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In recent months, there has been a lot of discussion in the biology research community about the potential of preprints as a tool to accelerate the dissemination of scientific results and ideas.

Preprints in biology

While preprints are well-established in other fields of science (particularly physics, mathematics and computer science through arXiv), they are still a recent phenomenon in biology. After a slow start, the volume of preprints published in bioRxiv is growing steadily in 2016 following Ron Vale’s preprint on the topic (first posted in September 2015 in bioRxiv and later published as a Perspective in PNAS) and after the highly publicised ASAPBio meeting at which there was general support from researchers, publishers and funders. Unsurprisingly, we are now starting to see research findings published as a preprint receiving endorsement in their own right as important for others to note, and potentially use and build upon.

Giving credit where credit is due

F1000Prime provides qualitative recommendations of articles identified by our faculty of senior scientists from around the world.   Since its beginnings in 2002, the F1000 Faculty have recommended articles from across the journal landscape to other researchers.

In 2014, F1000Prime published the first bioRxiv preprint recommendation*, only 15 days after it was posted in the preprint server hosted at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Recommendations of work published as a preprint are becoming more common, following the growth in the number of posts.  In the last couple of months, five bioRxiv preprints have been recommended by the F1000 Faculty, on subjects ranging from Genomics to Neuroscience. One such recommendation was published only 11 days after the manuscript was posted on bioRxiv. This timeframe – between the preprint being made public and being recommended in F1000Prime – is substantially shorter than would have been the case if the research had been submitted to a traditional journal for publication and then picked out by an F1000 Faculty Member.

F1000 Faculty Members recommending preprints raises two interesting issues: first, this is an indication that even in its pre-peer review status, work is being considered of value to consider and potentially use by experts (in this case the F1000Prime Faculty); and second, we are starting to see endorsement of a wider range of research outputs (e.g. posters, slides, software, datasets, databases etc) both within and without an article, or a journal, that can be used by the research community.

The paradigm is changing

There is a significant push to shift towards the adoption of preprints in biology at the moment. Although scepticism remains in some quarters, the number of journals that accept, and in some cases even encourage, the posting of manuscripts as preprints ahead of submission and formal publication is increasing (a list of such journals can be found here). The paradigm seems to be changing and some journals are now actively attempting to attract submissions from preprints (see here and here).

Implications for peer review and research assessment

While it seems unquestionable that preprints can help accelerate access to new discoveries, their appearance in F1000Prime also has interesting implications for the assessment of research quality and impact.

For preprints, the benefits of being recommended on F1000Prime are clear. The recommendation substantially increases its visibility and works as an independent badge of impact and quality of the research. From the preprint author’s perspective this is an ideal situation, as the recommendation awarded is unbiased by the prestige and impact factor of a journal. The recommendation reflects the value of the article itself and can be achieved much more quickly than it would be via publication in a high-profile journal. This is particularly important if the recommended preprint can be used to support a job or funding application. In the absence of formal peer-review and the reputation of the journal to serve as a proxy for the value of the work, an expert endorsement (such as an F1000Prime recommendation) serves as an indicator of interest, value and quality. If the momentum around preprints continues, services like F1000Prime have an important role to play in helping researchers and research evaluators navigate the research.

The core of F1000Research

Preprints and F1000Prime recommendations bring together the best of both worlds: immediate publication of results and ideas and independent assessment of a publication’s quality and impact signed by leading researchers. This model of publishing and evaluating research can effectively tackle many of the highly debated problems in life science publishing and we made it the core of the F1000Research publishing platform. F1000Research provides authors with the combined benefits of rapid publication and versioning (as preprints have been providing for decades) with additional services typically provided by traditional journals such as editorial assistance, formal invited peer-review (open and post-publication) and enhanced discoverability through major repositories (including PubMed and Scopus).

We are excited by the level of discussion that the preprints movement is bringing to biology and we are glad to be providing researchers with the right tools to fix a broken publishing system.

_{* – at the time of writing, this preprint doesn’t seem to have been published in a journal.}