Announcing the PeerJ Preprints Advisory Group

As announced in an earlier blog post, we are pleased to be creating a new Advisory Group to help guide the development of PeerJ Preprints .

We are truly thankful to the many people who provided suggestions for the Advisory Group. As is often the case in nomination processes, we received many more suggestions than we could appoint, and so we appreciate that the group below is only a representative sample of the level of interest in the community. We thank you all for your enthusiasm and we welcome your ongoing feedback and involvement.

The new ‘PeerJ Preprints Advisory Group’ is made up of the following individuals (in alphabetical order):

Grady Booch (IBM)

Stephen Curry (Prof at Imperial College)

Al Dove (Director of Research and Conservation, Georgia Aquarium)

Uta Francke (Prof at Stanford)

Patricia Gowaty (Prof at UCLA)

Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra (Prof at UC Davis)

Heather Joseph (Executive Director of SPARC)

Danny Kingsley (Head of Scholarly Communication, University of Cambridge)

Erin McKiernan (Prof at University of Mexico)

Ross Mounce (Post-doc at U of Cambridge, Co-Founder of the RIO Journal)

Brian Nosek (Prof at Universtiy of Virginia and Director of the Center for Open Science)

Victor Pylro (Prof and Head of the Brazilian Microbiome Project)

Eric Topol (Prof at Scripps Translational Science Institute)

Dagmar Waltemath (Group Leader, University of Rostock)

Siouxsie Wiles (Prof at University of Auckland)

Greg Wilson (Software Carpentry Foundation)

We thank each and every one of these individuals for their commitment to this group and we look forward to working with them in the future.

When putting this group together, we consciously tried to make it as diverse and inclusive as possible. Within the group we have members at all levels of ‘seniority’; we have early career researchers and we have people at the very top of their field; we have representatives from the library and information world; we have people who work on important external projects in which we have an interest; we have people who have pre-printed frequently (and some who have never preprinted yet!); people who have experience or involvement with other preprint servers; people from a wide range of geographies; people covering all of our main subject areas; we have a good gender mix; and we made sure to include people who already had a relationship with PeerJ as well as those who did not previously.

Going forward, we expect that this Advisory Group will help PeerJ gauge the ‘pulse’ of the community, and to provide advice on matters of policy or other important issues. Each of these talented individuals brings something unique to this advisory group, and we are pleased and honored to have them advising us.

Please join us in welcoming the ‘PeerJ Preprints Advisory Group’ into existence. This is an exciting time to be involved in scholarly communications and we look forward to figuring out how to evolve pre-printing into something that significantly accelerates and improves the global scientific endeavour!

Jason Hoyt and Pete Binfield
PeerJ Co-Founders

Addendum: Grady Booch was added to the group on 5/16/2016