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Preprints and New Content
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Preprints and New Content
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Just watching all the attendees flood in. Great to see everyone. OK, it looks like the flood is slowing down now. So we're going to get started. So welcome to New Directions in Preprints and New Content. My name is Sylvia. My pronouns are she, her, and hers.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: I am the Marketing Manager at Inera and also the Community Manager at Atypon. I am very busy, and I'm very excited to be moderating this panel. I want to thank the New Directions Working Group and the SSP DE&I Committee. And particularly Alexa Colella and Ben Madrick and Alice Meadows for their help in both shaping this panel and recruiting the panelists.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: So about the panelists, I've been involved in at least three other panels about preprints in 2021. And I started to notice a lot of repeat speakers, which is not to say that those speakers aren't great, they are great. But one of my goals in putting together this trio of speakers for New Directions-- emphasis on New Directions-- was to make sure that the SSP community hears some voices that we haven't heard a bunch of times before.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: So I'm going to ask them to briefly introduce themselves, and then we're going to dive right in with some questions. I am going to go in alphabetical order by first name. And so I'm going to ask Alex Freeman to introduce yourself first.
ALEX FREEMAN: Thank you very much, and hi, everybody. So I'm Alex Freeman. I'm the director of a not-for-profit company called Octopus, which is trying to change scholarly publishing. And because most of you probably don't know much about me or Octopus, I'm just going to give you a little bit of background so that where I'm coming from and why I'm excited to be talking about preprints today. So as you all know, the scientific publishing system has a lot of problems.
ALEX FREEMAN: So I came to it thinking, what could we do if we started again? Because we can. And Octopus has a lot in common with preprint servers, and I suspect that when Octopus launches next spring, it will behave a bit like one, initially at least. But what Octopus actually does is to split apart two jobs that are currently both being done by journals, and that's both the dissemination of relevant findings to audiences who want a concise, easy-to-read narrative on the one hand, and the recording of full details of all the work that researchers do, including the data, the code, the failures, the blind alleys on the other hand.
ALEX FREEMAN: And these are two very different types of communication and I think need different systems with different incentive structures. Journals do the first brilliantly, and I think we need a new 21st century digital-first primary research record to do the latter. And that it should be free, fast, and fair. And the free and the fast is what I think we have in common with preprint servers.
ALEX FREEMAN: As soon as all authors have clicked Publish, your publication goes up, and at no cost. But the difference with Octopus is that it's not papers that people are publishing. I think the paper has a lot to answer for. Science is not a linear process and requires a lot of specialist skills for different aspects. So Octopus abolishes the paper and the pressures towards questionable research practices that that kind of artificial linear narrative creates.
ALEX FREEMAN: And instead it carries eight different types of publication reflecting different specialist areas of the scientific process, and each has to be linked to another. So you can't publish results without linking it to the appropriate methods. And one of those types of publication is a peer review, which is treated like any other piece of work.
ALEX FREEMAN: So again, that's a slight difference from preprint servers at the moment, but preprint servers are definitely going in that direction where peer review is a sort of integral part of the platform. And there's also the question of quality metrics. So that a fair bit of free, fast, and fair. And I think the scholarly publishing system at the moment is a really terrible proxy measures for quality.
ALEX FREEMAN: And all metrics are proxies, but I think we could at least get a little bit closer if we design them carefully. So in Octopus, we have ratings of publications on three predefined criteria that are chosen to best define what we as a community think good means for each type of publication, and the ability to red flag serious concerns about publication. And also as having the option to reversion their publications, which is, again, similar to preprint servers there.
ALEX FREEMAN: And finally, I think as another important bit to being fair, and that is to remove barriers and bias and hierarchy. And some of that's being done by preprint servers in removing gatekeepers to publication, but I think we need to go further, and I want to avoid things like the use of first names of authors on publications and photos on authors pages, and in Octopus I hope to build in automatic language translation to make it truly language-agnostic so that everyone who reads and writes in their native language completely seamlessly.
ALEX FREEMAN: So in a very brief form, that's where I'm going to be coming from in this discussion.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Thank you, Alex. Joy, please go ahead.
JOY OWANGO: Thank you, Sylvia. I'm the Executive Director of the Training Center and Communication. It's a research capacity trust based at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. And its objective is to support researchers, research institutes, and governments on how they can improve their research output through scholarly and science communication training. And I also sit on the board of AfricaArXiv, which is Africa's first preprint repository and publishing platform.
JOY OWANGO: And Training Center and Communication is also a founding project partner of AfricaArXiv. One of the reasons why we feel taking part in this conference is important is because preprints have been a game-changer when it comes to the visibility of African research output. And not only that, we are looking at a situation whereby we have a platform where you are able to index research output in indigenous languages, bearing in mind so far, English is still being considered as the language of science, but unfortunately you have a situation whereby countries whose national language is not English is producing research and the work is written in the indigenous languages.
JOY OWANGO: So now we have a platform where you are able to have access to research output in those indigenous languages, which goes to show that we are actually contributing to the research community, the global knowledge when it comes to research in any particular topic. But most importantly, why this seminar is important to us is also we are here to learn on how can we build trust with authors?
JOY OWANGO: How can we learn to be more sustainable? Because I keep on saying this, the fun times over. We know why we need preprint repositories. The question is, how do we make them sustainable? What are other partners doing? What are the lessons they've learned? What are the challenges they are going through? Because we need to be realistic. In order for us to win the trust of authors, we need to learn to be sustainable.
JOY OWANGO: And as much as funding is exciting, it is one way of supporting a preprint repository, but we need to think like business people and ask ourselves, how are we going to be sustainable in making sure that the preprint repository can last more than 20 years or more than 30 years? And at the same time, how do we win the trust of authors in regards to the quality of preprints that have been produced?
JOY OWANGO: How we win the trust of readers in terms of what they are going to be using to site their research or referring to their research? So being part of this panel is more of a learning experience for us, but most importantly, sharing what we've been doing in the last three years. Thank you, Sylvia.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Thank you, Joy. And please go ahead, Michele.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: Thanks, Sylvia. Thanks for having me on this panel. I am serving as the Editor-in-Chief of Research Square, which is a preprint platform that many of you may be familiar with because of its connection to Springer Nature. Now there is-- preprints are sort of in the path to publication for many Springer Nature journals because of an opt-in service called In Review that posts a preprint automatically to the Research Square Preprint Platform.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: So the designation of editor-in-chief might sound a little odd to those of you who understand that preprints and their platforms typically operate in sort of the outside or parallel track to traditional publishing, and one that isn't typically associated with editorial functions as we've come to know them. So what is an EIC doing at a preprint platform? Well, most of my efforts go toward thinking about how to align our policies and operations in such a way as to balance the imperative to post new research quickly and without barriers with the desire to also maintain some standard of academic integrity, and exercise caution regarding what we inject into an increasingly fragile information space, which I'm sure is going to be part of the topic of what we discuss here today and touches on what Joy was just mentioning around trust.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: So this is why I was interested in participating on this panel, because those policies and standards that govern these platforms are being shaped right now, and on the back of a 20-month long pressure test that we know is the pandemic. So this is a particularly interesting time, I think, to consider the questions that we're going to address here, and hopefully we can all challenge each other on some points that I think are genuinely difficult and come away with some new insights and some ideas to improve the status quo for preprints.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING:
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Thank you, all. So we're going to move along now to our first question. I've titled the slides, Preprints versus the World-- preprints contra mundum. So the questions that I would like everyone to address are, first of all, what are the headwinds, the obstacles facing preprints as a new form of communicating research? And secondly, what are the problems or shortcomings inherent in preprints as they exist right now?
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Can I get a volunteer to speak first on this topic? Go ahead, Joy.
JOY OWANGO: OK. The obvious shortcomings facing preprints today is trust. People are seeing the massification of research output and they're questioning whether they are going through rigorous processes in making sure that whatever is produced is good quality. So when you're looking at some of the problems is, how do you win the trust of authors?
JOY OWANGO: How do you win the trust of authors who are going to submit their manuscripts in the preprint repositories? How are you going to win the trust of authors who are going to use that repository as a platform to get-- to do their research discovery or whatever literature search they're doing? But those are the obvious shortcomings that come to mind. But when you're looking at the headwinds facing preprints as a new form of communication research, I see from a progressive academic publishing perspective whereby the traditional aspect of academic publishing is being challenged, because there is a demand-- as I said, it's a bit of a double-edged sword.
JOY OWANGO: There's a demand for research output. There's a demand for rapid access to research output, hence the massification of the output. And the demand today is because we are a knowledge economy. 10, 15 years ago, we would be patient enough to wait for the results to be shared with us. But with the rise of pandemics, with the rise of technology, we are demanding to have access to knowledge. So the headwinds facing preprints is that-- I'm seeing it from an adoption of being progressive in academic publishing, but then it comes with the shortcomings-- it comes with the challenges on whether the output is good quality and whether the authors can be trusted.
JOY OWANGO: The authors can trust the output that is being produced or authors can actually trust the platforms where they're submitting their manuscripts as preprints.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Thank, Joy.
ALEX FREEMAN: Shall I come in with some thoughts?
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Yes, please.
ALEX FREEMAN: So I've got-- yeah. A couple of thoughts. So firstly, I think that the reason that preprints have taken off is because it's reflecting a failure in the publishing system to get stuff out there quickly. And I don't think it's necessarily-- I slightly disagree with Joy that I don't think it's necessarily because of our thirst for the knowledge.
ALEX FREEMAN: It's that this research is vitally important to patients, to engineers, to practitioners. mean, I think it's shocking that it takes so long for research-- two years or whatever to get a paper published. And I just think that the world is right not to put up with sitting around waiting for that to happen. So I think preprints have kind of burst out of the scenes of the failures of the publishing system, but I think that I would challenge the fact that they're a new form of communicating research.
ALEX FREEMAN: Because actually, they're just publishing papers. Their papers are the same as papers have always been. So that actual form of communication is the same, it's just that people have bypassed the very slow publishing process and said, well, here you are, guys, here it is. But what that's created is a kind of buyers beware market. So now it's more like going and buying things on eBay because there's no trusted brand associated with it rather than going to buy it at a store whose brand you know and that all this stuff has been checked and comes to some quality control.
ALEX FREEMAN: Whether or not peer review actually provides an adequate quality control is a totally different matter. So maybe it's actually a good thing for buyers always to be beware and to be-- know that they have to apply their own critical faculties when reading things that are published in any form. So there's my controversial views.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: Yeah, I can weigh in a little bit on this. I view this whole story kind of shaking out potentially in one of two ways. One is just the complete disruption and paradigm shift that could be coming to the whole scholarly publishing industry as we know it, and that is totally a possible outcome of the beginnings of which we're seeing right now.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: But another one is just the absorption and kind of admission by a large publisher, small publishers that this has been an issue all along and the internet is going to give us a new way of doing things where we can put all-- we can move to post-publication, peer review, everything should be available right away and the scrutiny comes later. And their full adoption of it.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: And I we're starting to see some of that, too. I mean, our platform's integration with Springer Nature is an example of this where they've leaned into preprints and said, well, right, I mean, this is fine. To the extent that they pass some level of initial scrutiny, things should be out there early so that the community can start to decide what their value is to the world and we don't need to wait for this entire editorial process to happen in order to just share the work.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: So that could be less of a paradigm shift, really. I mean, it could just mean that publishers sort of change their way of doing things and start publishing-- everything is preprints initially and then there's this process of evaluation that happens later. I'm trying not to like attach any evaluated words to anything that I'm saying because I have my own opinions on how this should actually play out. But I do think, just to be realistic, it's possible that the second one is more likely.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: And I guess the concept of preprint review as we're seeing it sort of start to form right now. Whether that's spontaneous community review or journal-driven review of preprints, that's going to expand. But until it becomes the dominant process, then I see it-- initially it's just going to further strain an already troubled system, this problem that we have, just a shortage of peer reviewers.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: So ultimately the concept of transparent review, which will likely eventually be the standard for preprints, it promises to reduce the overall burden on peer reviewers, but this really only happens once we reach a tipping point where some considerable proportion of research is being reviewed in that way. And the reality of a preprint-first world is that it means potentially a doubling of the content that is published, meaning posted online, and thus subject to review.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: So we will have to get accustomed to a world in which not everything is peer-reviewed, and I do think this presents a cultural challenge. So I'll just throw that out there.
JOY OWANGO: Yeah. Just to add on to what Michele is saying, she pretty much is-- she's highlighting the fact that academic publishing is fluid. I mean, in the beginning, researchers used to talk in the Royal Society, they'll present-- it was oral. Then they said-- then they started writing. And now here we are. And then there was a certain style of writing. The peer review process was still there, that's why you speak to your peers.
JOY OWANGO: And now you're writing and there's a certain style of writing. You still have to go through peer review. But now with technology, what I'm seeing with preprints, it's embracing technology to make sure you have rapid access to research output. There's a demand for it. Alex, I'm still standing on the fact that there is a demand for it based on the fact that when you look at the pandemic, we've had a few pandemics in Africa.
JOY OWANGO: So we've had Ebola, we've had some of the hemorrhagic fever-type of pandemics. And we see the demand to access that information is being looked for in any way possible. The COVID-19 pandemic was global. That is why everyone felt the need to have rapid access to research output. But the demand has always been there, and the reality is, what Alex was saying and which I support, that it takes a year or two before-- by the time that is done, people have moved on.
JOY OWANGO: We need to also acknowledge that in certain research disciplines, they were quick to accommodate rapid access to research output. Anybody who was in technology, ICT, we've actually made peace with the fact that if you go to an ICT Conference, you can actually cite the conference proceedings, because technology comes out so fast. Even those in the pharmaceutical industry.
JOY OWANGO: So why not for everything else? Why all of a sudden are we having issues about preprints? It's just that we've defined it, but in my opinion, it is rapid access to research output. That's how I see it. Yeah.
ALEX FREEMAN: Can I pick up on the other points which are being made in the chats and which Michele mentioned, which is about the problem of excess demand on peer reviewers? Because I think this is a really interesting-- and I think it's a cultural issue, really. That at the moment, what's incentivized is writing and not actually collaboratively reviewing what other people have done. And it's a very kind of blinkered approach that's being encouraged.
ALEX FREEMAN: And that's why I think it would be a shame for the publishing system to change simply to adopt preprints into its system without thinking about how can we actually solve some of the other problems, and one of which is what's incentivized at the moment in scientific publishing? And incentivizing peer review-- and I know there are a lot of initiatives thinking about how to incentivize peer review, but I think that's a really important problem.
ALEX FREEMAN: Because being able to critique somebody else's work in a constructive way is a really important skill. And it's a skill that we all in research rely on other people doing for us. And I think it needs to be recognized, and therefore, the system needs to be designed around that being something that is recognized and rewarded and developed as a skill. And all of that has to come through open reviewing because you learn by reading other people's reviews and learning what a good review looks like.
ALEX FREEMAN: But also, thinking about how to make that something that's valued by institutions and by funders and by individuals as well. So I think we need to-- I think this is a real opportunity in the moment of scientific publishing or scholarly publishing as a whole to stop and think, how can we better make this work in the future rather than simply letting it sort of absorb the things that have happened and not necessarily go on in a directed and thought-through fashion.
ALEX FREEMAN:
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Thank you, all. That was a lot more discussion than I thought we'd have on one question, that's fantastic. We are going to now move on to our next question, which I think we've kind of foreshadowed a little bit. As we add more standards and review mechanisms and so on to preprints, and as journals, publish articles faster and publish more kinds of content that aren't articles, and rely less on the structure of the volume and issue, are we heading toward some kind of preprint singularity, some sort of convergence between journals and preprints?
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Who would like to go first on this one?
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: It sort of touches on what I've already mentioned, but it's starting already, isn't it? eLife is probably the best example because they now only agreed to review papers that are preprinted. But now we have journals that participate with Peer Community In which performs preprint review. We have journals getting reviews from Review Commons. We also see the major publishers leaning in.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: As I mentioned, it's not just Springer Nature, it's I think all of the major publishers now have either their own proprietary preprint platforms or are integrating with other ones. So the lines are starting to blur there for sure. I do hope to see more journals experiment with overlay models, not least because this is-- it's likely to help with the version splintering issues that we're seeing with just like a million versions of the same paper from different preprint platforms-- AAMs and in repositories and all these things that are essentially the same paper but different iterations of it, which just presents like a huge indexing problem, I think, among other among other issues.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: But I just want to echo that I agree with you, Alex. I mean, just to say my own personal views on this, like I don't think that the manuscript as we've come to understand it is the best way anymore. We're not leveraging all that the internet has to offer us, but we're sticking to this archaic form of communication and pre-registration doesn't use enough-- all these things that Octopus I know cares about. And so I really appreciate your company's efforts here.
JOY OWANGO: In my opinion, it makes business sense, because part of the reason why-- when we began this conversation, I say the fun bit is over, we need to start asking ourselves how will preprints be sustainable. And this is a perfect example of the singularity. We need to see-- the fact that we are seeing preprint repositories aligning with publishers or aligning with societies, you're seeing a way in which they are going to be-- a way in which you're going to see preprints becoming manuscripts immediately or working closely with journals or having support systems that they didn't have like peer review support systems.
JOY OWANGO: This makes business sense. That is in my opinion. Number two, it's also one of the ways in which you are able to win the trust of authors, because the authors will know that this preprint repository is in partnership with X number of journals, which makes the whole general selection strategy easier. So from a business perspective, it's the way to go. And in any case, when you're looking at the calculation of citations and downloads, it's not when the paper is already accepted in the journal, it's from when it-- the calculations start from when it's a preprint repository.
JOY OWANGO: All of that is calculated. So this process had already started in the backend, they're just defining it right now. It's not defining-- it's the next logical step for lack of better words. It is the next logical step, yes.
ALEX FREEMAN: I think that, in a way, there is a preprint journal convergence, of course, because we're seeing journals using preprints as a submission platform or as-- in all sorts of ways in their workflow. I do worry, actually, about preprint servers partly-- they could become as siloed as journals are. And I think one of the great things about a preprint server is that it breaks down the fact that it's in a particular journal.
ALEX FREEMAN: The medRxiv, PsyArXiv, all these archives are much broader than any one journal could be. And I think that's an advantage, because I think work gets hidden by being in journals. So I would worry slightly about the convergence bringing more siloing, potentially. So I think-- yeah. I think preprint servers have an interesting and different role.
ALEX FREEMAN: And I think we should think very carefully about them ending up being sort of adopted by journals, particularly journals who-- it would end up being sucked into the general system and not providing the extra benefits that they do by standing outside of the journal system. But it comes down to that resources thing of journals are where the money is, and preprint servers are currently doing all the work for free for them.
ALEX FREEMAN: So this is an important question, which I'm sure we're going to go on to talk about, how to resource them.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: OK. Thank you, everyone. Our next question is indeed about funding and resources. So how do preprint servers become sustainable? How do we fund them? How do we make the funding sustainable? How do we make it equitable? And how do we make it fair? And those are all really big questions, and I know that all of you have big things to say.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: So Joy, you look poised to speak. Please go ahead.
JOY OWANGO: Yeah. I was about to tell everyone else, let's not mention funding. Funding doesn't count. We need to think outside the box. Aligning with publishers is one way, but then I also see Alex's concern on the fact that they might end up being siloed. But last week, one of the ways that I foresee is-- because pre-print-- the preprint repository is the go-between researchers, the academic community, and publishers.
JOY OWANGO: So if you're working with academic-- with an academic community, how can we build-- how can we raise some money from that academic community? So let's say it is a university or library consortia, a minimal amount. Because at the end of the day, let's be honest, open access has a cost. It might not be as high as the traditional ways of publishing, but it does have a cost.
JOY OWANGO: So we can have a nominal equitable amount that the community can contribute to the preprint repository. In return, the research capacity support and also creating partnerships with publishers, but then being wary of what Alex had raised. Instead of-- so that you're not-- you don't find yourself attached to one publisher, but then you're as multidisciplinary as possible, but you don't find yourself in a silo.
JOY OWANGO: That is the first thing that comes-- those are the first-- those are the first few things that come to my mind, because when it is so easy to go for funding, but I believe the funding can come in to support infrastructure systems. But we need to think beyond. How will we survive once the funding is gone? And how do we protect our integrity and our independence? And that is what also-- Alex has also raised as a point of concern.
JOY OWANGO: So for me, it's building the communities and seeing how money can be raised from those communities at a nominal fee so that you can be sustainable. And making the academic community understand why this is there to help them make their work accessible. So we shouldn't be idealistic in saying, oh yes, it's open access, so it is free.
JOY OWANGO: No, there is a cost. There is-- human capital is involved in this whole process. So the question is, how do you sustain that human capital so that you are able to support the academic community with this access to their research output? Anyone else?
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: If you have something to say, please go ahead and unmute yourself. Thank you.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: Yeah. So, just as with any business, the answer is about generating revenue and minimizing costs. And for a preprint server, there are a number of approaches you might consider. I mean, the simplest one just comes to mind are nominal fees for submission. I know this is controversial, but yeah, leveraging low-cost automation to reduce the cost associated with hosting.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: A small fee could be enough to cover a really bare bones server. But as soon as you factor in screening, HTML conversion to make content more searchable, machine-readable, and features like commenting, preprint level metrics, version of record linking, and like trying to integrate preprint review services, for example, things of that nature, now you're into a completely different cost bracket.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: And there really needs to be a sustainable business model to cover those ongoing expenses. For our platform, this is about leveraging the services that our company already offers that kind of built on a manuscript services company. So we're in a good position to offer the authors who are preprinting services to help with their manuscript preparation, but improve the manuscript just on a-- for its own sake and also in preparation for getting published at a journal, which is still has a huge demonstrated value for authors.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: So that's the approach that we're taking. It's going to be a slow, and-- it's still not an easy prospect and it's very hard to get into the path of manuscript services when somebody has already decided to post a preprint, for example. But we're working on ways to make that not only sustainable for us, but also something that authors can easily afford in different parts of the world.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING:
ALEX FREEMAN: I'm probably the last person to be good at talking about sustainability, because I come from such a public service kind of background, I hate thinking about money. My fear in Octopus is to keep the costs as absolutely low as possible. And I think there are so many tools that can be built relatively cheaply these days. So I'm hoping that at launch will have quite a lot of the features that Michele is mentioning built in and maintainable by a very skeleton kind of staffing.
ALEX FREEMAN: And my hope is that-- I mean, it's sort of written in our core ethos that we would never charge authors to read or to write. My hope is that we'll be able to-- and we've got funding for the first three years. My hope is to make a service that is so useful and so good for users that the costs of it-- and so low cost that actually the costs of the service that everybody then comes to value become so minimal that it isn't difficult to raise the money-- that minimal amount of money to keep it running, which I know sounds naive, but my primary focus is on making a service that works and works well for users and works well for science.
ALEX FREEMAN: And given that we've got enough money to start it and to do that, I think that hopefully success will breed people who are willing to help us keep that as a free service. We shall see. Only time will tell. But I totally agree with the person in the Q&A who said that starting free and then wanting to charge for it is very difficult, and I totally agree, and I do not want to start something free that would ever be charged to then to users.
ALEX FREEMAN: I would hope that I would be able to sustain it through either philanthropy or funding from funders or potentially from institutions. I mean, the cost to institutions would actually be so low compared to their library budgets for journal subscriptions, that if Octopus does what I want it to do, I hope that it would be the equivalent of basically one or two journal subscriptions.
ALEX FREEMAN:
JOY OWANGO: The rise of open science led to issues regarding equitable access to resources and smart ways in investing in scholarly communication. This is why we have the rise of transformative open access agreement, so that we know how this money is being spent, how these contracts have been signed. What does this mean? It means that people are more aware on the realities regarding open science and spending money wisely.
JOY OWANGO: And also, I'm looking at the Global South, there are some countries that are willing to spend a nominal amount of money in order to access some of their resources. So like the charity Research for Life is a classic example. In some countries, it's 100% free based on the World Bank status of the countries. And in some countries, they pay a nominal fee. So you see, we are already doing that.
JOY OWANGO: So let's not even panic about it-- we're already doing that. It's an issue of justifying equitable access to resources and visibility of research output. So such that you have a situation whereby when you're presenting this business proposition-- because at the end of the day, that's what it is. To an academic institution, to a government, to a library consortia, they are not breaking the bank. They don't see that they are breaking the bank, but they see it as an opportunity for them to have their output accessible and visible.
JOY OWANGO: So it is possible. That's what I keep on saying. It's already happening. It's how we proposition it. And also, if we are getting funding, it's how we smartly invest it in a manner that would help prolong our projects. But and my concern with funding, especially when-- I'm coming from the Global South, is that based on dependency theories, we rely on what the political economy of the Global North is.
JOY OWANGO: So one day you said no you're not interested in funding research in the Global South, and we're actually living through that with the UK's change of heart on supporting research in the Global South. So from having a long relationship over 10 years, we had, up to July-- the Global South had up to July this year to stop all projects that were funded by the UK government.
JOY OWANGO: Why? Because of the political-economic dynamics. So we are heavily reliant on what will happen from the Global North, and that is not sustainable from our perspective. So we need to look at the little that we have, how best can we rally the community in supporting our infrastructure-- open science infrastructure systems that will help in increasing the visibility of our output?
JOY OWANGO: As I said, it's already happening. So it's just an issue of having a good proposition to our targeted communities so that we are able to be sustainable.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Thank you very much, everyone. And we are going to move on to-- I think we have time for one more question. And this is an interesting one. We are going to interrogate the premise of this panel. So we're going to take a statement from the panel description, which is, the question is no longer if you will upload a preprint of your work, but when or how quickly you'll be able to upload your work.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: So is this true? Is it false? Or is the answer, it's complicated or something else? Alex, I would like you to take this one first because it's your fault that this question exists.
ALEX FREEMAN: Well, yes, that's true. So I did have a-- I was worried about this in the panel description, because it's not my experience. I work in a research group and I know colleagues and other research groups where we are absolutely open science advocates. So we always make all our code, all our data all publicly accessible, and all our stuff is gold open access. But we don't always upload a preprint, and that is due to several factors.
ALEX FREEMAN: You have to think about, do you want to get reviews before you make this public? So you think about whether there is a chance that you're making claims that other people will find a fault with. And that's not necessarily our fault. It's not that we're doing wrong work, but sometimes you can make a mistake or you can not have spotted a flaw.
ALEX FREEMAN: And so I think we sometimes hold back if we're worried that putting this out into the public domain before some quite serious reviewers have had their chance to find the holes in it could mean that the findings get disseminated when they're not as solid as we'd want them to be. So we think quite hard about what the findings and what the implications if it got reported in the news would be before it's been fully reviewed.
ALEX FREEMAN: And I have heard other people worry that preprint servers are-- they're not a sign of quality. And so I have heard people saying now, during the pandemic, because we had to get things out there quickly, it was great, you could put things in a preprint server. But now we're stepping back from that and we're thinking, is this the right place to put it?
ALEX FREEMAN: Is it going to be undermining for career purposes? Your journal article, you might have a version in a preprint server that shows some mistakes. Do you want that? It's on the record forever. So I've heard people talking about them and quite-- thinking through quite a lot of the implications. I don't think it's necessarily a when. I think it's still an if.
ALEX FREEMAN:
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Joy, please go ahead.
JOY OWANGO: I'll play the devil's advocate and say it's complicated, because we know why we want and we need preprints. And then I'm also cognizant-- and I say this as I sit on the board of AfricaArXiv. We know why we need it. We need preprint repositories. We understand the importance of the preprint repositories. But I'm also cognizant of the challenges that come with the sphere where preprints lie.
JOY OWANGO: So despite these challenges, I'm aware that preprint repositories are making an effort in having peer review communities as part of their repository systems such that what is submitted starts going through peer review before it goes to the journal or it's going through double peer review. One with the journals and one within the preprint repository.
JOY OWANGO: So efforts are being made. Is this a scary step? Yes. It's new. Really, it is new. So it would be foolish not to be scared of this new process. But is it here to stay? Yes it is, because it's the evolution of academic publishing.
JOY OWANGO: There is a demand for access to this output. A quick demand. So the question is, how do we adopt systems that will help win the trust of authors such that we don't have this question? We shouldn't say it's complicated. We say, oh yeah, I need to know when I need to submit my preprint. So it is new.
JOY OWANGO: We need to create systems that are uniform and are adopted by preprint repositories. But then when it comes to peer review, when it comes to quality and ways in which we can win the trust of authors, just like the way we have personal identifiers right now and we have organizations like NISO managing all personal identifiers, I believe we need-- whether it's an association or an organization that will help-- that will help in creating standards for-- standards for all these preprint repositories, such that these are systems that are set in place to win the trust of authors.
JOY OWANGO: Because this question just really comes down to trust on whether I should or should not use a preprint repository, knowing very well that we need it because we need access to the information. Yeah.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: Yeah. I'm in the it's complicated camp as well. Awareness of preprints has grown a lot during the pandemic, but many people, from what I've seen, are still pretty wary of the practice. And that's ECRs and senior researchers alike. One argument I've heard pretty recently on Twitter was basically, why would I want to share the error-ridden pre-polished version of my work?
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: Someone said, to me, it's like releasing the crappy-- the sketches and preliminary drawings before the final illustration or painting is done. But the concerns about getting scooped or making it much more difficult to publish afterward, they're still surprisingly persistent as well, especially in countries where this just hasn't become mainstream. So that tells me that in part, there's just a lot more work to do to improve awareness and understanding of the practice.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: But part of it is also just like your mileage may vary problem of like-- some people have benefited hugely from closed peer review-- the closed peer review process. A double-blind, single-blind, whatever. And others have been burned repeatedly by it. And those are-- that latter group are in the camp of like, well, screw it.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: Like we're going to preprints. Like this is the better way. And I think there are just-- there are compelling arguments on both sides of that. I'm actually not even sure exactly where I fall in that because I do understand-- and also, by discipline, there are cultural differences. I mean, look at the physics-- look at the physics discipline as a whole, and they're fully adopted this practice.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: And why is there such a big cultural difference between the way that we share research in the hard sciences-- or I guess physics and math relative to biology, for example? So there's a lot of questions there. I've not actually heard a great explanation of what accounts for that huge difference. I'd be interested to hear if others have thoughts on it.
ALEX FREEMAN: I don't have an answer to that, but what you were just saying about people being nervous of putting up their scruffy version, I think that's actually a really interesting point that I really noticed. I've only been in academia since the end of 2016. My career was in the media before that. And the fact that when you submit to a journal, you know that it's going to go through months and months and months of like 30,000 people putting their oar in makes a real difference to the state of the manuscript that you submit.
ALEX FREEMAN: So if you are putting something up on a preprint server and that the whole world is going to read it exactly what you write, you write to a much higher standard, and you polish it and you make it look like it's ready to be published. And I think that's a really interesting point, that you become slightly lazy and slightly perhaps infantilized by the fact that other people-- you expect other people to then read your manuscript and find how it can be improved, whilst preprints puts that all back on you.
ALEX FREEMAN: You have to put this to the standard that you would hold yourself to. No one else is holding you to a standard. This is your best work. And I think that's actually a good thing. I mean, I actually-- I think it's great to get other people's opinion on your manuscript, absolutely. But I think the standard that you submit it in-- the fact that it holds you to making it a higher standard before you absolve responsibility, rather, is an interesting and good development.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: Yeah. I'm not convinced that you're not to me putting the preprint up there is a very brave move. You're actually exposing your new work to a much larger audience, and often, people who would be actually in a much better position to adjudicate on it than the two or three reviewers that are kind of arbitrarily selected by an editor at a journal. Like, you're putting it out there to people who are super close to the work in some cases and can find problems with it that the journal might not be able to spot.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: So in some sense, that's a real test of the level of the work. And that's another reason why people might not want to do it. Like, that's a disincentive for some people if they're worried about-- if they're worried about something in their work, for example.
ALEX FREEMAN: But I think that that's a required change of culture, because the point of publishing work is not for you to get credit, it's for the world to know what you did. And so the point is to get other people's opinion on it and for you to say, this is what I did, this is what I think, what do you guys think? And for other experts in the area to share their opinions and say, well, I followed on from that piece of work or I think there's something you didn't think about in that piece of work.
ALEX FREEMAN: And I think that's an absolute cultural flip that I think we need to help people make, because for so long, publishing has been seen as how you get career enhancement and not how you put your piece of the jigsaw into this big puzzle of global knowledge. And how we're all working together on that. We all make mistakes and we all have different opinions of the data, and sometimes there isn't a right and a wrong, and it's all a kind of discussion.
ALEX FREEMAN: And that we all have to be-- hold ourselves to the highest standards that we are doing our best, but that other people will then help build that picture with us to build up what global knowledge means. And I think that's not incentivized and it's not-- it's not how people end up in academia seeing the role of publishing.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Yeah. And that's unfortunately not something that publishers can necessarily change, because publishers didn't invent these incentives, and we're not-- I really hate to cut this discussion off, but we have about six minutes left and we have some really good questions in the Q&A box. So, I'm going to see if we can get through a couple of those. So Rebecca Kennison asks, many preprints are moving to incorporating review which increases the ask on the same people who are asked to review for journals.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Are there ways you can think to expand the pool of reviewers so they aren't the same people all the time as Michele noted?
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: I can speak really quickly to this just that because I think about this problem a lot, because preprints open up to really anyone to comment. And in a lot of cases, that person is going to be the grad student who's doing that exact method in the lab and who's much, much better-positioned, in my opinion, to comment on the methodology or the stats or whatever then the PI of that same lab who doesn't really know what's going on, frankly.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: So grad students, post-docs, and people who have been traditionally left out of this process I think are going to be brought into it, and that massively improves the pool, and I think it will massively improves the quality of the review.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Yeah. Definitely.
JOY OWANGO: And also, with the rise of various communities coming up, various communities coming up to support preprint repositories-- and we are seeing this aptly put by eLife as well. You're seeing this-- eLife has got a whole platform, it's called [? Citey ?] where it shows all the history of all the peer review reviewers. It's trying to demystify the fear that comes with peer review. And as Alex had aptly put it, we are so scared of putting our research out there because we want it to be perfect, forgetting the purpose of sharing knowledge is also getting feedback.
JOY OWANGO: But traditionally peer review has been so harsh, to the point that people are scared of sharing that information and they feel that they'll be ostracized just by simply putting out information that is wrong. But if we humanize the process, if we humanize the process in a manner that we could easily accommodate the reviews that come in, whether it is from a peer review community, whether it is from the public if it is out there, and whether it is the peer reviewers in your field, it would become easy for people to be a bit more comfortable to share that information instead of being worried about having the final cut.
JOY OWANGO: It's about the process, and we all know that. Research is all about the process. It's never final, it's always-- it's continuous. So it's all about humanizing and demystifying this whole process on peer review, because in this whole discussion, what we are worried about in preprints-- about preprints is the peer review, it's nothing else. Actually, that's what we're worried about. It's the peer review of it and whether what is going to be out is it's good quality or not.
JOY OWANGO: Yeah.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Thank you. So the next question is from Ken Cornfield who says, I work in the field of clinical research publications. Are you saying your suggestions should apply across all fields? We had some major retractions around COVID articles due to individuals not doing their due diligence, and some of these have had negative direct effects on patients. It's not clear to me whether this these retractions are published articles after peer review or preprint articles before peer review, but based on my reading of Retraction Watch, which sends me an email every day, I think it could be either or both.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Alex, go ahead.
ALEX FREEMAN: So I think this is a really interesting one. Retractions-- so things are going to-- mistakes are going to be made. Things are going to happen. And I think what you see from the outside at the moment is potential bad things happening from published research that then gets retracted. But what you're not seeing is all the harm that's happening to patients because work hasn't been published.
ALEX FREEMAN: So all those patients who are waiting two, three years for clinical trials to get published and the results to get published who are potentially suffering whilst there's that delay isn't being weighed in that balance. And until we think about the harm of not publishing, we can't weigh up the two potential harms. So I think we have to be really careful thinking about that potential harm on its own, because although it exists, it does mean that-- it may be the lesser of two evils to get things out there more quickly.
ALEX FREEMAN:
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Question from Ana Jester. Can you provide examples of preprint servers that have included marketing efforts to help funders, policy-makers, and/or the general public understand their mission with the goal of sustainability? Go ahead--
JOY OWANGO: China ArXiv. And it doesn't even come as a surprise. I was waiting for that question, because if you even go to their website, it's very clear how they are trying to be sustainable. NIH recently set up a preprint repository, and they are trying to also have a sustainable model, and also support all the researchers who received funding from NIH to have a portal.
JOY OWANGO: A portal to start the publishing process as they're going through their general selection strategy, so that their work can be easily accessible. So yes. I mean, right now the reason why I started with China is because, first of all, the country in itself is the leading funder of research globally. And they also-- they've got the highest number of research outputs coming out of the country.
JOY OWANGO: And in terms of rollout of outputs, they are so fast. They are very conscious of the kind of output that needs to come out, and they are so fast. So it doesn't come as a surprise, even as a government itself, they think like a business. Whether they are looking at the higher education sector, the research sector, they think like a business. So for me, it didn't come as a surprise. When you go to China ArXiv, you will see-- is it Sino ArXiv or China ArXiv?
JOY OWANGO: You're going to see the sustainable approach to-- the sustainability approach to the archive, how they are working with funders, how they're trying to win the trust of authors. It is a classic example of a platform that is not associated with a publisher, but it is associated with publishers and also the academic community. So it's a very good example of how they are trying to make that their preprint repository sustainable.
JOY OWANGO: So that is my first observation when it comes to such type in terms of marketing.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: OK. We are at 12:01. I'm going to skip a couple slides here to get to the end. And say thank you very, very much. Thank you to you wonderful panelists. I wish we could go on talking for another hour or so. And thank you to everyone who came to this panel and for your thoughtful questions and your discussions in the chat. And we are going to reconvene-- I mean, not me-- New Directions will reconvene in one hour for New Directions in Open Access at 1 o'clock Eastern, one hour from now.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: 58 minutes from now. Thank you, everyone, very much.
JOY OWANGO: Thank you. It's been great.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: Thank you all.
Segment:0 .
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Just watching all the attendees flood in. Great to see everyone. OK, it looks like the flood is slowing down now. So we're going to get started. So welcome to New Directions in Preprints and New Content. My name is Sylvia. My pronouns are she, her, and hers.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: I am the Marketing Manager at Inera and also the Community Manager at Atypon. I am very busy, and I'm very excited to be moderating this panel. I want to thank the New Directions Working Group and the SSP DE&I Committee. And particularly Alexa Colella and Ben Madrick and Alice Meadows for their help in both shaping this panel and recruiting the panelists.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: So about the panelists, I've been involved in at least three other panels about preprints in 2021. And I started to notice a lot of repeat speakers, which is not to say that those speakers aren't great, they are great. But one of my goals in putting together this trio of speakers for New Directions-- emphasis on New Directions-- was to make sure that the SSP community hears some voices that we haven't heard a bunch of times before.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: So I'm going to ask them to briefly introduce themselves, and then we're going to dive right in with some questions. I am going to go in alphabetical order by first name. And so I'm going to ask Alex Freeman to introduce yourself first.
ALEX FREEMAN: Thank you very much, and hi, everybody. So I'm Alex Freeman. I'm the director of a not-for-profit company called Octopus, which is trying to change scholarly publishing. And because most of you probably don't know much about me or Octopus, I'm just going to give you a little bit of background so that where I'm coming from and why I'm excited to be talking about preprints today. So as you all know, the scientific publishing system has a lot of problems.
ALEX FREEMAN: So I came to it thinking, what could we do if we started again? Because we can. And Octopus has a lot in common with preprint servers, and I suspect that when Octopus launches next spring, it will behave a bit like one, initially at least. But what Octopus actually does is to split apart two jobs that are currently both being done by journals, and that's both the dissemination of relevant findings to audiences who want a concise, easy-to-read narrative on the one hand, and the recording of full details of all the work that researchers do, including the data, the code, the failures, the blind alleys on the other hand.
ALEX FREEMAN: And these are two very different types of communication and I think need different systems with different incentive structures. Journals do the first brilliantly, and I think we need a new 21st century digital-first primary research record to do the latter. And that it should be free, fast, and fair. And the free and the fast is what I think we have in common with preprint servers.
ALEX FREEMAN: As soon as all authors have clicked Publish, your publication goes up, and at no cost. But the difference with Octopus is that it's not papers that people are publishing. I think the paper has a lot to answer for. Science is not a linear process and requires a lot of specialist skills for different aspects. So Octopus abolishes the paper and the pressures towards questionable research practices that that kind of artificial linear narrative creates.
ALEX FREEMAN: And instead it carries eight different types of publication reflecting different specialist areas of the scientific process, and each has to be linked to another. So you can't publish results without linking it to the appropriate methods. And one of those types of publication is a peer review, which is treated like any other piece of work.
ALEX FREEMAN: So again, that's a slight difference from preprint servers at the moment, but preprint servers are definitely going in that direction where peer review is a sort of integral part of the platform. And there's also the question of quality metrics. So that a fair bit of free, fast, and fair. And I think the scholarly publishing system at the moment is a really terrible proxy measures for quality.
ALEX FREEMAN: And all metrics are proxies, but I think we could at least get a little bit closer if we design them carefully. So in Octopus, we have ratings of publications on three predefined criteria that are chosen to best define what we as a community think good means for each type of publication, and the ability to red flag serious concerns about publication. And also as having the option to reversion their publications, which is, again, similar to preprint servers there.
ALEX FREEMAN: And finally, I think as another important bit to being fair, and that is to remove barriers and bias and hierarchy. And some of that's being done by preprint servers in removing gatekeepers to publication, but I think we need to go further, and I want to avoid things like the use of first names of authors on publications and photos on authors pages, and in Octopus I hope to build in automatic language translation to make it truly language-agnostic so that everyone who reads and writes in their native language completely seamlessly.
ALEX FREEMAN: So in a very brief form, that's where I'm going to be coming from in this discussion.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Thank you, Alex. Joy, please go ahead.
JOY OWANGO: Thank you, Sylvia. I'm the Executive Director of the Training Center and Communication. It's a research capacity trust based at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. And its objective is to support researchers, research institutes, and governments on how they can improve their research output through scholarly and science communication training. And I also sit on the board of AfricaArXiv, which is Africa's first preprint repository and publishing platform.
JOY OWANGO: And Training Center and Communication is also a founding project partner of AfricaArXiv. One of the reasons why we feel taking part in this conference is important is because preprints have been a game-changer when it comes to the visibility of African research output. And not only that, we are looking at a situation whereby we have a platform where you are able to index research output in indigenous languages, bearing in mind so far, English is still being considered as the language of science, but unfortunately you have a situation whereby countries whose national language is not English is producing research and the work is written in the indigenous languages.
JOY OWANGO: So now we have a platform where you are able to have access to research output in those indigenous languages, which goes to show that we are actually contributing to the research community, the global knowledge when it comes to research in any particular topic. But most importantly, why this seminar is important to us is also we are here to learn on how can we build trust with authors?
JOY OWANGO: How can we learn to be more sustainable? Because I keep on saying this, the fun times over. We know why we need preprint repositories. The question is, how do we make them sustainable? What are other partners doing? What are the lessons they've learned? What are the challenges they are going through? Because we need to be realistic. In order for us to win the trust of authors, we need to learn to be sustainable.
JOY OWANGO: And as much as funding is exciting, it is one way of supporting a preprint repository, but we need to think like business people and ask ourselves, how are we going to be sustainable in making sure that the preprint repository can last more than 20 years or more than 30 years? And at the same time, how do we win the trust of authors in regards to the quality of preprints that have been produced?
JOY OWANGO: How we win the trust of readers in terms of what they are going to be using to site their research or referring to their research? So being part of this panel is more of a learning experience for us, but most importantly, sharing what we've been doing in the last three years. Thank you, Sylvia.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Thank you, Joy. And please go ahead, Michele.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: Thanks, Sylvia. Thanks for having me on this panel. I am serving as the Editor-in-Chief of Research Square, which is a preprint platform that many of you may be familiar with because of its connection to Springer Nature. Now there is-- preprints are sort of in the path to publication for many Springer Nature journals because of an opt-in service called In Review that posts a preprint automatically to the Research Square Preprint Platform.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: So the designation of editor-in-chief might sound a little odd to those of you who understand that preprints and their platforms typically operate in sort of the outside or parallel track to traditional publishing, and one that isn't typically associated with editorial functions as we've come to know them. So what is an EIC doing at a preprint platform? Well, most of my efforts go toward thinking about how to align our policies and operations in such a way as to balance the imperative to post new research quickly and without barriers with the desire to also maintain some standard of academic integrity, and exercise caution regarding what we inject into an increasingly fragile information space, which I'm sure is going to be part of the topic of what we discuss here today and touches on what Joy was just mentioning around trust.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: So this is why I was interested in participating on this panel, because those policies and standards that govern these platforms are being shaped right now, and on the back of a 20-month long pressure test that we know is the pandemic. So this is a particularly interesting time, I think, to consider the questions that we're going to address here, and hopefully we can all challenge each other on some points that I think are genuinely difficult and come away with some new insights and some ideas to improve the status quo for preprints.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING:
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Thank you, all. So we're going to move along now to our first question. I've titled the slides, Preprints versus the World-- preprints contra mundum. So the questions that I would like everyone to address are, first of all, what are the headwinds, the obstacles facing preprints as a new form of communicating research? And secondly, what are the problems or shortcomings inherent in preprints as they exist right now?
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Can I get a volunteer to speak first on this topic? Go ahead, Joy.
JOY OWANGO: OK. The obvious shortcomings facing preprints today is trust. People are seeing the massification of research output and they're questioning whether they are going through rigorous processes in making sure that whatever is produced is good quality. So when you're looking at some of the problems is, how do you win the trust of authors?
JOY OWANGO: How do you win the trust of authors who are going to submit their manuscripts in the preprint repositories? How are you going to win the trust of authors who are going to use that repository as a platform to get-- to do their research discovery or whatever literature search they're doing? But those are the obvious shortcomings that come to mind. But when you're looking at the headwinds facing preprints as a new form of communication research, I see from a progressive academic publishing perspective whereby the traditional aspect of academic publishing is being challenged, because there is a demand-- as I said, it's a bit of a double-edged sword.
JOY OWANGO: There's a demand for research output. There's a demand for rapid access to research output, hence the massification of the output. And the demand today is because we are a knowledge economy. 10, 15 years ago, we would be patient enough to wait for the results to be shared with us. But with the rise of pandemics, with the rise of technology, we are demanding to have access to knowledge. So the headwinds facing preprints is that-- I'm seeing it from an adoption of being progressive in academic publishing, but then it comes with the shortcomings-- it comes with the challenges on whether the output is good quality and whether the authors can be trusted.
JOY OWANGO: The authors can trust the output that is being produced or authors can actually trust the platforms where they're submitting their manuscripts as preprints.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Thank, Joy.
ALEX FREEMAN: Shall I come in with some thoughts?
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Yes, please.
ALEX FREEMAN: So I've got-- yeah. A couple of thoughts. So firstly, I think that the reason that preprints have taken off is because it's reflecting a failure in the publishing system to get stuff out there quickly. And I don't think it's necessarily-- I slightly disagree with Joy that I don't think it's necessarily because of our thirst for the knowledge.
ALEX FREEMAN: It's that this research is vitally important to patients, to engineers, to practitioners. mean, I think it's shocking that it takes so long for research-- two years or whatever to get a paper published. And I just think that the world is right not to put up with sitting around waiting for that to happen. So I think preprints have kind of burst out of the scenes of the failures of the publishing system, but I think that I would challenge the fact that they're a new form of communicating research.
ALEX FREEMAN: Because actually, they're just publishing papers. Their papers are the same as papers have always been. So that actual form of communication is the same, it's just that people have bypassed the very slow publishing process and said, well, here you are, guys, here it is. But what that's created is a kind of buyers beware market. So now it's more like going and buying things on eBay because there's no trusted brand associated with it rather than going to buy it at a store whose brand you know and that all this stuff has been checked and comes to some quality control.
ALEX FREEMAN: Whether or not peer review actually provides an adequate quality control is a totally different matter. So maybe it's actually a good thing for buyers always to be beware and to be-- know that they have to apply their own critical faculties when reading things that are published in any form. So there's my controversial views.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: Yeah, I can weigh in a little bit on this. I view this whole story kind of shaking out potentially in one of two ways. One is just the complete disruption and paradigm shift that could be coming to the whole scholarly publishing industry as we know it, and that is totally a possible outcome of the beginnings of which we're seeing right now.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: But another one is just the absorption and kind of admission by a large publisher, small publishers that this has been an issue all along and the internet is going to give us a new way of doing things where we can put all-- we can move to post-publication, peer review, everything should be available right away and the scrutiny comes later. And their full adoption of it.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: And I we're starting to see some of that, too. I mean, our platform's integration with Springer Nature is an example of this where they've leaned into preprints and said, well, right, I mean, this is fine. To the extent that they pass some level of initial scrutiny, things should be out there early so that the community can start to decide what their value is to the world and we don't need to wait for this entire editorial process to happen in order to just share the work.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: So that could be less of a paradigm shift, really. I mean, it could just mean that publishers sort of change their way of doing things and start publishing-- everything is preprints initially and then there's this process of evaluation that happens later. I'm trying not to like attach any evaluated words to anything that I'm saying because I have my own opinions on how this should actually play out. But I do think, just to be realistic, it's possible that the second one is more likely.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: And I guess the concept of preprint review as we're seeing it sort of start to form right now. Whether that's spontaneous community review or journal-driven review of preprints, that's going to expand. But until it becomes the dominant process, then I see it-- initially it's just going to further strain an already troubled system, this problem that we have, just a shortage of peer reviewers.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: So ultimately the concept of transparent review, which will likely eventually be the standard for preprints, it promises to reduce the overall burden on peer reviewers, but this really only happens once we reach a tipping point where some considerable proportion of research is being reviewed in that way. And the reality of a preprint-first world is that it means potentially a doubling of the content that is published, meaning posted online, and thus subject to review.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: So we will have to get accustomed to a world in which not everything is peer-reviewed, and I do think this presents a cultural challenge. So I'll just throw that out there.
JOY OWANGO: Yeah. Just to add on to what Michele is saying, she pretty much is-- she's highlighting the fact that academic publishing is fluid. I mean, in the beginning, researchers used to talk in the Royal Society, they'll present-- it was oral. Then they said-- then they started writing. And now here we are. And then there was a certain style of writing. The peer review process was still there, that's why you speak to your peers.
JOY OWANGO: And now you're writing and there's a certain style of writing. You still have to go through peer review. But now with technology, what I'm seeing with preprints, it's embracing technology to make sure you have rapid access to research output. There's a demand for it. Alex, I'm still standing on the fact that there is a demand for it based on the fact that when you look at the pandemic, we've had a few pandemics in Africa.
JOY OWANGO: So we've had Ebola, we've had some of the hemorrhagic fever-type of pandemics. And we see the demand to access that information is being looked for in any way possible. The COVID-19 pandemic was global. That is why everyone felt the need to have rapid access to research output. But the demand has always been there, and the reality is, what Alex was saying and which I support, that it takes a year or two before-- by the time that is done, people have moved on.
JOY OWANGO: We need to also acknowledge that in certain research disciplines, they were quick to accommodate rapid access to research output. Anybody who was in technology, ICT, we've actually made peace with the fact that if you go to an ICT Conference, you can actually cite the conference proceedings, because technology comes out so fast. Even those in the pharmaceutical industry.
JOY OWANGO: So why not for everything else? Why all of a sudden are we having issues about preprints? It's just that we've defined it, but in my opinion, it is rapid access to research output. That's how I see it. Yeah.
ALEX FREEMAN: Can I pick up on the other points which are being made in the chats and which Michele mentioned, which is about the problem of excess demand on peer reviewers? Because I think this is a really interesting-- and I think it's a cultural issue, really. That at the moment, what's incentivized is writing and not actually collaboratively reviewing what other people have done. And it's a very kind of blinkered approach that's being encouraged.
ALEX FREEMAN: And that's why I think it would be a shame for the publishing system to change simply to adopt preprints into its system without thinking about how can we actually solve some of the other problems, and one of which is what's incentivized at the moment in scientific publishing? And incentivizing peer review-- and I know there are a lot of initiatives thinking about how to incentivize peer review, but I think that's a really important problem.
ALEX FREEMAN: Because being able to critique somebody else's work in a constructive way is a really important skill. And it's a skill that we all in research rely on other people doing for us. And I think it needs to be recognized, and therefore, the system needs to be designed around that being something that is recognized and rewarded and developed as a skill. And all of that has to come through open reviewing because you learn by reading other people's reviews and learning what a good review looks like.
ALEX FREEMAN: But also, thinking about how to make that something that's valued by institutions and by funders and by individuals as well. So I think we need to-- I think this is a real opportunity in the moment of scientific publishing or scholarly publishing as a whole to stop and think, how can we better make this work in the future rather than simply letting it sort of absorb the things that have happened and not necessarily go on in a directed and thought-through fashion.
ALEX FREEMAN:
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Thank you, all. That was a lot more discussion than I thought we'd have on one question, that's fantastic. We are going to now move on to our next question, which I think we've kind of foreshadowed a little bit. As we add more standards and review mechanisms and so on to preprints, and as journals, publish articles faster and publish more kinds of content that aren't articles, and rely less on the structure of the volume and issue, are we heading toward some kind of preprint singularity, some sort of convergence between journals and preprints?
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Who would like to go first on this one?
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: It sort of touches on what I've already mentioned, but it's starting already, isn't it? eLife is probably the best example because they now only agreed to review papers that are preprinted. But now we have journals that participate with Peer Community In which performs preprint review. We have journals getting reviews from Review Commons. We also see the major publishers leaning in.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: As I mentioned, it's not just Springer Nature, it's I think all of the major publishers now have either their own proprietary preprint platforms or are integrating with other ones. So the lines are starting to blur there for sure. I do hope to see more journals experiment with overlay models, not least because this is-- it's likely to help with the version splintering issues that we're seeing with just like a million versions of the same paper from different preprint platforms-- AAMs and in repositories and all these things that are essentially the same paper but different iterations of it, which just presents like a huge indexing problem, I think, among other among other issues.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: But I just want to echo that I agree with you, Alex. I mean, just to say my own personal views on this, like I don't think that the manuscript as we've come to understand it is the best way anymore. We're not leveraging all that the internet has to offer us, but we're sticking to this archaic form of communication and pre-registration doesn't use enough-- all these things that Octopus I know cares about. And so I really appreciate your company's efforts here.
JOY OWANGO: In my opinion, it makes business sense, because part of the reason why-- when we began this conversation, I say the fun bit is over, we need to start asking ourselves how will preprints be sustainable. And this is a perfect example of the singularity. We need to see-- the fact that we are seeing preprint repositories aligning with publishers or aligning with societies, you're seeing a way in which they are going to be-- a way in which you're going to see preprints becoming manuscripts immediately or working closely with journals or having support systems that they didn't have like peer review support systems.
JOY OWANGO: This makes business sense. That is in my opinion. Number two, it's also one of the ways in which you are able to win the trust of authors, because the authors will know that this preprint repository is in partnership with X number of journals, which makes the whole general selection strategy easier. So from a business perspective, it's the way to go. And in any case, when you're looking at the calculation of citations and downloads, it's not when the paper is already accepted in the journal, it's from when it-- the calculations start from when it's a preprint repository.
JOY OWANGO: All of that is calculated. So this process had already started in the backend, they're just defining it right now. It's not defining-- it's the next logical step for lack of better words. It is the next logical step, yes.
ALEX FREEMAN: I think that, in a way, there is a preprint journal convergence, of course, because we're seeing journals using preprints as a submission platform or as-- in all sorts of ways in their workflow. I do worry, actually, about preprint servers partly-- they could become as siloed as journals are. And I think one of the great things about a preprint server is that it breaks down the fact that it's in a particular journal.
ALEX FREEMAN: The medRxiv, PsyArXiv, all these archives are much broader than any one journal could be. And I think that's an advantage, because I think work gets hidden by being in journals. So I would worry slightly about the convergence bringing more siloing, potentially. So I think-- yeah. I think preprint servers have an interesting and different role.
ALEX FREEMAN: And I think we should think very carefully about them ending up being sort of adopted by journals, particularly journals who-- it would end up being sucked into the general system and not providing the extra benefits that they do by standing outside of the journal system. But it comes down to that resources thing of journals are where the money is, and preprint servers are currently doing all the work for free for them.
ALEX FREEMAN: So this is an important question, which I'm sure we're going to go on to talk about, how to resource them.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: OK. Thank you, everyone. Our next question is indeed about funding and resources. So how do preprint servers become sustainable? How do we fund them? How do we make the funding sustainable? How do we make it equitable? And how do we make it fair? And those are all really big questions, and I know that all of you have big things to say.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: So Joy, you look poised to speak. Please go ahead.
JOY OWANGO: Yeah. I was about to tell everyone else, let's not mention funding. Funding doesn't count. We need to think outside the box. Aligning with publishers is one way, but then I also see Alex's concern on the fact that they might end up being siloed. But last week, one of the ways that I foresee is-- because pre-print-- the preprint repository is the go-between researchers, the academic community, and publishers.
JOY OWANGO: So if you're working with academic-- with an academic community, how can we build-- how can we raise some money from that academic community? So let's say it is a university or library consortia, a minimal amount. Because at the end of the day, let's be honest, open access has a cost. It might not be as high as the traditional ways of publishing, but it does have a cost.
JOY OWANGO: So we can have a nominal equitable amount that the community can contribute to the preprint repository. In return, the research capacity support and also creating partnerships with publishers, but then being wary of what Alex had raised. Instead of-- so that you're not-- you don't find yourself attached to one publisher, but then you're as multidisciplinary as possible, but you don't find yourself in a silo.
JOY OWANGO: That is the first thing that comes-- those are the first-- those are the first few things that come to my mind, because when it is so easy to go for funding, but I believe the funding can come in to support infrastructure systems. But we need to think beyond. How will we survive once the funding is gone? And how do we protect our integrity and our independence? And that is what also-- Alex has also raised as a point of concern.
JOY OWANGO: So for me, it's building the communities and seeing how money can be raised from those communities at a nominal fee so that you can be sustainable. And making the academic community understand why this is there to help them make their work accessible. So we shouldn't be idealistic in saying, oh yes, it's open access, so it is free.
JOY OWANGO: No, there is a cost. There is-- human capital is involved in this whole process. So the question is, how do you sustain that human capital so that you are able to support the academic community with this access to their research output? Anyone else?
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: If you have something to say, please go ahead and unmute yourself. Thank you.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: Yeah. So, just as with any business, the answer is about generating revenue and minimizing costs. And for a preprint server, there are a number of approaches you might consider. I mean, the simplest one just comes to mind are nominal fees for submission. I know this is controversial, but yeah, leveraging low-cost automation to reduce the cost associated with hosting.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: A small fee could be enough to cover a really bare bones server. But as soon as you factor in screening, HTML conversion to make content more searchable, machine-readable, and features like commenting, preprint level metrics, version of record linking, and like trying to integrate preprint review services, for example, things of that nature, now you're into a completely different cost bracket.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: And there really needs to be a sustainable business model to cover those ongoing expenses. For our platform, this is about leveraging the services that our company already offers that kind of built on a manuscript services company. So we're in a good position to offer the authors who are preprinting services to help with their manuscript preparation, but improve the manuscript just on a-- for its own sake and also in preparation for getting published at a journal, which is still has a huge demonstrated value for authors.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: So that's the approach that we're taking. It's going to be a slow, and-- it's still not an easy prospect and it's very hard to get into the path of manuscript services when somebody has already decided to post a preprint, for example. But we're working on ways to make that not only sustainable for us, but also something that authors can easily afford in different parts of the world.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING:
ALEX FREEMAN: I'm probably the last person to be good at talking about sustainability, because I come from such a public service kind of background, I hate thinking about money. My fear in Octopus is to keep the costs as absolutely low as possible. And I think there are so many tools that can be built relatively cheaply these days. So I'm hoping that at launch will have quite a lot of the features that Michele is mentioning built in and maintainable by a very skeleton kind of staffing.
ALEX FREEMAN: And my hope is that-- I mean, it's sort of written in our core ethos that we would never charge authors to read or to write. My hope is that we'll be able to-- and we've got funding for the first three years. My hope is to make a service that is so useful and so good for users that the costs of it-- and so low cost that actually the costs of the service that everybody then comes to value become so minimal that it isn't difficult to raise the money-- that minimal amount of money to keep it running, which I know sounds naive, but my primary focus is on making a service that works and works well for users and works well for science.
ALEX FREEMAN: And given that we've got enough money to start it and to do that, I think that hopefully success will breed people who are willing to help us keep that as a free service. We shall see. Only time will tell. But I totally agree with the person in the Q&A who said that starting free and then wanting to charge for it is very difficult, and I totally agree, and I do not want to start something free that would ever be charged to then to users.
ALEX FREEMAN: I would hope that I would be able to sustain it through either philanthropy or funding from funders or potentially from institutions. I mean, the cost to institutions would actually be so low compared to their library budgets for journal subscriptions, that if Octopus does what I want it to do, I hope that it would be the equivalent of basically one or two journal subscriptions.
ALEX FREEMAN:
JOY OWANGO: The rise of open science led to issues regarding equitable access to resources and smart ways in investing in scholarly communication. This is why we have the rise of transformative open access agreement, so that we know how this money is being spent, how these contracts have been signed. What does this mean? It means that people are more aware on the realities regarding open science and spending money wisely.
JOY OWANGO: And also, I'm looking at the Global South, there are some countries that are willing to spend a nominal amount of money in order to access some of their resources. So like the charity Research for Life is a classic example. In some countries, it's 100% free based on the World Bank status of the countries. And in some countries, they pay a nominal fee. So you see, we are already doing that.
JOY OWANGO: So let's not even panic about it-- we're already doing that. It's an issue of justifying equitable access to resources and visibility of research output. So such that you have a situation whereby when you're presenting this business proposition-- because at the end of the day, that's what it is. To an academic institution, to a government, to a library consortia, they are not breaking the bank. They don't see that they are breaking the bank, but they see it as an opportunity for them to have their output accessible and visible.
JOY OWANGO: So it is possible. That's what I keep on saying. It's already happening. It's how we proposition it. And also, if we are getting funding, it's how we smartly invest it in a manner that would help prolong our projects. But and my concern with funding, especially when-- I'm coming from the Global South, is that based on dependency theories, we rely on what the political economy of the Global North is.
JOY OWANGO: So one day you said no you're not interested in funding research in the Global South, and we're actually living through that with the UK's change of heart on supporting research in the Global South. So from having a long relationship over 10 years, we had, up to July-- the Global South had up to July this year to stop all projects that were funded by the UK government.
JOY OWANGO: Why? Because of the political-economic dynamics. So we are heavily reliant on what will happen from the Global North, and that is not sustainable from our perspective. So we need to look at the little that we have, how best can we rally the community in supporting our infrastructure-- open science infrastructure systems that will help in increasing the visibility of our output?
JOY OWANGO: As I said, it's already happening. So it's just an issue of having a good proposition to our targeted communities so that we are able to be sustainable.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Thank you very much, everyone. And we are going to move on to-- I think we have time for one more question. And this is an interesting one. We are going to interrogate the premise of this panel. So we're going to take a statement from the panel description, which is, the question is no longer if you will upload a preprint of your work, but when or how quickly you'll be able to upload your work.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: So is this true? Is it false? Or is the answer, it's complicated or something else? Alex, I would like you to take this one first because it's your fault that this question exists.
ALEX FREEMAN: Well, yes, that's true. So I did have a-- I was worried about this in the panel description, because it's not my experience. I work in a research group and I know colleagues and other research groups where we are absolutely open science advocates. So we always make all our code, all our data all publicly accessible, and all our stuff is gold open access. But we don't always upload a preprint, and that is due to several factors.
ALEX FREEMAN: You have to think about, do you want to get reviews before you make this public? So you think about whether there is a chance that you're making claims that other people will find a fault with. And that's not necessarily our fault. It's not that we're doing wrong work, but sometimes you can make a mistake or you can not have spotted a flaw.
ALEX FREEMAN: And so I think we sometimes hold back if we're worried that putting this out into the public domain before some quite serious reviewers have had their chance to find the holes in it could mean that the findings get disseminated when they're not as solid as we'd want them to be. So we think quite hard about what the findings and what the implications if it got reported in the news would be before it's been fully reviewed.
ALEX FREEMAN: And I have heard other people worry that preprint servers are-- they're not a sign of quality. And so I have heard people saying now, during the pandemic, because we had to get things out there quickly, it was great, you could put things in a preprint server. But now we're stepping back from that and we're thinking, is this the right place to put it?
ALEX FREEMAN: Is it going to be undermining for career purposes? Your journal article, you might have a version in a preprint server that shows some mistakes. Do you want that? It's on the record forever. So I've heard people talking about them and quite-- thinking through quite a lot of the implications. I don't think it's necessarily a when. I think it's still an if.
ALEX FREEMAN:
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Joy, please go ahead.
JOY OWANGO: I'll play the devil's advocate and say it's complicated, because we know why we want and we need preprints. And then I'm also cognizant-- and I say this as I sit on the board of AfricaArXiv. We know why we need it. We need preprint repositories. We understand the importance of the preprint repositories. But I'm also cognizant of the challenges that come with the sphere where preprints lie.
JOY OWANGO: So despite these challenges, I'm aware that preprint repositories are making an effort in having peer review communities as part of their repository systems such that what is submitted starts going through peer review before it goes to the journal or it's going through double peer review. One with the journals and one within the preprint repository.
JOY OWANGO: So efforts are being made. Is this a scary step? Yes. It's new. Really, it is new. So it would be foolish not to be scared of this new process. But is it here to stay? Yes it is, because it's the evolution of academic publishing.
JOY OWANGO: There is a demand for access to this output. A quick demand. So the question is, how do we adopt systems that will help win the trust of authors such that we don't have this question? We shouldn't say it's complicated. We say, oh yeah, I need to know when I need to submit my preprint. So it is new.
JOY OWANGO: We need to create systems that are uniform and are adopted by preprint repositories. But then when it comes to peer review, when it comes to quality and ways in which we can win the trust of authors, just like the way we have personal identifiers right now and we have organizations like NISO managing all personal identifiers, I believe we need-- whether it's an association or an organization that will help-- that will help in creating standards for-- standards for all these preprint repositories, such that these are systems that are set in place to win the trust of authors.
JOY OWANGO: Because this question just really comes down to trust on whether I should or should not use a preprint repository, knowing very well that we need it because we need access to the information. Yeah.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: Yeah. I'm in the it's complicated camp as well. Awareness of preprints has grown a lot during the pandemic, but many people, from what I've seen, are still pretty wary of the practice. And that's ECRs and senior researchers alike. One argument I've heard pretty recently on Twitter was basically, why would I want to share the error-ridden pre-polished version of my work?
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: Someone said, to me, it's like releasing the crappy-- the sketches and preliminary drawings before the final illustration or painting is done. But the concerns about getting scooped or making it much more difficult to publish afterward, they're still surprisingly persistent as well, especially in countries where this just hasn't become mainstream. So that tells me that in part, there's just a lot more work to do to improve awareness and understanding of the practice.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: But part of it is also just like your mileage may vary problem of like-- some people have benefited hugely from closed peer review-- the closed peer review process. A double-blind, single-blind, whatever. And others have been burned repeatedly by it. And those are-- that latter group are in the camp of like, well, screw it.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: Like we're going to preprints. Like this is the better way. And I think there are just-- there are compelling arguments on both sides of that. I'm actually not even sure exactly where I fall in that because I do understand-- and also, by discipline, there are cultural differences. I mean, look at the physics-- look at the physics discipline as a whole, and they're fully adopted this practice.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: And why is there such a big cultural difference between the way that we share research in the hard sciences-- or I guess physics and math relative to biology, for example? So there's a lot of questions there. I've not actually heard a great explanation of what accounts for that huge difference. I'd be interested to hear if others have thoughts on it.
ALEX FREEMAN: I don't have an answer to that, but what you were just saying about people being nervous of putting up their scruffy version, I think that's actually a really interesting point that I really noticed. I've only been in academia since the end of 2016. My career was in the media before that. And the fact that when you submit to a journal, you know that it's going to go through months and months and months of like 30,000 people putting their oar in makes a real difference to the state of the manuscript that you submit.
ALEX FREEMAN: So if you are putting something up on a preprint server and that the whole world is going to read it exactly what you write, you write to a much higher standard, and you polish it and you make it look like it's ready to be published. And I think that's a really interesting point, that you become slightly lazy and slightly perhaps infantilized by the fact that other people-- you expect other people to then read your manuscript and find how it can be improved, whilst preprints puts that all back on you.
ALEX FREEMAN: You have to put this to the standard that you would hold yourself to. No one else is holding you to a standard. This is your best work. And I think that's actually a good thing. I mean, I actually-- I think it's great to get other people's opinion on your manuscript, absolutely. But I think the standard that you submit it in-- the fact that it holds you to making it a higher standard before you absolve responsibility, rather, is an interesting and good development.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: Yeah. I'm not convinced that you're not to me putting the preprint up there is a very brave move. You're actually exposing your new work to a much larger audience, and often, people who would be actually in a much better position to adjudicate on it than the two or three reviewers that are kind of arbitrarily selected by an editor at a journal. Like, you're putting it out there to people who are super close to the work in some cases and can find problems with it that the journal might not be able to spot.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: So in some sense, that's a real test of the level of the work. And that's another reason why people might not want to do it. Like, that's a disincentive for some people if they're worried about-- if they're worried about something in their work, for example.
ALEX FREEMAN: But I think that that's a required change of culture, because the point of publishing work is not for you to get credit, it's for the world to know what you did. And so the point is to get other people's opinion on it and for you to say, this is what I did, this is what I think, what do you guys think? And for other experts in the area to share their opinions and say, well, I followed on from that piece of work or I think there's something you didn't think about in that piece of work.
ALEX FREEMAN: And I think that's an absolute cultural flip that I think we need to help people make, because for so long, publishing has been seen as how you get career enhancement and not how you put your piece of the jigsaw into this big puzzle of global knowledge. And how we're all working together on that. We all make mistakes and we all have different opinions of the data, and sometimes there isn't a right and a wrong, and it's all a kind of discussion.
ALEX FREEMAN: And that we all have to be-- hold ourselves to the highest standards that we are doing our best, but that other people will then help build that picture with us to build up what global knowledge means. And I think that's not incentivized and it's not-- it's not how people end up in academia seeing the role of publishing.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Yeah. And that's unfortunately not something that publishers can necessarily change, because publishers didn't invent these incentives, and we're not-- I really hate to cut this discussion off, but we have about six minutes left and we have some really good questions in the Q&A box. So, I'm going to see if we can get through a couple of those. So Rebecca Kennison asks, many preprints are moving to incorporating review which increases the ask on the same people who are asked to review for journals.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Are there ways you can think to expand the pool of reviewers so they aren't the same people all the time as Michele noted?
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: I can speak really quickly to this just that because I think about this problem a lot, because preprints open up to really anyone to comment. And in a lot of cases, that person is going to be the grad student who's doing that exact method in the lab and who's much, much better-positioned, in my opinion, to comment on the methodology or the stats or whatever then the PI of that same lab who doesn't really know what's going on, frankly.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: So grad students, post-docs, and people who have been traditionally left out of this process I think are going to be brought into it, and that massively improves the pool, and I think it will massively improves the quality of the review.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Yeah. Definitely.
JOY OWANGO: And also, with the rise of various communities coming up, various communities coming up to support preprint repositories-- and we are seeing this aptly put by eLife as well. You're seeing this-- eLife has got a whole platform, it's called [? Citey ?] where it shows all the history of all the peer review reviewers. It's trying to demystify the fear that comes with peer review. And as Alex had aptly put it, we are so scared of putting our research out there because we want it to be perfect, forgetting the purpose of sharing knowledge is also getting feedback.
JOY OWANGO: But traditionally peer review has been so harsh, to the point that people are scared of sharing that information and they feel that they'll be ostracized just by simply putting out information that is wrong. But if we humanize the process, if we humanize the process in a manner that we could easily accommodate the reviews that come in, whether it is from a peer review community, whether it is from the public if it is out there, and whether it is the peer reviewers in your field, it would become easy for people to be a bit more comfortable to share that information instead of being worried about having the final cut.
JOY OWANGO: It's about the process, and we all know that. Research is all about the process. It's never final, it's always-- it's continuous. So it's all about humanizing and demystifying this whole process on peer review, because in this whole discussion, what we are worried about in preprints-- about preprints is the peer review, it's nothing else. Actually, that's what we're worried about. It's the peer review of it and whether what is going to be out is it's good quality or not.
JOY OWANGO: Yeah.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Thank you. So the next question is from Ken Cornfield who says, I work in the field of clinical research publications. Are you saying your suggestions should apply across all fields? We had some major retractions around COVID articles due to individuals not doing their due diligence, and some of these have had negative direct effects on patients. It's not clear to me whether this these retractions are published articles after peer review or preprint articles before peer review, but based on my reading of Retraction Watch, which sends me an email every day, I think it could be either or both.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Alex, go ahead.
ALEX FREEMAN: So I think this is a really interesting one. Retractions-- so things are going to-- mistakes are going to be made. Things are going to happen. And I think what you see from the outside at the moment is potential bad things happening from published research that then gets retracted. But what you're not seeing is all the harm that's happening to patients because work hasn't been published.
ALEX FREEMAN: So all those patients who are waiting two, three years for clinical trials to get published and the results to get published who are potentially suffering whilst there's that delay isn't being weighed in that balance. And until we think about the harm of not publishing, we can't weigh up the two potential harms. So I think we have to be really careful thinking about that potential harm on its own, because although it exists, it does mean that-- it may be the lesser of two evils to get things out there more quickly.
ALEX FREEMAN:
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: Question from Ana Jester. Can you provide examples of preprint servers that have included marketing efforts to help funders, policy-makers, and/or the general public understand their mission with the goal of sustainability? Go ahead--
JOY OWANGO: China ArXiv. And it doesn't even come as a surprise. I was waiting for that question, because if you even go to their website, it's very clear how they are trying to be sustainable. NIH recently set up a preprint repository, and they are trying to also have a sustainable model, and also support all the researchers who received funding from NIH to have a portal.
JOY OWANGO: A portal to start the publishing process as they're going through their general selection strategy, so that their work can be easily accessible. So yes. I mean, right now the reason why I started with China is because, first of all, the country in itself is the leading funder of research globally. And they also-- they've got the highest number of research outputs coming out of the country.
JOY OWANGO: And in terms of rollout of outputs, they are so fast. They are very conscious of the kind of output that needs to come out, and they are so fast. So it doesn't come as a surprise, even as a government itself, they think like a business. Whether they are looking at the higher education sector, the research sector, they think like a business. So for me, it didn't come as a surprise. When you go to China ArXiv, you will see-- is it Sino ArXiv or China ArXiv?
JOY OWANGO: You're going to see the sustainable approach to-- the sustainability approach to the archive, how they are working with funders, how they're trying to win the trust of authors. It is a classic example of a platform that is not associated with a publisher, but it is associated with publishers and also the academic community. So it's a very good example of how they are trying to make that their preprint repository sustainable.
JOY OWANGO: So that is my first observation when it comes to such type in terms of marketing.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: OK. We are at 12:01. I'm going to skip a couple slides here to get to the end. And say thank you very, very much. Thank you to you wonderful panelists. I wish we could go on talking for another hour or so. And thank you to everyone who came to this panel and for your thoughtful questions and your discussions in the chat. And we are going to reconvene-- I mean, not me-- New Directions will reconvene in one hour for New Directions in Open Access at 1 o'clock Eastern, one hour from now.
SYLVIA IZZO HUNTER: 58 minutes from now. Thank you, everyone, very much.
JOY OWANGO: Thank you. It's been great.
MICHELE AVISSAR-WHITING: Thank you all.
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