Episode 7 is out now!
Latest News: H1B changes & chaos; who determines what gets into PubMed (Literature Selection Technical Review Committee).
Preprints:
High-resolution ab initio reconstruction enables cryo-EM structure determination of small particles (see the great bioRxiv comment thread).
Taylor’s rotation built a pipeline to simulate diffuse scattering from multiconformer models.
By Taylor Womack. Read the full post on the Prism blog.
Kara compares dry-ice shipping with live crystallization plates to see which keeps crystals best for diffuse experiments.
By Kara Zielinski. Read the full post on the Prism blog.
Why we picked one macrodomain dataset for parallel processing with mdx2, and what we debated about background.
By James Fraser. Read the full post on the Prism blog.
Preprints have transformed how we share science. Posting a preprint is joyful: you upload your work, and it just works. That frictionless experience is a big reason preprinting has become such a success.
But preprint peer review hasn’t taken off in the same way. This week, I realized one surprisingly simple reason why: authors often don’t even know when feedback happens.
When we give feedback on preprints (all of our reviews are posted on our reviews page), I used to use Disqus, which is embedded into bioRxiv. More recently, we’ve been posting through PREreview (including in the graduate-level class we teach on peer review: details of the peer review course).
But I’ve discovered that the authors never find out because:
This means thoughtful, constructive reviews can easily go unseen. I only realized how widespread this issue is after running into an author who had never seen the review my students had written of their preprint. They loved the feedback once they did, but only because I mentioned it to them in person.
bioRxiv leadership has explained their caution to me: some authors don’t want unsolicited comments, and auto-notifications could feel like spam. But the result is that reviews are written… and no one hears about them.
I think that posting a preprint is already an explicit invitation for feedback. Authors should not have to “opt in” to learn that constructive, ORCID-authenticated reviews exist — especially when those reviews are linked right in the preprint’s sidebar on the BioRxiv website.
For now, our workaround will be to email authors directly when we post reviews. But this friction slows down the cultural change toward open, constructive feedback.
If we want preprints to truly catalyze faster, more open science, then our infrastructure needs to reduce barriers — not create them. Otherwise, we risk shouting into the void while authors miss out on the joy of receiving thoughtful feedback.