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A very active discussion of interest to many members of the Future of Research community is how to shape the future of publishing in science.

The #ASAPBio meeting, discussing ways to incentivize the use of pre-prints in biology research, is coming up at Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the next 2 weeks. The meeting is being co-organized by Jessica Polka from Future of Research, and Gary McDowell will be in attendance as a representative. See the announcement below to see how to make your views known, get involved, and follow along!

Share your ideas on accelerating scientific publishing with ASAPbio

ASAPbio is a meeting that aims to accelerate the pace of research in biology by removing barriers to the use of preprints (versions of scientific manuscripts posted online at a validated server prior to peer review and journal publication).

Preprints allow scientific findings to be posted  immediately in a format freely accessible to anyone in the world. They can help scientists get productive feedback on their work and also could serve as interim evidence for productivity. While preprints have been a key aspect of the physics community for  decades, they are not widely used in biology because 1) they are not compatible with the policies of some journals, 2) they are not officially acknowledged by many funding agencies, and 3) there is uncertainty regarding whether a preprint will be respected  as a legitimate form of communication in the biology community.

The meeting will bring roughly 70 leaders from funding agencies, journals, scientific societies, and the biology community to HHMI Headquarters on February 16th and 17th to discuss concrete immediate steps and areas of future development. However, change cannot occur without the involvement of the broader community.

Therefore, all biologists are invited to visit ASAPbio.org to take a 3-minute survey to share their opinions on preprints, comment on white papers written by attendees, and register their opinions via Twitter with #ASAPbio.

Furthermore, tune in  at 7pm Eastern on Tuesday, February 16th to watch a video stream of introductory talks and the keynote address by Paul Ginsparg (founder of the physics preprint server arXiv). You can also view a stream of all plenary talks on February 17th (starting at 8am) and listen in to individual breakout sessions. Throughout the whole meeting, viewers are encouraged to submit comments and questions through the website, or on Twitter with the hashtag #ASAPbio.