At the ASAPbio meeting, researchers and publishers gathered to discuss what it would take to persuade biologists that they should submit their work to preprint servers before peer review and journal publication, Nature News reports.
Ron Vale, a cell biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, co-organized the ASAPbio meeting, and he argues that the slow pace of publishing means that that there's a delay in researchers getting credit for their work as well as in the field moving forward. And preprints, he says, could speed all that up.
But, Nature News notes that some biologists worry that preprint servers will flood the field with low-quality work, threaten a paper's chances of being published in a traditional journal, and lead to researchers being scooped.
Supporters of preprint sites say that researchers are generally more careful when they submit preprints, as their work is then open to critique from the public. John Inglis, the co-founder of bioRXiv, also tells Nature News that many journals have altered their rules to allow the publication of research that's previously been made available at a preprint server.
Still, Vale and Rockefeller University's Leslie Vosshall say that preprints will likely only become accepted within the biological science community if a consensus is established that a preprint determines credit for a discovery.