Posting papers as preprints allows rapid communication of research findings and so speeds up the scientific process. The practice has been common in physics and computational science for over 30 years but is now being embraced by biologists, health scientists, and other academic fields. The decoupling of dissemination from peer review that preprints provide is also stimulating the evolution of the publishing ecosystem. It has the potential to improve the way in which scientific information is presented, verified, reviewed and curated, as well as benefit individuals by allowing more multi-dimensional and equitable forms of assessment.
About the speaker: Richard Sever is assistant director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and co-founder of the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv. He also serves as executive editor for the Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives and Cold Spring Harbor Protocols journals and launched the precision medicine journal Cold Spring Harbor Molecular Case Studies. Previously he worked as an editor at Current Opinion in Cell Biology, Trends in Biochemical Sciences, and Journal of Cell Science. Richard received a degree in biochemistry from Oxford University and a PhD in molecular biology from Cambridge University.
