Some of us are thinking about starting a pre-print service devoted to ecology and evolutionary biology. We'd love to know what you think of this idea (good, bad, or otherwise). So, if you can spare a minute, please take our BRIEF survey: https://goo.gl/ZpJiPx
If you don't know what a pre-print is, please read below for more info: Pre-prints are spreading rapidly in ecology and evolutionary biology; the posting rate is doubling every year (see: http://www.sciencemag.org/ news/2017/09/are-preprints-future-biology-survival-guide-scientists). Pre-prints are old news in physics but are new in most other disciplines. Discipline-specific pre-print services have emerged recently in fields ranging from biology, geology, psychology, economics, and engineering. Right now, most biology pre-prints are posted on a single site (Biorxiv), but biology is a vast field and it may make sense to create different pre-print services for different sub-fields. So what is a pre-print and why would someone post one? A typical pre-print is a manuscript posted by authors prior to submission to a journal. In the short-term, this allows for peer comments that can improve the manuscript before formal peer review, provides early exposure for the manuscript, establishes priority, and provides an opportunity to garner citations before publication (a pre-print gets a doi). After publication, pre-prints are still useful because a pre-print is available to anyone, not just people who can get past a pay wall. This open-access is not only desirable for maximum visibility of the science, but is required by many funding bodies. Finally, pre-prints have become compatible with later publication in a journal, as most prominent journals, and a rapidly growing list of other journals, accept manuscripts that are posted as pre-prints. Some people would like pre-print services to ultimately replace journals. Others see pre-prints as a useful addition to the current publishing landscape. Either way, pre-prints appear here to stay. We are considering helping to found a pre-print service devoted to papers from ecology and evolutionary biology. The first step in this process is determining the level of interest. We would greatly appreciate it if you would complete the short survey at this link: https://goo.gl/ZpJiPx Tim Parker Fiona Fidler Shinichi Nakagawa
