Approximately 25 years ago, around the time of the invention of the world wide web, a physicists called Paul Ginsparg realized that he could harness the power of the internet to improve the way new discoveries are communicated within the Physics community. He developed the freely accessible repository for Physics preprints called arXiv, which runs out of the Cornell University Library and is now host to cutting-edge research in the fields of Physics, Computational Science, Mathematics, Quantitative Finance, Statistics, and Quantitative Biology.

As a result of arXiv’s success, and because of the many problems with the archaic model of publishing in the biological and biomedical sciences, a group of scientists launched an initiative to promote the use of preprints in biology. This initiative was named ASAPbio, which stands for Accelerating Science and Publication in biology, and was spearheaded by Ron Vale (Professor at UCSF), along with Jessica Polka (then a postdoc at Harvard Medical School and now Director of ASAPbio), Harold Varmus (Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine ) and Daniel Colón-Ramos (Associate Professor at Yale School of Medicine).

Prior to the first ASAPbio meeting in February 2016, awareness and use of preprint repositories was minimal. The February 2016 ASAPbio meeting changed this by bringing together representatives from all aspects of scientific research, funding, and publishing to discuss whether preprints could be used in the biological sciences, like the Physicists had been doing for 25 years. This first meeting, held at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Headquarters, set the ball rolling for what has been an exciting and revolutionary progression towards open and rapid access to cutting-edge scientific discoveries. A summary of this meeting can be found in an article written in Science.

Subsequent meetings were held in May 2016 at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in August 2016 at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), and more recently in July 2017 at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, to determine the level of interest of private and public funding agencies in supporting the use of preprints as evidence of productivity in grant proposals, and also to discuss interest in a centralized preprint service for biologists. These meetings were a resounding success (see summaries here, here and here) with many funding agencies, including the Helmsley Charitable Trust, the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the NIH, and the Human Frontiers Science Program, to name a few, changing their policies to allow, and encourage, the citing of preprints as evidence of productivity in grant proposals. These developments, together with the gradual acceptance of preprints by Journals, has led to an explosion of posting of preprints on online repositories. But we don’t want to stop there. Preprints not only have benefits in bringing the most up-to-date research to the whole web within days of submission, but they also provide an invaluable opportunity for early career researchers to develop their skills at critically reviewing scientific manuscripts. More about this below.