 Hi, my name is Caitlin and I'm the Scholarly Communication Informationist at the Welch Medical Library, and I'm going to talk about preprints and preprint journal clubs. First, I'm going to start with just the peer definition. What are preprints? So preprints, according to the NIH are a complete and public draft of the scientific document. They're typically not peer reviewed, but they are written often in the style of a peer reviewed journal article. Scientists issue preprints to speed dissemination, establish priority, obtain feedback, and offset publication bias, and this is a definition from the NIH. On the other hand, journal articles are perhaps quite obvious to you, peer reviewed articles that appear in and have been published in academic journals. Another sort of definition that I want to provide is that of an author accepted manuscript, and the reason for this is that there are lots of different versions of your research. And they're often called different things, and you often have different rights to share different versions, though journal policies might be a little bit confusing about what and what what you can do and when you can do it. So a preprint, again, is the version that precedes formal peer review. Preprint is often made available before publication in a journal in repositories like archive, bio archive, med archive. They're posted, they're posting as often or not often, but sometimes required by funders. And sometimes journals do require you to either link to your final version or take down your preprint upon publication. It's really important to know which journals have which policies and I'll give you some resources for that. Some researchers also annotate each other's preprints, and it's a common practice in particular disciplines. It's a really good way to sort of when you think about the core values of science, perhaps for some it might be, you know, I do my analysis and I share my work and with all my fellow scientists and then we comment and make it better and then we submit it to a journal. There's also an authors accepted manuscript, like I said, and this is often called either an author final manuscript or you might see postprint. You can find authors final manuscripts, it's a searchable field in PubMed Central, for example. And this is the version of your research that is peer reviewed, and it is preceded it precedes publication and journal as well, but it is again peer reviewed. It might not include copy editing it might not be formatted like it would be in the final PDF that has publishers glossy logo on it, for example, but is often also a version that might be required by funding agencies to be made publicly available. And a lot of journals actually do allow you to make this version publicly available in a repository or a personal website. It just depends on the journal and it's often not widely advertised on the journals website that you can do this. I'm going to go through a quick timeline of publishing really because we're at this really strange moment where there are so many preprints about COVID being published that it's really interesting to see how much the publishing business model or landscape has not changed until now. So in 1665 that's when the first journal was established and that's the philosophical transactions of the Royal Society. And all the way to the 1950s that's when the peer review system becomes widely utilized, and it's not until the 1990s to journal move online, obviously to an online environment on the web. In 1991 is that's when archive was established and that's the first footprint repository. It's really interesting again to see that as a scholarly communication informationist librarian, I'm often involved in a lot of open access work and open access. A lot of the big initiatives and the Budapest open access initiative, for example, that did not come until much later in 2011 the Center for Open Science provides positive platforms for several disciplines and in 2013 is when bio archive was released from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. And then again 2019 Met Archive from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. What was really interesting is when Met Archive was released we had a researcher from Hopkins reach out to us to the library to one of our informationists and say, great that there's now an archive a footprint repository for the medical clinical sciences because when I was working in the field during the Ebola outbreak preprints were the only way that I was getting any data to be able to kind of advance science and help find treatments for this. This is an example of what a preprint repository looks like in here you can see that this is met archive. There is a caution here that there are preliminary reports that have not been certified by peer review and that they should be not not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health related behavior. It also makes a really interesting note at the end that I will talk about a little bit later about media engagement with preprints that these should not be reported in the news as established information so you're going to see how some journalists and some media have signal when they're using or citing a preprint. This is what it looks like when you drill down by subject area and this is I will say for a lot of my informationist colleagues were excellent searchers precision searchers systematic reviews they're really talented at what they do. It might be quite frustrating for them to search for a search through preprint repositories because it really is keyword and subject area based. So you're really getting information. This is for example cell biology all of the papers under cell biology and you could add some keywords but to limit it but it is not doesn't have the same robust capability as like a PubMed be able to limit down research. This is what a paper looks like. This is one example of a SARS-CoV-2 paper that was published in the preprint repositories and you can also see some information about article usage here when you scroll over on this is actually a different article. But this here you can see things some altmetric information like 41 news outlets have picked up this research. It was tweeted over 1500 times and there are 239 leaders of this preprint on my play. Another question I often get is which journals do and do not accept preprints. So right now I only know of the New England Journal of Medicine that does not. I think encourage preprints but there are many many many that do including some of the big ones you might have heard of. Many of them listed here. So we have PNAS science nature and science and nature even have people who look through preprint repository. The Lancet encourages preprints. E-Life of course and plus. So there's many more not listed here that encourage it. How do you know whether or not you can post a preprint or it's allowed by the journal? First is a list of academic journals by preprint policy. So this is a Wikipedia page where you are welcome to check out if you search the list of academic journals by preprint policy on Google you should be able to get right into the Wikipedia page that lists the journals and their policies according to their preprint policies. And then Sherpa Romeo is also a really good resource for understanding not only your rights to post a preprint but whether or not you can post and share in other platforms different versions of your research like the publishers PDF that post print or authors found a manuscript or preprint on a website in an institutional repository on your personal website and lots of other places. So that's a really good place for that information. It might also include per journal information about whether or not the journal has an embargo period for your PDF and lots of kind of relevant information about your sharing ability. So why are we talking about this other than there's lots and lots of preprints that are being published out there today. So that there is a huge delay in the traditional publication process as you can kind of see from that 1665 all the way to 1991 as one preprints came on the scene. For publication times for submission to publication in journals PubMed has a median of seven months, but it can be up to three years. Whereas in bio archive and that archive it could be 24 hours before research is disseminated. So again, looking at this delay and seeing where we where we started to where we've come with met archive right now and all of the probably 3000 plus preprints that are in met archive and bio archive about COVID. There's a lot of changes that are happening. Stephen Quake has studied this a bit and he is a professor of bio engineering and physics at Stanford University and he's also the co-president of the Chan Zuckerberg bio hub. He has done some analysis to suggest that we could speed up scientific discovery five fold in 10 years if everyone decides to post a preprint instead of waiting for that traditional process to happen with journal publication. So more information about why why post preprints. So we actually hosted so Welsh Medical Library in the School of Public Health hosted and collaborated on a preprint panel and this was about the role of preprints in the scholarly ecosystem with the post doc. Samantha Hendo from bio archive. Arturo Casadoval from the School of Public Health, Cynthia Wolberger from the School of Medicine and our post doc was Sarvinas Sarabipur. And they talked about lots of different reasons why preprints are happening why they're important and why it might be of a benefit to post them. So first research can be disseminated again immediately without embargoes and Cynthia Wolberger talked about as an NIH reviewer often she and others do not often want to see the term in progress anymore they want to read the work that's happening in its draft form. So please post a preprint. Richard Siever talked about bio archive and met archive not ranking papers like some other entities might and that 78 to 80% of papers in preprint repositories might do end up in journals. Sarvinas Sarabipur talked about expanding diversity of peer reviewers. She gave some really interesting statistics about the same of those that are asked to peer review. Most people ask men to peer review, even women, and then the stats about and the stats are linked directly in here so apologies if I misquote, but she said that of 20% of the same people that review the papers all the time and are always asked to peer review only 20% of that 20% are women. So really think about the ways that engaging with preprints and preprint journal clubs which I'll talk about later could expand diversity of peer reviewers and encourage researchers to ask more women to peer review. Engage their early career researchers and fellows and postdocs in this process for example. Something else really interesting that has really changed the narrative in within the scholarly communication landscape is establishing primacy. For so long I had heard some some pushback and concern about being scooped so if I post my preprint out there then my ideas will be scooped my data will be scooped. Recently I heard from a team at Hopkins that they had been scooped by a preprint. They were rushing to get their research out there they had some really exciting and novel insights in their field. But a preprint was published before they were able to submit their research. Finally, expanding your readership. We I showed you some of those stats about kind of where research and preprints are picked up on social media by the news, etc. And there are some examples that Arturo Casa de Val gave about his engage his media engagement and social media engagement with his preprints that has been been turned into journal articles. And yet there are still our concerns. So some of the concerns that I hear a lot are that the basic review by repositories could permit incorrect information to be posted. This is definitely not limited to preprints. We are probably all familiar with some of the big contributors to misinformation that have come from peer reviewed journals articles for example and just the whole idea of retractions and these retractions coming from really prestigious journals and that that does happen all the time. The general public may also think it's been peer reviewed when they come across a preprint. So that's something that is I'll show you a little bit about how the media has dealt with this with signaling. So there have been some concerns about do is if a preprint if you get a DIY when you are establishing your primacy you put your paper up as a preprint and now you are the one asserting that you were published this information and you have your copyright to that that paper. The PDF might also receive a PD at a DIY and there is some linking that needs to happen to ensure that there's not multiple versions floating around. The promotion and tenure system might also not yet highly value preprints. I do wonder if that will change and I do know that you can their siteable materials and you can put a preprint in your CV signal does a preprint. And then there's also the need to understand some licensing options so whether or not you're again allowed to post a preprint but whether you retain your copyright to that preprint and in bio archive you are the owner of your research. So I mentioned signaling this is a New York Times columnist a tweet from him talking about a preprint and you can see his caveat here that has not been pre reviewed. These are ways that other media outlets have engaged with preprints and written about them describe them that might be of interest so here we have science magazine and PR CNN so you're both seeing how they're signaling that their preprints but also that the media is seeing a change in the way that science is being disseminated. And this leads us to talking about preprints and COVID-19. So what is really fascinating here is the rate of preprints or the way that again publishing has been changing with throughout epidemics and pandemic. So right now, we don't have the ability or we can't wait three years to read COVID research and be able to innovate. But what's interesting is during the 2003 SARS epidemic 93% of the papers were published after the epidemic had ended. Well, there's already probably over 3000 now but since I last updated this since January they're already over 2700 preprints related to COVID. So the preprint repository tour is here by archive met archive normally received about 100 submissions per day for all some disciplines are receiving 100 today about COVID. So it's both obviously concerned for we have to think about quality and quantity at the same time, but this dissemination and scientists wish to really kind of think about how do we innovate how do we solve this problem when we really need it. And this is the direct screenshot of the aggregated COVID SARS cove to preprints in met archive and bio archive which these two repositories have correlated them into one link here. And again, some more concerns just because we have to talk about them, but there really is a bigger issue, a much bigger picture issue about misinformation and the internet so transparency is key. So while the hydrochloric paper was on met archive, some of the information was also published as well so there are some things to think about about the ethics of sharing particular treatments, etc. As a preprint when you can't always be sure that people are understanding that it's not peer reviewed science so we, many researchers do I think understand that peer review might not catch everything and be the end all be all as well, but it is the best system that we do have for that. There are pros and cons of fast versus thorough but signaling does help so this is a PNS PNAS article about the need to have signals around trustworthy information and signaling the trustworthiness of science we encourage everybody to take a look. I also really want to point out this really great resource from the from Hawkins this is a school public health 2019 novel coronavirus research compendium. So this is a really interesting project and I feel like it signaling some of the changes that are happening in scholarly communication and the way that we review engage with and collaborate crop globally to kind of innovate and ensure quality of literature that's coming out agnostic of or totally independent of whether or not it's published in a journal and an open access journal subscription journal in a platform in a repository on a website if you see it on social media. So what this group does is they rapidly curate and assess literature on SARS code to and COVID-19 to inform the public health community during the pandemic so they will summarize the research and it comes from journals it comes from pre print repositories. And summarize and then discuss some of the limitations of the study so this is also really interesting tool that could perhaps be used in a pre print journal club. Similarly here's a platform that was spun up in January response to COVID. This aggregates from different repository pre print repositories some of the literature based around outbreaks are about outbreaks and it's encourages researchers to engage with the pre prints and rate them on the group asked for please review three each scientist if you reviewed three papers this would be this would really help improve the research that's out there. So that's sort of their call to action. These are some of the questions that are asked in order to encourage a good review of a pre print and to advance it to the next stage. And so I'm going to talk about pre print journal clubs and really briefly. It's exactly what it looks like it's a journal club that examines and assesses pre prints. And there's lots of things you can do with it but I really wanted to point out. Dr. Castle Deval Hopkins researcher. He has written an editorial about the benefits of using pre prints and journal clubs. The first is that pre prints are free to anyone with an internet connection you don't have to go through the library to get access you don't have to pay a fee or hit a pay wall etc to get a research pre prints are often the most current form of scientific literature as well and presenting pre prints will give the journal club members the ability to participate in peer review because the comments and criticisms that are generated during the discussion can be posted on the pre print servers so not only are you keeping it in house but teaching early career researchers or your fellow scientists peers or students how to comment and criticize and advanced scientific literature but you can actually translate to that real world and put it in a platform and send it out to the rest of the world for improvement. Using pre prints also de emphasizes the current focus on selecting articles from high impact journals impact factor has long been sort of misattributed and misused and been biased so journal impact factor does not always mean that it has the best science in it. Journal impact factor is a journal level metric that does not quite tell you much information about the particular science in the article. So that's where pre print journal clubs are engaging with the articles and the content and value that is within the articles rather than focusing on trying to impress your colleagues because you're picking an article from a really high impact journal and a lot of high impact journals have published a lot of science that has been retracted so not to say that that's any correlation or causation there but it's just an interesting note that you really shouldn't assume that just because an article is in a high impact journal that it is the best science that's out there and finally pre prints might allow a later analysis of the work by comparing the pre print with the final paper and this could be really interesting for kind of a different form of assessment within a journal club instead of reading the article and either making suggestions for improvement tearing it apart talking about how wonderful it is you can actually see that change between what was it as a pre print and where did it end up so what review what edits might have taken place in order to get it to its final publishable state. And this is the similar platform by pre review and this is an example of what the platform looks like and it's used to it's it's meant to crowdsource pre print reviews. So this is very similar to the outbreak science platform. That's all I have. Thank you for taking time to learn about pre prints and pre print journal clubs.