Giving Compass' Take:

• The Chan Zuckerberg Science Initiative highlights a workshop focused on exploring open practices that can be built on top of preprints, in order to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and collaboration.

• How can nonprofits participate in the rise of “open science” and learn from its methods? In what ways might the practices described here build more trust in the philanthropic and scientific world?

• Learn how data is driving a life sciences boom in Seattle. 

Preprints, or versions of manuscripts posted online by authors ahead of peer review, are seeing a strong increase in adoption and recognition among many communities in the biomedical sciences. As a vehicle for innovation, preprints allow scientists to build off of each others’ work faster. They also offer an opportunity to incorporate new types of content — and transformations of that content — into the scholarly record that anyone can access and build upon.

Aside from the emergence of preprints, the dissemination of scientific research is tightly constrained by tradition. Biomedical science research findings are typically shared via journal articles, which can accommodate only a static presentation of results that fit into a narrative structure. The publishing process is slow, data and code are often excluded, and the majority of journal articles remain hidden behind paywalls.

This makes it hard for practitioners, clinicians, patients and non-academic researchers to access results and resources to reproduce and build on existing research quickly. When rapid and open sharing occurs, it is usually in venues (like scientific conferences or within networks of collaborators) accessible only to researchers from well-resourced and established institutions, creating additional barriers to researchers from emerging countries or under-resourced areas, preventing them from participating in the scientific discourse.

Read the full article about the power of preprints by the Chan Zuckerberg Science Initiative via Medium.