Richard Sever

New version of our preprint on bioRxiv about bioRxiv. Now that’s what I call a revision – 6 years after the first version!

It has new data about our progress and highlights from a massive user survey.

bioRxiv continues to grow – a brief spike and lag in the pandemic (details of which are included) but a steady increase in submissions since then. % revisions, license choice, etc. all fairly constant. 0.1% withdrawal rate is comparable to journal retraction rates.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/833400v2

Feb 27 at 12:04amWeb
Show threadRichard SeverFeb 27
So when do authors preprint? Many do long before they submit to a journal (to get feedback to improve the work?); many submit around the same time (just want the work out?). Only a minority are submitting once the paper is under review [evidence against claims by some detractors].
Show threadRichard SeverFeb 27

What about feedback/comments? Authors clearly want and are getting feedback on articles, but it’s mostly private, via email. Cultural change is needed for this to move to the public comment section, and it will always be distributed (social media, etc.).

Meanwhile, MS Word is still what the vast majority of authors write papers with. A reminder for those of us hoping for new authoring tools that we must meet people where they are.

Show threadDan GoodmanFeb 27
@richardsever is that in or out of proportion to the number of journals that only accept submissions in Word?
Show threadRichard SeverMar 3
@neuralreckoning oh I don;t know the answer to that. but I don't think it's a consequence of that
Show threadStephen RoyleFeb 27
@richardsever fascinating update. It would be interesting to see Table 2 normalised for research output over the same period to understand which institutions are the most pro-preprint (rather than the institutions with the most preprints by volume).
Congrats to all authors and thanks for posting the data.