Cancer Research UK: Taking a broad view of research impact

Cancer Research UK recently announced that it will encourage researchers to deposit preprints of their publications and will allow them to cite preprints and non-traditional research outputs in their applications. The announcement comes just after a period of discussions among the scientific community and funding agencies that prompted several funders to publicly state their support of preprints and allow researchers to showcase their non-peer reviewed work in funding applications. Preprints are complete scientific manuscripts (often also being submitted to a peer-reviewed journal) that are uploaded by the authors to a public preprint server without formal peer review. It’s argued that preprint servers facilitate the rapid, direct and open delivery of new knowledge to the worldwide scientific community before formal validation through peer review. While posting papers on preprint servers has been common practice for the physical sciences for over 20 years, preprints have only recently started to appear in the life sciences. The number of biology preprint servers have increased, many journals now accept submissions directly from preprint servers and it is acknowledged that while appreciated by researchers, the peer review process can slow down publication. All these factors might have prompted the increasing discussions around the use of preprints and have resulted in an increase of biology preprints online. Peer reviewed journal articles are one of the main outputs of resea...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Medicine Open Access Publishing cancer CRUK open science preprints Source Type: blogs