NISO Virtual Conference, Hot Topic - Preprints

Research during the pandemic accelerated discussions surrounding the value of preprints. Preprint services, such as the venerable arXiv and more recent bioRxiv, are accepted steps in the publication pathways. Are existing models sustainable? What issues are there with regard to infrastructure? Should there be some process for validation or rejection? How much understanding of the limitations of preprints is properly communicated to journalists or other interested parties? This virtual conference followed up on the 2019 preprint event sponsored by NISO. What progress has been made?

Confirmed participants include Alberto Pepe, Director of Product, Authorea; Bruce Rosenblum, Vice President, Content and Workflow Solutions, Atypon; Kathryn Funk, Program Manager, PubMed Central, NLM; Kyle Lo, Research Scientist, Semantic Scholar, Allen Institute for Artificial Information (AI2); Leslie McIntosh, CEO, Ripeta; and Richard Sever, Assistant Director, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and Co-founder of medRxiv and bioRxiv.

Background Reading on Preprints (NISO Publications)

1, Open Access: The Role and Impact of Preprint Servers, January 2020

This is a write-up of a two-day event sponsored by NISO in November 2019. The 2021 event builds on areas of concern surfaced during that set of discussions.

2. Why “What is A Preprint?” is the Wrong Question, December 2019

Jessica Polka, ASAPBio

3. To Preprint or Not to Preprint, December 2019

Sara Rouhi, PLOS

Event

54 Videos

NISO Virtual Conferences

These half-day events cover a range of important and timely topics in more depth than our monthly webinars. With expert speakers from across the information community, they include a mix of formats — keynotes, case studies, perspectives, and vision interviews. Recordings are shared immediately with registered participants, and made openly available after two years.

Speaker

1 Video

Alberto Pepe

Director of Product, Authorea

Alberto Pepe, Senior Director of Product Strategy and Innovation, joined Wiley in March 2018 via Atypon’s acquisition of Authorea. Alberto holds degrees in Astrophysics, Information Systems, and Computer Science from Harvard University, UCLA, and University College London. For his Ph.D. work, he was awarded the Best Dissertation Award by the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Prior to starting his Ph.D., Alberto worked in the Information Technology Department of CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, where he developed digital library tools and promoted Open Access and reproducible research among particle physicists. In 2013, Alberto co-founded Authorea, a collaborative publishing platform for Open Research. In his current role at Atypon, Alberto focuses on strategy and innovation around open research publishing.

Speaker

1 Video

Bruce Rosenblum

Vice President, Content and Workflow Solutions, Atypon

Bruce Rosenblum has been designing and implementing electronic publishing workflows and solutions for over 35 years. He is the developer of the Crossref Metadata Deposit Schema and co-authored the original NLM DTD. He served on the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Board of Directors from 2005 to 2013 and is currently co-chair of the NISO STS working group as well as an active member of its JATS and BITS working groups. Prior to joining Atypon, he was CEO of Inera, which was acquired by Atypon in 2019. His 16 years of joint work with Crossref earned Inera and Crossref the 2014 NEPCo Publishing Collaboration Award, and he was awarded the status of NISO Fellow in 2020. Bruce continues to lead software development for Inera’s eXtyles and Edifix, and works with Atypon customers on workflow solutions.

Speaker

2 Videos

Kathryn Funk

Technical Information Specialist - US National Library of Medicine/National Institutes of Health

Kathryn Funk is the program manager for PubMed Central at the US National Library of Medicine. She works on PMC policy and other special projects, including coordinating PMC support for the public access policies of numerous funding agencies. Prior to coming to NLM, Katie worked in academic publishing, most recently at the American Psychological Association. She received her master’s degree in library and information science from The Catholic University of America.

Speaker

1 Video

Kyle Lo

Senior Applied Research Scientist, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2)

Kyle Lo (@kylelostat) is a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI on the Semantic Scholar team, where he works on NLP for scientific text with emphasis on literature discovery, knowledge extraction, and document understanding. He is the co-creator of open datasets for scientific text mining, like CORD-19 and S2ORC, and large modeling resources, like SciBERT. He is also an organizer of the SciNLP and Scholarly Document Processing workshops and the TREC-COVID, EPIC-QA, and SCIVER shared tasks. His work on domain adaptation of language models for science was runner-up for best paper at ACL 2020, and his works on paper summarization, scientific fact checking, and sex bias identification have been featured in MIT Tech Review, Nature, Quartz, VentureBeat, and others. Kyle has an MS in Statistics from the University of Washington.

Speaker

1 Video

Leslie McIntosh

CEO, Ripeta

Dr. Leslie McIntosh, PhD, MPH is the founder and CEO who is an internationally known consultant, speaker, and researcher passionate about mentoring the next generation of data scientists. She is active in the Research Data Alliance, grew the St. Louis Machine Learning and Data Science Meetup to over 1500 participants, and was a fellow with a San Francisco based VC firm. She concluded as the Director of Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBMI) at Washington University in St. Louis where she led a dynamic team of 25 individuals facilitating biomedical informatics services. Dr. McIntosh has a focus of assessing and improving the full research cycle (data collection, management, sharing, discoverability) and making the research process reproducible. She holds a Masters and PhD in Public Health with concentrations in Biostatistics and Epidemiology from Saint Louis University.

Speaker

1 Video

Richard Sever

Assistant Director, Cold Spring Harbor Press, Co-founder of medRxiv and bioRxiv

Richard Sever is Assistant Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in New York and Co-Founder of the preprint server bioRxiv. He also acts as Executive Editor for the Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives and Cold Spring Harbor Protocols journals. After receiving a degree in Biochemistry from Oxford University, Richard obtained his PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. He then moved into editorial work, serving as an editor at Current Opinion in Cell Biology and later Trends in Biochemical Sciences. He subsequently served as Executive Editor of Journal of Cell Science, before moving to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2008.