preLights—A Community Platform for Preprint Highlights

2021 | 43rd Annual Meeting | Poster | preLights—A Community Platform for Preprint Highlights

Preprints in the life sciences have been on the rise since 2013. The current pandemic has resulted in a further surge in preprint posting but also highlighted the value of curation and public commenting on preprints, to help researchers navigate the preprint literature and point to important and reliable studies. Similar challenges around preprints were the motivation for launching preLights, a community platform for selecting, highlighting and commenting on preprints across the biological sciences, in early 2018. At the heart of preLights is the team of over 200 early-career researchers (the ‘preLighters’) who select which preprints to feature and summarize the key findings of the preprint, highlighting why they think the study is important. Uniquely, the preLighters directly question preprint authors about their work, and the resulting discussions are published at the end of the articles, thereby promoting open communication. A further way preprints are curated on the website is through ‘preLists’, which are lists of preprints centered around a certain topic or preprints that were presented at scientific conferences. In our poster we will introduce the preLights platform and our strategies for engaging early-career researchers. Further, we will present data from a meta-analysis of over 1,000 preLight posts, including various aspects of diversity of the preprints selected such as gender and geography of authors, subject categories of the preprints and their peer review outcomes. We hope our projects will inspire others who are taking on the challenges and opportunities of our changing world in scholarly communication.

Presenter: Helen Robertson