 I'd like to talk to you today about preprints, and about preprints and neuroinformatics, and ask this question of, well, where are we at with this? So let me first start with the story. This is Professor Ron Vale. He was at UCSF, and a few years ago he noticed that his graduate students were taking a long time to graduate with their first author publication. And he looked at some data and he realised that it genuinely was taking years longer to get that first author publication. He dug into it and he saw that if you looked at the amount of panels in the figures that there's a lot more data being crammed into each publication, of course we all kind of know why this is, is that everyone is racing to get very high prestigious journals on their CV so they can move forward with their career. So publishing is being tied to evaluation processes. Now Ron and a lot of other people were like, hang on a second, can we really help this situation? Can we help to break apart the fact that publishing and evaluation are so tied up together and it's really taking a very long to get every bit of science out? So in 2016 Ron and my colleague Jessica helped co-organise this meeting of publishers, of funders, of journal editors to discuss the use of preprints in biology and whether it could be something that could happen. And this was the start of ASAP Bio. ASAP Bio is a non-profit, it's based in the US, and we are a biologist-driven organisation with a mission and that mission is to improve transparency and innovation in life sciences communication. So what we do is we research and produce informational resources about preprints to help you to make an informed choice in this space. We also speak to a lot of researchers, that's what I'm here to do today, to promote awareness and information about preprints and to encourage you to talk to each other about it a lot more. We are actually a very small team, so there's me, there's Jessica, who helped co-found ASAP Bio. We've also got someone working with us on a particular project and I'd really like to point out Ron and Jessica really what ASAP Bio was until I joined them a few months ago and Jessica's made most of these slides before. I've always adapted them but really this slide says hers. And actually ASAP Bio is all of you. It started as a hashtag so actually it's a social movement as well and you can absolutely be involved. We're funded by a lot of research funders. Here are the specific ones who fund the preprints side of the work, which is what I do. And it's already been introduced but I come with my own biases. It's very nice to see someone talk about change in publishing and how E-Life are helping with that. I also am on the board of directors for DRIAR to care a lot about data sharing and I used to be in neuroscience but I can't pretend that I really understand your talks anymore. I'm sorry. Okay, so why preprints in biology? What's happening in neuroinformatics? And actually what I really want to do I want to get onto this part of the talk where I actually ask you what would you want to happen with preprints in neuroinformatics? So this is how it's going to... This is the structure of my talk. So I'm sure we all recognise this is the traditional publishing process. A lot of it happens behind doors. You submit to a journal. You might have to submit to several journals. You might get rejected, be asked to revise and then ultimately months to years later there's a peer reviewed paper that's out in the open. Who's frustrated by this? Can you put your hands up if you're frustrated by this? I put my hands up. You can put both hands up if you like. I'm going to ask you to do this quite a few times. So this is kind of like a practice run, the exercising. There you go, okay. So a few of you are frustrated by this. So, preprints. Preprints are complete scientific manuscripts that are shared openly online before journal organised peer review. That's the definition. Now peer review is also essential. A lot of scientists think peer review is essential and actually preprints aren't here to replace peer review. What they do is they work alongside peer review to make your work available almost immediately. They take a couple of days to get online when you send them to a preprint server and then some community feedback and discussion can happen on the preprint all the while the journal process is happening and then actually what you've done is that you've shared your work a lot earlier yet you still get to be published in a journal. Okay, so who's read a preprint? Can you put your hand up? Wow, that's most of you. Okay, brilliant. This is a preprint on bioarchive. It's not the only preprint server, but it's definitely a dominant one. So this is what it looks like when you hit a page for a preprint and preprints are fully featured for more scientific outputs. You can see these slides online. There's a bit link at the bottom. So I'm not going to spend too long on this, but I would like to point out that it tells you on the preprint page if it's now being published. It's the most recent version and this when it hasn't been published says this content is not yet peer reviewed. So it's very obvious to people arriving at this page that it's not been peer reviewed. There are lots of benefits for posting a preprint and I call out... Actually, I've got... Sorry. I call out here this Accelerate Discovery bit because I want to talk about it more later and it's the one that's more of a collective benefit as well. These grey ones are all very much individual benefits that you can pick and choose, is one that I really want to talk to you about. We've got some evidence of this. There's some early evidence about the science of preprints are starting to come out. This was a preprint a couple of months ago and that the journal article, if it's been preprinted, the journal article itself has on average one and a half times more citations than journal articles that have not been preprinted. This is citations on the journal article, not on the preprint. So there is definitely a visibility advantage going on. We hear a lot of stories where young or sorry, early career researchers talk about how they've managed to get their next job because they've preprinted their work. This is not an uncommon story. Actually, there's a lot of funders now that use preprints or talk about preprints and their policies. They encourage their researchers to preprint and they're using it as evidence of productivity and applications and reporting. I'm not surprised because this preprinting is not a new thing and if you look back to the 1960s, there's an experiment that the NIH did in America where they got scientists to share amongst each other their manuscripts in a closed circle and they estimated that this exercise, because of all the benefits that scientists reported from doing this experiment, actually saved $30,000 per preprint per year and that's adjusted to today's figures. That's quite a lot of money. I'm sure you'll agree so it's clear why funders are interested. As I said, it's not a new thing. It's been happening in physics and other disciplines for decades now and we're at this point now when preprinting biology started to take off. This is the number of preprints per month over years at various preprint servers that's now exhaustive. Amidst this graph is this whole context of a lot of policy development and tool development and things that are really helping preprints to happen. We're now at the situation today where there are a lot of preprint servers. They're not all relevant to all of us but basically a preprint server is anywhere that anyone has posted a preprint available on the web and some that are generic and some that are very community specific. I'll focus mainly on bioarchive in this talk because it's definitely the most dominant one in our situation right now. Okay. So, neuroinformatics. That was a very quick tour of preprints in biology very general. It's probably not new to you but let's actually get to what might be happening in the room. So we know that neuroscience is a major contributor of preprints. Now this isn't adjusted to how big a field neuroscience is. It's not really a comment on how many neurosciences are preprinting but if you look at preprints as a whole a lot of them are neuroscience preprints. On top this is neuroscience submissions in bioarchive and on bottom and on bottom this is in the quantitative biology section of archive. This pink one is neurons and cognition. I think that's what they call it. It's the NC. So there's a lot of neuroscience preprints out there. Okay. And a lot of the keynotes of this conference I did a bit of research. Actually a lot of them have preprints themselves so this is not unfamiliar territory for you all. So now we get to this point again where I like to ask you to put your hand up. So I'm just curious if you've ever posted a preprint would you mind putting your hand up? Okay it's about half. Have you ever cited one? Has anyone ever cited one in a tool core? And has anyone ever actually commented on a preprint? Oh wow that's more than I expected. Okay interesting. Thank you. Thank you. I'm still a researcher at heart. But this is a thing. So that's actually quite a lot of you. But we need to remember that we're a bias audience here. The INCF is all about sharing. People are very receptive to the idea of open and collaborative science. So I'm not surprised it's neuroscience and you're an open group. So a lot of people put hands up. But actually when we look at it preprinting is still quite early compared to all of biomedical science. So there's clearly some stuff that we need to do. So some work we need to do if we think that it's what needs to happen. There's a lot of reasons why people aren't preprinting as well. Here's some of the common concerns we hear when we go out and we speak to people. I'm very happy to cover any of these concerns in the discussion afterwards. You can talk to me individually as well. I've had these conversations a lot. And I've got some data and some evidence and some open questions to reflect back at you as well. So if you want to talk about it, please just come and talk to me. It's what I'm here for. Okay. So I'd like to pause. So that was a very quick fire. What's happening with preprints are near informatics and I could stop there. But I don't want to stop there because actually you've invited me into your space and I feel comfortable to raise some questions with you actually because what I really want is a discussion. Because I think there's an elephant in the room. And I think that we actually need to start thinking about our values in science and some of you already are and I'm not saying that you're not thinking about these things but you're not thinking about my time thinking about the value of science communication because it's now my job. And when I was in research at the lab I probably thought about it a little bit but I didn't have much time. So I'm coming here to share with you some questions that have emerged in my brain because I have the privilege of spending many hours thinking about preprinting and communicating and publishing science. So I'd like us to think about these questions when we come to sharing our science. What are you sharing? When are you sharing it? And with whom are you sharing it? Because I think these questions are really important. I know that I think that I want science to change. It's one of the reasons I left the lab. I want science to become more open. I want it to be more collaborative. I want it to be a bit more efficient. I really want science to bring benefit to society and there's some things that I see happening that I think aren't very helpful. We've all discussed these things already so I don't think that's uncommon when it comes to sharing to this space. Our values may be shared, they may be different. That's totally okay but I'd just like to have a conversation about it really. And I have this question because one of the benefits of preprints that we thought when we started ASAP Bio was that they should accelerate science. But I don't think that's a foregone conclusion. I think it's still a question. Will preprints really accelerate science? And will they really help with open science whatever that means to you? And will they really be reusable when we think about the fair terminology? So I can tell you that preprints are definitely not open and fair by default. For sure they're not because this relies on licensing and the majority of preprints on Bioarchive are not open access because they're not associated with a permissive licence for reuse. That's okay, that's the author's decision. You can decide to licence it however you like but I think it's really important that we don't conflate preprints with open automatically. We do have a resource that talks through licensing if you're interested and if you try to publish in journals that might be a bit difficult with licensing you should check that general policy first as well. We've got some resources, all these red things link to external resources and I've got a print out as well which has got loads of links on it and a bitly link so you can easily find all this information. Preprints could be the first step in peer review. There's a lot of people talking about this at the moment. There's a notable editor in chief of an open access journal who keeps tweeting about it as well and what the vision is, it has been for quite some time with journals now actually, is that peer review could be done on preprints that could help to show the sound science and then those sound science papers are curated into different channels for people to see and maybe that would be more efficient. That's still to be tested but it's an idea that's really percolating right now. There are some people that are doing this on their own already so here's a preprint from someone in the room. There is actually a review of this preprint that was posted on academic comments being archived in pub peer and then the authors when they finally published it in a journal acknowledged that reviewer in their paper for the comments on the manuscript so this process is already happening individually and we do know that 10% of preprints on bioarchive at least in 2016 had public comments of some variety. We're waiting an update on this figure but we do know that actually a lot of preprint feedback happens in private on email and that we know that this rate of commenting is much more than on journals because it's pre-publication not post-publication so it kind of makes a bit more sense. There's a lot of initiatives happening to kind of help you to coordinate that kind of peer review. Some of these are community based scientists starting things on their own and we know that there's a lot of talk about journals trying to do this as well. I'd like to flag there's one for circuit neuroscience if you're interested there's a peer community in group for circuit neuroscience but it's also important to recognize that there's lots of reasons why people preprint and actually this is another preprint from somebody in the room and I think this is fantastic because it's another example of open science and people are sharing a resource for the community and if you look at it when this resource was sent to the journal it took six months to come out but then they preprinted it so it was available two months earlier if you really look at the dates there's no way that this author could ever have benefited from pre-publication comments because it was two weeks before acceptance dates so we need to incorporate those comments at that point because it's really been peer reviewed so we've really got to think about this we've got to think about why people are preprinting when you're preprinting and what it is that you want from that you may not want pre-publication review that's fine but if you do you also need to do it in a way that people can get to you before you submit to a journal that's just a fact so we need to have a discussion as to what you really want to see happen with preprints preprints are not very modern or collaborative yet so the theme of this conference was about openness and fairness and data and so I just want to reflect that question back on preprinting and whether preprints really help with reproducibility with reuse which as Carol said is a different thing and with best practices overall now I did find an excellent example of this so Camille helps organise this conference and when you look through this preprint you can see that the data is shared they explain the scripts there's a notebook they cite all the software packages they use I mean I love this and I'm really into open science so I read this and I thought this is brilliant I knew I'd get a good one so I could, if I was really interested I could get back into this if I wanted to look at this and reproduce some stuff or reuse some things I could but preprints are just PDFs on servers this is the authors doing what they want to do and other authors do things differently and I commonly read preprints that have no links to data no links to scripts no links to software packages and actually it's very hard for me to see any kind of reusable resource other than understanding the story of their work so can preprints sit at the beginning at the middle of this hub and spoke model that we're presenting to illustrate fairness are preprints really interupperable are they reusable do they really link out to the other research objects that they are related to they could do and there's actually a technological effort in your own backyard that's happening right now to potentially help this happen maybe can help drive culture change that's something that Francis just told us about and the aperture publishing platform is an idea from the open human brain mapping project JB is in the room they're thinking about these kind of issues in their plan and actually there's a lot of people involved in this so if you're interested in changing publishing for your own community I definitely recommend you speak to them because that could be a point at which this happens I'm a bit of trouble with this sorry OK but I'm here because the real issue is social it's a culture change issue and so what I'd really like to think about with you and discuss later or in this session the questions is that preprints could be a relatively easy step towards more open collaborative science because they're taking a manuscript that you already have and asking you to post it in its PDF form when you submit it to a journal that's something you could very easily do today it might take a few extra minutes but progress towards this whole vision of open and collaborative and reproducible and reusable science very much depends on how we use these tools and that's all about knowing what we want to do, what our values are what everyone else's values are what we as a community support each other to do so if you collectively only use preprints as a faster way to publish and not perish and by this I mean stake your claim, get visibility get peer endorsement, get some recognition that leads to being funded to work on your ideas which is fine, that's all very good if that's what preprints are used for then that is what they'll be that's just a simple statement of fact it's it's really not surprising because I started this story with the fact that publishing is tied to evaluation and that's slowing things down and preprints could help relieve some of that pressure and if that's what they're doing then that's fine, that's what they're doing but there is a bigger vision here the bigger vision is that actually communicating science is about exchanging knowledge and information and accelerating science for the benefit to society and that is a grand vision that lots of people are working on and it's very hard to get there but preprints could play a part and if that's what you would like to happen then that's actually what we need to discuss because we need to think about how we might be using preprints in that way because it matters so my call to you is that preprints are tool to be shaped there's lots of reasons why you might do them for your own reasons and for scientific reasons but they're not a panacea and it's not automatic that they're going to solve issues in science and actually it's up to you to use them productively for the science that you're doing when we build tools that shapes practices our practices shape the tools we build and so there's this like fortuitous cycle or not that could be happening with preprints I'll end with this this is not all on you we're here to help, this is my day job is to help produce information resources and help you have discussions you can help with social change that's mainly the best thing you could do is to talk to each other and to know your values and the values of other people around you and why you are or are not preprinting this bitly link at the bottom is this one page information it has a lot of links that links out into our website but if you would like some simple take home one sheet information just to find out more I've got some for that some of that with me today how am I doing on time, am I am I good, well I'm at questions so there we go one of the side effects of preprints I would say was many people with whom I talk they say okay we'll submit some revision to preprint openly and then we publish final version in you know not open access open access journal so then we have access only to some version which might not be final might not be peer reviewed but then you know file inversion is behind the pay wall and that kind of it didn't it so that was their excuse to go for high profile but not open access so how to treat those people are we still friends I think we should always still be friends because we are working through this together I think you bring a really important point at the end of this slide deck that says that preprints are not green archiving I think this is really really critical when you talk about green archiving that is putting an accessible version of your peer reviewed manuscript online for others to see so preprints do not lead you to ticking the open access box for a lot of funders they're talking about the peer reviewed version so it's not really an excuse however it is really important I don't have institutional affiliations I use unpay wall there might be an archived copy if there's not there might be a preprint copy which is not the ideal version for me to look at because I have no idea what's changed but at least it gets me some of the way there so I don't think it's a good reason to preprint I don't think open access is not ticking that box but it's helpful to share your science and if that's all someone can do at this point then maybe that's what they can do then maybe we need to think about how can we help them to do the next step to be a bit more open with their final version I'll tell them to talk to you One more question I saw in one of your slides but you didn't talk about overlay journals as a strategy for having organized science and sort of review or endorsement without maybe all the slow parts like I have an overlay journal I put some preprints in there and probably no one reads it but it's like I've given it my stamp of approval and that counts for something and if someone had just given me their stamp of approval that would count for something is that part of a possible strategy or is that just silly? If it's a part of a strategy for you then it's part of a strategy I think it's fair it's exactly like Carol saying the fair is like this idea and we haven't quite agreed what it all means just yet and an overlay journal people say open science isn't that just science maybe overlay journals are just journals and that's what that is because someone's website saying I read these five preprints this week and I think they're really interesting is very different to XML produced manuscripts that are interoperable with a whole system of publishing and so there's a whole spectrum of what a journal is and actually as a community we need to really tick box we need this, we don't need this this is the actual cost of what this is to do this, how do we fund this there's a whole bigger conversation I won't go into it there's a whole conversation about this so let me rephrase that since you're plugged in in a way that I'm not into this what are people saying what are people doing what's getting momentum where do overlay journals stand as a strategy okay I'm being filmed aren't I there are scientists led efforts to coordinate peer review on preprints that are excellent journals have a lot of power in this system and if they think that's a threat to their model they can choose to ignore that peer review because they want to conduct a peer review in order to maintain this power for their own commercial reasons which is it's like a statement of fact I don't think it's that controversial to say that so whether these scientists led efforts to do peer review on preprints actually become a success or not really depends on which journals they work with and I think it's really interesting that there are journals now thinking about producing a service and also like my own personal bias is that I think editors are really important and there are scientists editors there are academic editors but there are also the editors who do it as a profession like the same way that I've stepped out of science and I do this as a profession gives me the ability to practice skills that actually like I need a lot of time to develop and I think that some professional editors really are excellent at doing that so we want to think about how we work them into the system as well whether it's to be successful or not I don't have a magic ball I'm sorry but we know that journals have consistently like some publishers have consistently shaped and it's about really getting to the heart of whether we let that continue