Why you should consider to publish your work as a Preprint

We had the chance to talk to Prachee Avasthi, president of ASAPBio, who answered all our questions about preprints. She showed us how early career scientists can get involved in the publishing and reviewing process of preprints, and how it can benefit us all.

The strength and necessity of preprints in accelerating the pace of science became obvious to the world last year, when most of our day-to-day revelations about Covid-19 came from preprints. Why do preprints speed up our scientific exploration? Instead of submitting your manuscript to a scientific journal and going through an often lengthy peer review – rejection – resubmission cycle, you publish it online as a preprint before submitting it to the journal. Your scientific findings become publicly available instantly, and other scientists can start to build on them while your manuscript goes through the peer review process before being published in a scientific journal.