We promote the productive use of preprints for research dissemination and transparent peer review and feedback on all research outputs.

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Who we are

ASAPbio (Accelerating Science and Publication in biology) is a scientist-driven nonprofit with a mission to drive open and innovative communication in the life sciences. We promote the productive use of preprints for research dissemination and transparent peer review and feedback on all research outputs.

As part of our activities we work to foster participation in preprint review, and with this goal, we are coordinating review and feedback on preprints using the crowd review model pioneered by the journal Synlett.

In 2023, our review activities include four areas and associated review groups: meta-research, cancer biology, computational neuroscience and cellular neurobiology.

Our evaluation model

The crowd preprint review involves a group of researchers (‘the crowd’) who will receive a weekly preprint and be invited to provide feedback on the paper via a collaborative Google document.

The ASAPbio crowds will select preprints to review and ciruculate them to crowd members for comments during the following 14 days. Crowd members can comment on the full paper or on parts of it, according to their interest and/or expertise. Crowd members can use a pseudonym so that their identity is known only to organizers of the review activities, and are not asked to declare competing interests. At the end of the commenting period, a crowd member will generate a collective synthesis of the comments for each paper. The synthesized review will then be posted publicly on PREreview. The service provides no binary or scalar rating or recommendation and does not incorporate responses of the authors or the general public as an integral part of the process, although preprint authors who wish to provide a response may do so via PREreview or the commenting features on the preprint server.

Crowd members are asked to provide contributions in alignment with the FAST principles for preprint feedback.

More information about the crowd preprint review and its workflow is available here: https://asapbio.org/crowd-preprint-review.

PReF

The Preprint Review Features (PReF) describes key elements of each group’s evaluation activities.

Review requested by
Non-authors
Reviewer selected by
Self-nominated
Public interaction
No
Inclusion of author response
No
Decision
None
Review coverage
Complete paper
Reviewer identity known to
Editor or service
Competing interests
Not included

Our team

The crowd preprint review activities are coordinated by:

  • Iratxe Puebla
  • Jessica Polka
  • Alex Mendonça

Content license

CC BY license, Creative Commons attribution 4.0.