On January 20 and 21, 2020, ASAPbio, in collaboration with EMBL-EBI and Ithaka S+R, convened over 30 representatives from academia, preprint servers, publishers, funders, and standards, indexing and metadata infrastructure organisations at EMBL-EBI (Hinxton, UK) to develop a series of recommendations for best practices for posting and linking of preprints in the life sciences and ideally the broader research community. We hope that these recommendations offer guidance for new preprint platforms and projects looking to enact best practices and ultimately serve to improve the experience of using preprints for all.
Preprints enable new forms of peer review that have the potential to be more thorough, inclusive, and collegial. In December 2022, 80 researchers and representatives of funders, institutions, preprint servers, journals, indexers, and review services were invited to gather online and at the Janelia Research Campus for a workshop on Recognizing Preprint Peer Review. Sponsored by HHMI, ASAPbio, and EMBO, this meeting aimed to catalyze community consensus and support for preprint peer review and to create model funder, institutional, and journal policies that recognize both preprints with reviews, and reviews of preprints. Here, we make a call to action to stakeholders in the community to help capture the growing momentum of preprint sharing and empower researchers to provide open and constructive peer review for preprints.
In 2016, Crossref launched a metadata schema for ‘posted content’ with the aim of better accommodating the metadata needs for preprints, working papers, theses, reports, and related outputs, which are not typically peer-reviewed. In 2021, Crossref formed an Advisory Group (AG) to discuss how the quality of metadata for preprints using this schema could be improved. The group focused on four topics: 1) preprints as an article type (rather than subtype of posted-content); 2) relationships to/from preprints; 3) versioning; and 4) withdrawal/removal of preprints. The recommendations that resulted from the group’s deliberations have been published previously. Here we provide further background to the recommendations and report more details of the discussions.
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