Is the time right for a preprint server for life science? | Mendeley Blog

"Academics in physics, economics, or math often think that life scientists (like myself) are weird because life science doesn’t have a preprint server. Life science is a fast-paced discipline, but there’s no place where the latest research can be found, discussed, and where the primacy of results can be established. There’s a lot of value in life science research (the reproducible subset, that is) but instead of staking your claim to a finding shortly after you get the data, many researchers feel like they have to write a polished paper, submit it to a prestigious journal, and wait nerve-wracking months to years for the process of review, rejection, resubmission to finally make their results available to a subset of others in their field.As submission-to-publication times grow, fears of someone else getting there first grow and there are often accusations of 'anonymous' reviewers asking for more experiments, just to delay the publication of a paper from a competing lab. What can be done about this? As frustrating as these problems are, it’s worth remembering that they’re relatively recent in origin. Pre-publication peer review as a critical part of the publication has only become standard in the last half of the 20th century. As Jason Hoyt notes in a post at Scientific American, Watson & Crick’s paper in Nature wasn’t peer reviewed. So it might seem like Peerj’s announcement today of a preprint server for life science is a good idea. Indeed, some ecologists and bioinformatics folks already use Arxiv, but as some of you will surely point out, we’ve tried preprint servers before. Nature had Nature Precedings back in 2007, and that didn’t really go anywhere. PeerJ (see our founder interview) would like to convince you that this time it’s different, because Nature weren’t really fully behind Precedings and because it didn’t really seem like it fit anywhere. Although it got thousands of submissions, perhaps the time was just a bit too early as well. Now there are millions more scientists online and we have ways of tracking the attention that a pre-print gets in addition to only citations of final published versions. So I think that now might be the right time, and PeerJ might be the right people to do it. What do you think? Below I’ve listed some interesting points for discussion ..."