Important biological discoveries have arrived with the same old-fashioned fanfare for the last three centuries. After months, maybe years of research, a paper will wind its way through the peer review process and land in the pages of (hopefully) a high tier journal: a Nature, a Science, a Cell. Picturing those finalized figures under a glossy cover is enough to set a postdoc’s heart aflutter.
But if it were up to biologists Michael Eisen and Leslie Vosshall, they’d celebrate a paper’s release with a PDF and a rainbow unicorn.
Biologists, publishers, and science funders gathered at a meeting last week in Maryland at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to talk about how to improve the centuries-old tradition of slow, careful peer-reviewed science publishing. The ASAPbio meeting focused on bringing that process into the Internet age by releasing papers as preprints, skipping over the review process to get research out faster---just as fields like physics already do. And yes, Eisen and Vosshall were promising rainbow unicorn T-shirts to people who took the opportunity to submit their first preprints.
Peer review is scientific policing in action: A journal shares a submitted paper with a group of scientists and returns their comments to the author, who uses those suggestions to make the paper better. That's the best case scenario. Worst case, that editorial back-and-forth takes months, holding scientific information hostage and slowing the pace of discovery. On top of that, journals tend to publish only the most exciting papers, occasionally preventing scientists from reading about important results that aren't, well, sexy.
Print journals used to be the only way to share new science. But today, scientists communicate much more rapidly—and directly—than before. “Something’s changed,” says Eisen, who runs a lab at the University of California, Berkeley. “People live on the Internet now. We have senior scientists who are all on Twitter. It just doesn’t make sense that we don’t publish our work immediately.”
Case in point: Back in July, Ron Vale, a biologist at the University of California, San Francisco and one of the ASAPbio organizers, simultaneously sent a paper to the relatively new preprint server bioRxiv.org and the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It went up on bioRxiv the next day. It took PNAS a month and a half. In that time, Twitter users sent 600 tweets about the preprint and 6,000 people viewed it. In the same six weeks, Vale got responses from two referees at the journal. “By the time I got this feedback from the journal, it was dwarfed by the amount of feedback that I got through other mechanisms,” says Vale. “I integrated all that information, and it produced a better final article in the journal.”