6 ms·

What bioRxiv’s first 30,000 preprints reveal about biologists

45 points by digital55 8y ago

mindcrime 8y ago
Fascinating stuff. I found this bit particularly interesting: Preprint websites also help researchers to communicate ideas that might not be picked up by peer-reviewed journals, says Marina Picciotto, a neuroscientist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and editor-in-chief of The Journal of Neuroscience, one of the top 20 journals in terms of the number of preprints published. These include baseline but otherwise uninteresting data, she says, and negative results, which are rarely published in journals. “Preprint servers have a complementary role to play with traditional journals,” she says. It would be interesting to see similar analyses for https://chemrxiv.org/ https://chemrxiv.org/ and https://psyarxiv.com/ https://psyarxiv.com/ as well.
lenticular 8y ago
Note that there are 'xivs available for many scientific disciplines (it's a publisher restriction that a single repo can't accept work from disparate fields). If you have any preprints, published or not, please upload them to one of these services. If people can't read your work, then you did it for nothing. A list of repositories can be found here: https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/learning/sharing-preprints/#/id/5ac23bbcdd1827131b90e79d https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/learning/sharing-preprints/...
- jessriedel 8y ago
  > it's a publisher restriction that a single repo can't accept work from disparate fields What do you mean by this?
  - lenticular 8y ago
    For example, you can't have a repo that does both astronomy and psychology. It's a restriction with many publishers, but note that their policies are usually very gray.
    - tofof 8y ago
      Still unclear, to the point of being simply wrong. One feature of preprint repositories is to decouple the science from the control of publishers. How do publishers have a say over what can and cannot be posted to these repositories? Particularly when, as the article notes, many preprint articles will never even be published. Please provide a citation if possible, even a single example. "a single repo can't accept work from disparate fields" ArXiv is a single repository that itself hosts papers in mathematics, physics, astronomy, electrical engineering, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, quantitative finance, and economics. [1] All are named repeatedly and featured with their own sections on the landing page. Are economics & astronomy considered the same field? How do aggregators (like BASE and CORE) factor in? Why are they not somehow publisher-forbidden? Note also that the arXiv.org FAQ on how they expanded to cover new fields makes no mention whatsoever of publisher restrictions. [2] Instead, it names difficulties like finding qualified moderators for the topics as a barrier, and mentions feasability/desirability as reasons they don't attempt to cover all disciplines. [1]: https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/ [2]: https://arxiv.org/help/support/faq#1E https://arxiv.org/help/support/faq#1E
      - Vinnl 8y ago
        > How do publishers have a say over what can and cannot be posted to these repositories? Publishers can and do add restrictions on submitted papers, such as "can not have been made public before". Indeed, this does not applies to papers that would never have been published, but it does apply to papers that will later be submitted to a journal. ArXiv never had this problem, because it became widespread before the publishers gained much of their influence. It's been a major hurdle for preprint servers in other disciplines, however. It is a lot better nowadays, where many publishers explicitly allow posting preprints. That said, they do still impose some restrictions, and I can imagine having to post works to preprint servers specific to that discipline being one of them. A server like biorXiv wouldn't want to miss out on those preprints, so they'd have to accommodate that - and biorXiv in particular is very apprehensive about not ruffling any publisher feathers. (Likely a factor in its success.)
      - lenticular 8y ago

45 points by digital55 8y ago

Fascinating stuff. I found this bit particularly interesting: Preprint websites also help researchers to communicate ideas that might not be picked up by peer-reviewed journals, says Marina Picciotto, a neuroscientist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and editor-in-chief of The Journal of Neuroscience, one of the top 20 journals in terms of the number of preprints published. These include baseline but otherwise uninteresting data, she says, and negative results, which are rarely published in journals. “Preprint servers have a complementary role to play with traditional journals,” she says. It would be interesting to see similar analyses for https://chemrxiv.org/ https://chemrxiv.org/ and https://psyarxiv.com/ https://psyarxiv.com/ as well.

lenticular 8y ago

Note that there are 'xivs available for many scientific disciplines (it's a publisher restriction that a single repo can't accept work from disparate fields). If you have any preprints, published or not, please upload them to one of these services. If people can't read your work, then you did it for nothing. A list of repositories can be found here: https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/learning/sharing-preprints/#/id/5ac23bbcdd1827131b90e79d https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/learning/sharing-preprints/...

jessriedel 8y ago
> it's a publisher restriction that a single repo can't accept work from disparate fields What do you mean by this?
- lenticular 8y ago
  For example, you can't have a repo that does both astronomy and psychology. It's a restriction with many publishers, but note that their policies are usually very gray.
  - tofof 8y ago
    Still unclear, to the point of being simply wrong. One feature of preprint repositories is to decouple the science from the control of publishers. How do publishers have a say over what can and cannot be posted to these repositories? Particularly when, as the article notes, many preprint articles will never even be published. Please provide a citation if possible, even a single example. "a single repo can't accept work from disparate fields" ArXiv is a single repository that itself hosts papers in mathematics, physics, astronomy, electrical engineering, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, quantitative finance, and economics. [1] All are named repeatedly and featured with their own sections on the landing page. Are economics & astronomy considered the same field? How do aggregators (like BASE and CORE) factor in? Why are they not somehow publisher-forbidden? Note also that the arXiv.org FAQ on how they expanded to cover new fields makes no mention whatsoever of publisher restrictions. [2] Instead, it names difficulties like finding qualified moderators for the topics as a barrier, and mentions feasability/desirability as reasons they don't attempt to cover all disciplines. [1]: https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/ [2]: https://arxiv.org/help/support/faq#1E https://arxiv.org/help/support/faq#1E
    - Vinnl 8y ago
      > How do publishers have a say over what can and cannot be posted to these repositories? Publishers can and do add restrictions on submitted papers, such as "can not have been made public before". Indeed, this does not applies to papers that would never have been published, but it does apply to papers that will later be submitted to a journal. ArXiv never had this problem, because it became widespread before the publishers gained much of their influence. It's been a major hurdle for preprint servers in other disciplines, however. It is a lot better nowadays, where many publishers explicitly allow posting preprints. That said, they do still impose some restrictions, and I can imagine having to post works to preprint servers specific to that discipline being one of them. A server like biorXiv wouldn't want to miss out on those preprints, so they'd have to accommodate that - and biorXiv in particular is very apprehensive about not ruffling any publisher feathers. (Likely a factor in its success.)
    - lenticular 8y ago