through a screening process on our end, we're not in anything goes platform. We have a trained team of screeners who filter out submissions that are fairly pseudo scientific that are ethically dubious or ones that could potentially, you know, be dangerous or contain patient identifiers. We don't routinely block the posting of papers based on poor methodology, you know, other flaws poor opaque reporting specious conclusions. So we have plenty of those. We also have plenty of great solid research. So preprint servers are already not passive hosts for research, right. But the last years have taught us that we may be able to play a bit more of an active role in ensuring that people at minimum don't come away with wildly misinformed ideas about a preprint. So, this, this one up here, this is the same preprint I showed you a little bit earlier with the site badge. This was a really interesting preprint that came to us in June 2020, and it was discussing T cell immunity to SARS CoV two, and that the T cell immunity that we have from our past exposures to viruses that cause the common cold. Well, what some people took from this complex immunology story was that well most of us are already immune to the virus. This is proof that this is a hoax. We already have herd immunity. It's all being blown totally out of proportion. And of course, this wasn't at all the point of the preprint, but nevertheless, this is the false narrative that was repeated over and over again on Twitter, you can see just one instance of that here on the left. And it was basically using this preprint and other preprints and other papers in its defense, this this kind of false narrative. The paper was ultimately published in nature immunology, where it of course continued to garner the same kind of attention from the herd immunity by infection crowd. The thing that we did to try to stem the flow of misinterpretation was to add a lay summary to the preprint, we call them research highlights. And while it's, it's impossible to attribute the decrease in chatter to this alone. I know that people found it useful, because I saw people using screenshots of the summary to respond to other people's interpretations of the preprint online. And that was very encouraging. It means it really does help to explain something in plain language, when when it's being exposed to, to everyone to a lot of people who don't necessarily have the means to properly interpret the science. For example, many of you will be familiar with the ivermectin saga that unfolded last year. A major part of that was linked to a preprint on our platform, and not this one, by the way, but it was a bit of a domino effect where after that big randomized control trial was found to be fraudulent. There were data analyses that included it were compromised, and other ivermectin papers started getting really close scrutiny, and some of them were also found to be seriously problematic fabricated other issues. And this was one of them that was also on our platform. It was later published in a journal. After the whistleblowers came to me in October was very compelling evidence of problems with this one I added an editorial note to put readers on alert. And the journal by the way that published this still doesn't have an expression of concern on the paper. That gives you a sense of some of the work that we're doing to combat some of the negatives that have come out of, you know, it's not clear that it's related to preprints necessarily, but the heat and the intensity of the COVID-19 pandemic. Okay, but who cares what I think about our platform. I work here. Of course, I love it. What really matters is what you think about it. What researchers think about it. So these data are a couple of years old. The people who used peer review in review were surveyed about why they used it and here's what they said. Most of them, not surprisingly, were intrigued by the opportunity to share the research with the community, much faster than they would have otherwise to track the status of their manuscript. This is a very popular feature about 36% wanted to receive feedback earlier from the wider community and 21% wanted to be able to cite the research on a grant or in a tenure application. I see some of the open responses here. You know, I want I opted into that that I and others could cite our work. I had a publication. It's a bit like sharing findings at a conference before, before publishing. A lot of people have made this this sort of analogy that preprints are like a big ongoing online conference and getting feedback and questions. This is what I was hoping for. I opted in because I knew I should be posting preprints, but I was too lazy. You know, in review made it convenient. And then the author dashboard is called out. This is better than what most journals are offering so it's a no brainer. I spent a lot of time on Twitter, as you probably can imagine, just monitoring the chatter about specific preprints about our server in general. And so I get the honor of watching people proudly debut their preprints online, and then get feedback from colleagues and strangers all over the world. I also see people talking about our dashboard. The goal of this feature was to ease the stress, make people feel a bit more informed, a bit more in control of what of what can be a really agonizing process for some people. And I'm very encouraged to see that this is the effect that it's having in reality. People do feel more in control. People do feel like they're getting more information. They want this to be available for all journals for every journal submission process. And so that's been a wonderful feedback for us. So I want to close on this point. I know we're getting to the time that we want to start allowing for questions. And this is the point, this is the topic that has dominated all of our lives for the last two years, every single one of us. And though I think we can all agree that the pandemic really made everyone very aware of the slowness of the traditional preprinting process, suddenly this pain point that has been ours, this is the pain point that researchers knew about all this time could potentially have become the world's pain point. But that didn't happen, because the idea of waiting for an editorial and peer review process before sharing in an emergency like this became patently absurd. So instead, researchers flock to preprint servers in the tens of thousands, and our server alone now hosts over 10,000 COVID-19 papers. So preprinting means that scientists and clinicians are able to read this research, take it to the comments section, take to email, take to Twitter to discuss it as soon as the author has deemed it ready to share. So here's one example, one of thousands where people are discussing this preprint on long COVID, which was posted in November of last year. The paper is still under review. So this is months of exposure that would have been lost without the preprint. And even one month, as you know, is a non-trivial amount of time in this pandemic. Actually, so many of the voices we've all followed during the pandemic have been focusing much of their attention on preprints, and it's been incredible to see the work of our authors headlined by these people and used to incrementally improve all of our understanding of every aspect of the pandemic in these last two years. Now we understand that there's no reason to limit this practice to COVID-19. All research is worthy of being shared quickly. Yours too. So today, we have covered that what the what and the why of preprints and taken a deep dive into research square and the interview service. And I look forward to your questions and I hope that I can satisfy any curiosity you have about our platform. Thank you very much. It was really great. Yeah, we learned a lot. I learned a huge amount. Thank you so much. That's great. And now everybody like I've seen lots of comments, lots of questions like I've been trying to post links in the chat as we've been going through the session this afternoon. You'll get a certificate, you'll get an email with a recording of today's events. So don't worry about that. It takes a few days. So if you haven't gotten it over the next day or so don't panic, you will be getting that email with your recording and with your certificate. Lots of comments, lots of information too about our audience. So thank you so much, everybody for sharing some information about where you're from, how many papers you've published, whether we could help you with your next publication. It's not too late. If you'd like to share that information with us, we'd welcome that in the chat box. Lots of comments and questions. I'm going to get started with one that came in a little bit ago from William and that's in medical and public health sciences, Michelle. Most peer reviewed PubMed journals still require that work they consider has never been published in any form before submission. So how can an author know that posting their work on a preprint server will not limit their chances of acceptance in their target journal or a subsequent journal. And William says that big journals just don't need to be author friendly. Do you have comments on that? Wow, interesting. Well, in our experience, this has not been a big barrier. Actually, it's changed even in the last year, you know, it just keeps changing, meaning there are journals all the time coming to the realization that they can only keep up this policy for so long. And it's not a very common thing for us to see that, you know, an author who has a preprint on our platform is running into problems with the journal taking a hard line stance against preprints. More often what happens is that because journals do a plagiarism check at the point of submission. Sometimes, especially if they're not as savvy, and they're not as aware of preprint servers, they will just see the high similarity index. You know, it'll be a basically an identical paper that's somewhere else online. They'll assume that it's already been published. And that's it. And sometimes it's an automated rejection. We have a standard set of procedures that we, you know, advise authors to use in cases where they get pushed back from a journal that should otherwise be accepting the preprint. I mean, all of the major publishers and a huge number of journals that people are considering publishing with are under the five, the big five major publishers. They have preprint permissive policies. That doesn't mean that every single journal is going to toe the line with respect to those policies, but we can make progress by just talking to them. And often, it's a confusion. It's a misunderstanding. And even we will sometimes my staff will go to the journal staff and say hey, you know you understand that this is a preprint. All of the major, you know the major funders now support the major publishers now support preprints like, let's, you know, let's get on with the program here. And we've actually managed to convince journals that were not accepting of preprints to come on board, because they realize that this is going to be a really a big barrier for them now. And then more journals are joining us like you can have a look at research square dot com and see like just all of the different journals William that are, they're signing up with us and it's about communication of course like talk to us. We can help you to preprint your work and also talk to those potential target journals so that's a great question and I know it's a concern that lots of people will have there's a question from Mohammed. It is stated that preprints, which I'm a strong advocate of create a problem in terms of citation tracking, which might be due to difficulties merging citations between preprints and published manuscripts could you please comment on that. Yes, that's such an excellent question. It's true that it does. We do have an issue with citations splitting or I've called it citation dilution. I think in the last paper that I wrote about this, where you know you have citations aggregating with the preprint, then the paper is published. So citations will continue to aggregate with the preprint this is why we think it's so important to make sure that that link appears, and that it's very obvious to anybody who lands on the preprint oh there's a more recent version of this, I should probably site. There are going to be reasons that people site a preprint, even when they are aware that there is a version of record. That's not the norm. I would say that it's more often it's because people don't realize that there's a more recent version. So it's incredibly important that we do our part to find those links, make those links and make sure that they're visible. But it's also, it's also going to be incumbent on the aggregators and the indexers to solve this problem and Google scholar I will say has done a very good job of this. Google scholar does aggregate all the different versions even if you have different preprint versions of the same paper different preprints at different preprint servers that have different citations. So if you have the version of record, Google scholar will actually stack them up chronologically, but the version of record at the top, and will aggregate the citations, so that now you have you can look at them by separately, or you can look at an aggregate I think we're going to be headed right because in the future what you want is an aggregate I think this is what journals are going to want to there once they have decided to post that paper. They want to collect all of those citations right they kind of want to claim them. And I think they'll have a right to claim them if they've done the work to do the peer review and publish the paper. I think this is going to be a point to an aggregate citation, which is not not a difficult thing, technically to solve for, like I said Google scholar has already done it. Other groups are going to do it too. And I don't think this is going to be a problem for very long, but you're right. It is a pain point right now it's something we need to sort out and everybody needs to kind of get on board and do the right thing to make sure that it happens. That's a great such a great question. Thank you for that question. Yes, sir. That's really cool. We got lots of comments about our editing service I've been posting the digital editing tool link into the chat. That's an amazing AI trained free if you sign up for a trial. See what you think give us your feedback can get your papers edited in less than 10 minutes I use it all the time it's amazing. It's really cool so people are saying your editing charges are a bit high for students well have a go at the digital editing tool. I've shared the link with everybody a few times. We have a question from Teresa, can a preprint be rejected. Michelle I think you covered this in some detail in the presentation right. I think that what she may be referring to is through in review that if somebody opts into in review and then their paper gets rejected. I'll assume that that's that's what she meant because it's a good question and one that's that's you know reasonable to think about what happens you know you've opted in now you have a preprint permanently that has the insignia the imprint of the journal on it. Well what happens if there's a rejection and I did see another comment about this by the way in the in the comments somewhere. What happens is that the the imprint goes away quietly, you know there's no, we don't blast the klaxons let everybody know that this paper has been rejected. It happens quietly. The in review timeline also goes away. You know the author will still be able to see that history on their dashboard, but publicly that information quietly disappears, and the preprint just looks like a preprint just looks like a research square preprint that was. It's very indistinguishable from a research square preprint that was submitted directly to our platform, so nobody knows, you know whether it came in through in review and was rejected, or, or it came in directly. I hope that answers the question. I think so I think so we got quite a lot of comments and questions about editing as well and general language comments also journal selection. There are a lot of sources in these areas so I do encourage you to check out like a je.com or so which is our professional services site where there's lots of information to help you with your paper writing I'll follow up with everybody links and and information from other recorded sessions, but follow me asks a good question Michelle in a situation whereby authors submitted superficial research information to a journal and opted in for review to be published on research when the manuscript got rejected by the journal. What are this misinformed the experts or researchers in the field, and is there a plagiarism risk when submitting over to another journal. Thanks for that question. Great question. Okay yeah and it touches someone on the answer I already gave now you have a little bit more insight into what what happens to a preprint when it's been rejected through the in review system, but I think what you're asking is, you know doesn't that give. Now you have work up that has been rejected by a journal, maybe it was rejected before peer review maybe it was rejected after peer review. But we all know that being rejected from a journal does not mean that the work is not worthy of being published it may not have been right for that journal. The editor may have had a rock in his shoe. There are many reasons why why a paper might be rejected, especially if you know people start often with a very high reach journal that that doesn't and end up accepting their work because it's not impactful enough or something like that. So we take to kind of the more optimistic view that that the vast majority of work is is worthy of publication is worthy of sharing if there's some serious problems with it if it really is just very superficial. I think that that that's what we're hoping will come out with the with all of these trust signals and all of these opportunities for people to comment. And frankly you know that's that's the risk you know if you're putting your work online and it really is terrible or you falsified the data or have you done something on ethical. It's quite possible that someone will turn that up, but isn't that a good thing for the scientific community at large right you would want to know that for a paper that you were looking at or looking to site or something like that so that's what we're hoping will will happen with a you know more collaborative approach to looking at to looking at papers that are posted online, but it's a great question. It is yeah and I'm aware that we're running short on time so I'm just going to go for one more question before you before we quickly tell everybody a few things about our company and give you that special free gift at the very end of the session. This is a good question. Thank you so much everybody for all the other questions I'll follow up with you so that you do get answers to all of your questions from the session this afternoon. Dr Andy saying, can personal information that I put up be protected from third party intervention when I make submissions of manuscripts to journals. I think that this is. That's an interesting question because of course, like, when you make submissions you do put quite a lot of your own information into the system as well Michelle do you want. Yes, yes, and you have and there is a part of the opt in process is also a, you know, you know, an agreement that is an informed consent agreement that we are the third party in this case that we're going to be receiving all of your all of your information all of the data associated with your whatever you've submitted to the journal we will have access to. And that's an understanding of the author dashboard. So it's something that authors need to be informed about and understand that we have. We don't, you know, sell that information or anything to say another third party but we have it and we have, we have to have it in order to be able to do the things that we do with the paper like do the automated editing and all and post the pre print ultimately if that's if that's what the author decides to do. So there is an informed consent process. Yes, we do get your data. So it's good to know. Right, I mean, thank you again everybody for all the great questions Michelle, could you just skip to the next slide for me that will be, that will be great like we're we're a research square company just to wrap things up this afternoon, and you can check out the pre print platform on these slides. Everybody's going to get a recording of this session as Michelle's been talking about the pre print platform gives you access to the latest research you can get in there and comment on emerging science if you could just knock the slides forward just one more for me. We do have a digital editing service which I've been banging on about quite a lot this afternoon this evening as well so do have a look at that we appreciate your feedback. The main reasons that we provide these links in the webinar we know that you're all experienced researchers, getting started or well into your careers so any feedback you can give us on our editing services in particular this digital editing service would be absolutely fantastic. And if I could just finally jump to the last slide in our slide deck this afternoon. Thank you so much for joining us everybody AJ e.com is the research square company professional services site you can get information, grant services, journal recommendations, figure preparation, formatting and of course English language editing. Gareth 10. My name, number 10 will give you a 10% discount on all of our AJE products and services, and that doesn't expire so you can share that with your children's give it to your family, share it with your children, spread it around the world 10% discount on all of our AJE products and services and so with that it just remains for me to say, Michelle, thank you very much for your participation and for the wonderful presentation today and everybody else. Thank you so much for joining us we'll see you again at the end of next month in our next research square company, global webinar have a great afternoon everybody a great evening stay safe and take care. Take care.