Call for Nominations to the ‘PeerJ Preprints Advisory Group’

tl;dr – We are seeking nominations to the “PeerJ Preprints Advisory Group”. Please email your suggestions to editor@peerj.com. Deadline April 8th, 2016.

Since PeerJ Preprints launched in April 2013 both the venue and the wider landscape have grown more accustomed to preprints in biology:

PeerJ Preprints has grown to now host almost 2,350 preprints

its growth is accelerating (projected to produce nearly 2,000 more in just the next 12 months)

it has been adopted by a wide range of disciplines

and it has published some articles that have received tens of thousands of views and attracted broad news coverage

We are proud of the growth of PeerJ Preprints, and it seems increasingly clear that 2016 will be the year that preprints take off in the broader academic community (outside of their traditional strongholds in the physical sciences).

For example, just last month ASAPbio was convened in DC, co-hosted by HHMI and the NIH. This was an important two-day meeting which included many influential thought leaders, and aimed to map out a path towards greater uptake of preprints in the biological sciences. PeerJ was pleased to be in attendance at this meeting.

Partly as a result of ASAPbio, several major articles were published in the last couple of weeks, most notably by the New York Times and the Economist . These articles are helping to take the debate about preprints to a much wider range of the academic community.

When we launched our two peer-reviewed journals (PeerJ and PeerJ Computer Science) we set up Advisory Boards for each one, and we are thankful for their support and input. With the current level of interest in ‘preprinting’, and the strong growth of PeerJ Preprints, it’s clear that there is a good level of interest in this concept in the academic community. As such, we feel that it makes sense to now establish an Advisory Group for PeerJ Preprints, to help advise us in our efforts going forward. This group of people will help provide high level community input into our plans, as well as to demonstrate that senior and influential people are supportive of the concept of preprints.

Thus, we are pleased to announce a ‘call for nominations’ for potential members of the ‘PeerJ Preprints Advisory Group’. If you know of senior or influential people who are supportive of preprints, and whom you feel could provide good input into our ongoing developments, then please nominate them by emailing us at editor@peerj.com. We will collate the suggestions and approach them with the goal of forming an Advisory group of no more than 12-15 people in the next few weeks.

We believe that this is an exciting time for preprints – if the academic community can develop a culture of “preprinting”, then we believe that this will be a major step in accelerating science, and in moving toward a more ‘open’ environment for the sharing results.