Preprints and the Future of Science Publishing with Jason Hoyt, PeerJ | Mendelspod

"A renewed effort has been underway by leading biologists this year to persuade their colleagues to preprint. This is the posting of a paper to an open access server before peer review and publication. The proponents argue that preprinting will be good for science because discoveries will be made available sooner. The peer review process can take several months, and by preprinting, a biologist doesn’t have to wait to get their work out there and begin interacting with the community. It’s a powerful argument, and one that has been embraced by the discipline of physics for some time. However, only a small fraction of biologists have been willing to jump on board, according to today’s guest, Jason Hoyt. He anticipates that about 5,000 biology papers will be preprinted this year out of a total of 1.5 million. As co-founder and CEO of the open access publisher, PeerJ, Jason advocates for preprinting. He and his co-founder, Peter Binfield, launched PeerJ Preprints back in 2013, one of the first preprint servers online. At that time, the two co-authored a blog in Scientific American (Who Killed the PrePrint and Could It Make A Return) explaining that historically preprints were the way science was done (though it wasn’t called that). They point out that it's only been in the last 50 years that the peer review process has come to dominate the publication of biological discoveries ..."