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Following on from the success of our recent Diversity in Research and Reproducibility in Research tweetchats, the next instalment of the #F1000Talks running on the @F1000Research Twitter account will cover the topic of “archiving research before publication”. The Tweetchat will take place on Tuesday 6th of May at 1pm (EST), 6pm (BST).

It is widely known in the publishing world that researchers in Mathematics and Physics have developed a flourishing culture of making work available through a preprint manuscript before publication in order to disseminate it rapidly and publicly. This preprint culture hasn’t permeated the field of biomedical research quite as much, but in recent times we have seen the birth of new preprint repositories dedicated to the life sciences – so is the culture changing?

Preprints by definition concern research papers, but in a much wider sense there are many other ways to archive different types of research before it is eventually published. For example, our very own F1000Posters is a free online repository for conference posters and slides, and there are many other dedicated repositories that can host an array of biological/medical data, filesets, figures and multimedia.

With this new wave of self archiving coming to our shores, we wanted to ask a couple of bonafide experts about the preprint culture in the life sciences and help us identify the benefits of archiving before publication, as well as discussing the barriers that stand in the way of making it common practice for research workflows.

Our special guests are:

Mark Hahnel (@MarkHahnel) of Digital Science who is the founder of Figshare, a repository where users can archive all of their research outputs whilst making them citable, sharable and discoverable.

Ethan White (@ethanwhite) an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology and the Ecology Center at Utah State University, where he studies ecological systems at continental to global scales. Ethan champions the use of preprints, regularly submits them himself and is a co-author on the perspective paper: The Case for Open Preprints in Biology.

There will be an opportunity to ask the guys some pressing questions on the subject during the tweetchat itself, but if you have anything that you would like to be discussed in particular, please just leave a comment on this blog or tweet a question to the #F1000Talks hashtag.