On, Thursday, November 7, from 2:30 – 3:10 pm, Oya Y. Rieger will join Susan K. Kendall (Michigan State University Libraries), Rachel Burley (Springer Nature), and Jessica Polka (ASAPbio) for a panel discussion on “Preprints – Why Should Librarians Care?” at the Charleston Conference. For more information and to register, please see the conference website.

About the panel

Librarians play a critical role in supporting students and faculty in understanding the trends and developments in scholarly communications. Librarians also help students and faculty navigate the changing landscape and make decisions about how to share their research.

Over the past few years the increase in preprints in biology and medicine disciplines has grown and that growth is set to accelerate with the launch of medRxiv and other platforms. But as yet the proportion of preprints across various servers relevant to biological and clinical content, is still low, (less than three percent in the biological sciences).

With publishers, funders and others beginning to encourage preprinting, and the clear value that early sharing of research provides, initiatives that help authors share their work early in a safe way which links up to the ultimate peer-reviewed output is helpful to all.

This session will discuss ways to increase the preprints adoption rate by encouraging authors to post preprints on submission to journals. Librarians, publishers, funders and others with an interest in speeding up the pace of discovery will be interested in the ideas presented in this session. Participants can expect to learn about the ways in which technology can be used to integrate preprints into the end to end research communications process and the enormous benefits that can be gained by doing so.