Funders Call for Bio-Preprints

IN FOCUS NEWS works on the project. “It’s brilliant.” PUBLISHING By testing wind-flow models against the detailed data from Perdigão, researchers will be able to apply their findings in other locations. “Lessons learned will translate into improved Funders call for atmospheric models for the entire wind- energy community,” says Sonia Wharton, a meteorologist at the Lawrence Livermore bio-preprints hub National Laboratory in Livermore, California. Europe gets 11% of its total energy from wind. But just a 10% shift in wind speed can Biomedical scientists argue for centralized server. change the amount of energy produced by up to 30%, says Jakob Mann, a wind-energy BY EWEN CALLAWAY scope will depend on specific scientific fields researcher at the Technical University of and their funders, says Jessica Polka, the Denmark near Copenhagen. And losses are ife scientists keen to share their director of ASAPbio. But as well as aggregat- greatest in hilly or forested regions. Mann leads findings online before peer review are ing content from other biology-focused pre- the €14-million (US$14.9-million) New Euro- spoilt for choice. Whereas physicists print sites, ASAPbio wants the site to mesh pean Wind Atlas project, a collection of wind- Lgravitate to one repository — the ‘preprint’ with arXiv and with ChemRxiv, which the mapping studies and experiments of which the server arXiv — life sciences has a fast-grow- American Chemical Society in Washington project in Portugal is the largest. ing roster of venues for preprints. There’s the DC plans to launch soon. A pilot experiment by the Perdigão team biology-focused bioRχiv, and a biology sec- in 2015 found turbulence downwind of one tion on arXiv too. But other sites have sprung ALL YOUR PREPRINTS HERE ridge that affected wind patterns on the next up in the past year, or soon will, and these, Proponents hope that a central site will lure — the sort of detail that can improve models too, provide opportunities for life sciences: biologists to embrace preprints as whole- of atmospheric flow, says José Laginha Palma, ChemRxiv for chemistry; psyArXiv for psy- heartedly as physical scientists have. Physics a wind-energy specialist at the University of chology; even AgriXiv for agricultural sci- manuscripts routinely appear at arXiv.org Porto in Portugal and head of the project. ences and paleorXiv for palaeontology. months before publication in peer-reviewed Such models have typically relied on Now, a coalition of biomedical funders journals, as researchers race to release their measurements from a simpler field experi- and scientists is throwing its weight behind findings online before their rivals. And pre- ment based on and around a hill in Askervein, a ‘one-stop shop’ for all life-sciences preprints prints are now accepted currency in deter- UK, in the 1980s. “We’re going to update and — a move that its backers argue should clar- mining priority for a discovery, as well as replace data going back 30 years,” says Palma. ify any confusion and make it easier to mine in winning grants and jobs. ArXiv handles Portugal has a well-developed wind the preprint literature for insights. more than 100,000 manuscripts each year in industry, and the Perdigão ridges already host On 13 February, ASAPbio, a grass-roots physics, mathematics and computer science, one turbine. Winds at the site generally sweep group of biologists that advocates for pre- whereas the largest life-sciences preprint across and down two steep ridges at around prints, issued a funding call to build a central server, bioRχiv, posted around 5,000 manu- 8 metres per second — but they can blow at up preprint site. The US National Institutes of scripts in 2016 (see ‘Preprints on the rise’). to 40 metres per second. One recent burst blew Health (NIH), the Wellcome Trust and sev- “One of the lessons of arXiv is that users the door off a temporary office trailer on one eral other leading funders also announced prefer ‘one-stop shopping’,” says Paul of the ridges. Knowing where such gusts occur their support for the concept. Ginsparg, a theoretical physicist at Cornell can help turbine engineers take advantage of “The landscape could become fragmented University in Ithaca, New York, who founded the steady winds while avoiding damage by the very quickly,” says Robert Kiley, head of digi- the site in 1991. biggest gusts, says Rebecca Barthelmie, a wind tal services at the London-based Wellcome A central preprint service could also help engineer at Cornell who is working at the site. Trust. “We want to find a way of ensuring scientists use automated software to mine the Much of the scientific equipment is already that, although this content is distributed far literature for insights, says Ron Vale, a cell up and running, and researchers will install and wide, there’s a central place that brings it biologist at the University of California, San the rest throughout February. The set-up all together.” Francisco, and a founder of ASAPbio. At the includes 54 masts outfitted with instruments The details of the service are inchoate: its moment, researchers who want to mine to measure wind speed, direction, tempera- ture, humidity and other factors, both along and perpendicular to the ridges, 20 times per PEPINTS ON THE ISE second. And 22 instruments will study small- Life scientists are increasingly posting preprints online, although the much older arXiv server scale wind flow in three dimensions using the attracts ten times as many preprints, mostly in physics, computer science and mathematics. laser-based technique lidar. 10 1.0 arXiv Life sciences (eight websites) Eight websites: Many studies have looked at wind pat- Wellcome Open Research terns on the scale of 1 kilometre, but the 8 0.8 Preprints.org Perdigão experiment is the first to push large- The Winnower scale wind mapping down to resolutions of 6 0.6 BioRχiv SOURCE: ARXIV/PREPUBMED/BIORXIV 100–500 metres, says Harindra Fernando, a PeerJ Preprints F1000 Research fluid-dynamics engineer at the University of 4 0.4 Nature Precedings Notre Dame in Indiana. arXiv q-bio He is co-leader of the US researchers work- 2 0.2 ing at Perdigão, who are funded with $3.4 million from the National Science Foundation. per month (thousands) Preprints 0 0 “What we are trying to do is portable to any- 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2012 2016 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 where in the world,” he says. ■ ©2017 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. Al16l ri g hFEBRUARYts reserved. 2017 | VOL 542 | NATURE | 283 NEWS IN FOCUS peer-reviewed papers face myriad hurdles, Other funders that have come out in support central preprint service emphasize that it’s no from publisher copyrights to disparate web- of the central service include the UK Medical replacement for peer-reviewed journals. They sites that make bulk-downloading difficult. Research Council, the Howard Hughes Medical note that the vast majority (more than 80% in “We’re trying to think of preprints as data,” Institute (HHMI), the Canadian Institutes of some fields) of arXiv posts wind up in journals. says Vale. It would be both technically and Health Research and the European Research “We really see this as a complement to the jour- legally straightforward for computers to crawl Council. “That’s going to send a strong mes- nal system, rather than anything that could be through the collection of preprints on the sage to the science community that this kind threatening,” says Polka, who adds that a central central site, where they would appear under of communication is encouraged,” says Vale. service will not attempt to organize peer review. an open-access licence. That would be a missed opportunity, says Polka would not say how much ASAPbio CULTURAL CHALLENGE Rebecca Lawrence, managing director of expects the site to cost, but arXiv funding totals Jason Hoyt, chief executive of the journal London-based F1000Research, which posts about US$925,000 a year, paid for by a global PeerJ (which also operates a preprint service), papers before they are peer reviewed (but collective of more than 200 research institu- says he supports a central preprint site and does not consider these as preprints). She tions and funders. Ginsparg says expenses for that his company might bid to help create would like to see peer review occur through the life-sciences site should be around $5 a it. But such a site will succeed only if it can a central preprint service, thereby reducing manuscript, once it is publishing tens of thou- induce a large proportion of life scientists to the influence that traditional journals have sands of manuscripts each year. Funders who view preprints as the dominant currency for on scientists’ careers. support the site have not yet committed to pay- career progression, he says. “The challenge is “It’s a great shift in the right direction,” ing for it, but Kiley expects that they will do so to overturn the thinking in biology.” she says, “but I think we need to go a lot once details have been hammered out. ASAPbio and the funders supporting a further.” ■ CHEMISTRY Elusive triangulene created by moving atoms one at a time Researchers used microscope tip to make unstable hydrocarbon with ‘molecular surgery’. BY PHILIP BALL have tried hard, and failed, to make already,” the method is unlikely to work for those with says Leo Gross, who led the IBM team at the complicated shapes or structures. esearchers at IBM have created an firm’s laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland. Triangulene is similar to a fragment of elusive molecule by knocking around The creation of triangulene demonstrates graphene, the atom-thick material in which atoms using a needle-like microscope a new type of chemical synthesis, says Philip carbon atoms are joined in a hexagonal mesh.

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