N.G. thanks Sophien Kamoum for discussions on this topic, which helped shape his views.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Casadevall, Arturo

Gow, Neil

mBio

English

ABSTRACT
          Journal clubs are important mechanisms for teaching how to approach the scientific literature critically and for disseminating findings. Papers from high-impact journals often dominate journal club selections, a practice that reinforces the unscientific emphasis of placing high value on publishing venue rather than scientific content and critical analysis of the publications. We suggest improving journal clubs by including preprints rather than focusing completely on published papers. This change in practice might benefit the scientific enterprise in numerous ways, including by providing direct criticisms to preprint authors before publication, deemphasizing publishing venue, teaching students the art of reviewing papers, and making journal clubs more current by discussing unpublished data.</jats:p

Arturo Casadevall

Neil Gow

Crossref

Using Preprints for Journal Clubs

N.G. thanks Sophien Kamoum for discussions on this topic, which helped shape his views.Peer reviewe

The Open University

Using Preprints for Journal ClubsArturo Casadevall,a Founding Editor in Chief, mBio, Neil GowbaJohns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, USAbUniversity of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, United KingdomABSTRACT Journal clubs are important mechanisms for teaching how to approachthe scientific literature critically and for disseminating findings. Papers from high-impact journals often dominate journal club selections, a practice that reinforces theunscientific emphasis of placing high value on publishing venue rather than scien-tific content and critical analysis of the publications. We suggest improving journalclubs by including preprints rather than focusing completely on published papers.This change in practice might benefit the scientific enterprise in numerous ways, in-cluding by providing direct criticisms to preprint authors before publication, deem-phasizing publishing venue, teaching students the art of reviewing papers, and mak-ing journal clubs more current by discussing unpublished data.KEYWORDS journal club, preprints, publishingA journal club is a meeting to discuss a scientific paper. The practice of journalclubs originated in medicine and provided a mechanism for physicians todiscuss new findings in the field (1). Journal clubs are used in academia, researchlaboratories, industry, and government as mechanisms for keeping current incertain areas of science. In academia, such clubs serve the essential role of provid-ing a venue for instructing students on how to review the literature critically as wellas extend awareness of topics of interest.In a typical journal club, the presenter provides a detailed description of the paper.The goal is to show trainees how to read the literature critically and to discuss newinformation. A nonscientific survey of immunology and microbiology journal clubpublication choices at four universities found in open Internet websites provided someinsight into journal choices. Of 112 journal club publication choices, 30 (27%) were fromCell, Nature, or Science. When these journals and their offshoots published by Cell Pressand Nature Publishing Group (e.g., Immunity, Nature Immunology, etc.) were added, thetotal was 59 (53%). Journals published by scientific societies, such as those publishedby the American Society for Microbiology (such as mBio), the National Academy ofSciences (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States ofAmerica), and the American Association of Immunologists (Journal of Immunology),were a minority, accounting for less than 30% of journal selections.In our opinion, the quality of journal clubs has been degraded in recent years asanother deleterious consequence of the impact factor mania that has gripped thebiological sciences (2). Specifically, presenters often feel under great pressure to pickleading articles to avoid criticism about their selections. This frequently leads tochoosing publications from very high impact journals. Articles in these journals tend tobe short and terse and have a greatly abbreviated methods section. Consequently,critical details of how the work was performed may not be available for discussion. Inthis situation, the conversation frequently digresses into a discussion of how and whythe paper made it into such a journal, with a tacit assumption that all important criticalanalysis has been done via high-level peer review. Such discussions tend to miss thescience and the objective of acquiring critical skills, and when that happens, it dimin-Published 3 April 2018Citation Casadevall A, Gow N. 2018. Usingpreprints for journal clubs. mBio 9:e00516-18.https://doi.org/10.1128/mBio.00516-18.Copyright © 2018 Casadevall and Gow. This isan open-access article distributed under theterms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0International license.Address correspondence to Arturo Casadevall,acasade1@jhu.edu.The views expressed in this Editorial do notnecessarily reflect the views of this journal orof ASM.EDITORIALcrossmMarch/April 2018 Volume 9 Issue 2 e00516-18 ® mbio.asm.org 1 mbio.asm.org on May 1, 2018 - Published by mbio.asm.orgDownloaded from ishes the opportunities for teaching and learning. Previous editorials have recom-mended that journal clubs broaden their selections to include papers from more-specialized journals to avoid these problems (2).In recent years, the biological sciences have experienced the phenomenon of thepreprint movement (3–5). Although the circulation of unpublished papers has longbeen used by other disciplines, the notion of depositing unpublished papers in preprintservers that are available to all free of charge is new to biology. Preprint servers, suchas Biorxiv, screen submissions and accept only those items that pass muster as scientificpapers. Most submissions are freely available to all days after the item is placed in thepreprint server. These preprint servers include boxes where readers can entercomments on the papers, thus allowing for prepublication criticism and crowdsource reviewing. The practice is increasingly popular, and the number of manu-scripts deposited in Biorxiv is growing exponentially (http://asapbio.org/preprint-info/biology-preprints-over-time).There are numerous reasons why using preprints for journal clubs instead ofpublished articles might improve that experience while also benefiting the scientificenterprise. (i) Preprints are free and available to all with an Internet connection. Thismight be a major advantage in resource-poor settings where the selected article isbehind a pay wall and not accessible to all. Although such costs are often minimizedby distributing the article to journal club members, that practice can run afoul ofrestrictions by certain publishers. (ii) Preprints are often the most current form ofscientific information since they are deposited before the article is published. Given thatpublication of a manuscript can be associated with significant delay as a result of peerreview and publication procedures, such as the generation and correction of articleproofs, using preprints in journal clubs will heighten the immediacy of the information.(iii) Presenting preprints will give the journal club members the ability to participate inpeer review, since comments and criticisms generated during the discussion can beposted on preprint servers. For preprints deposited in the Biorxiv server, there is abuilt-in commenting service that allows the comments to be directly linked to themanuscript. Having more eyes look at each manuscript might improve the literature byreducing the frequency of inappropriately reproduced images, which plagues up to 4%of all published articles (6). Hence, the journal club review might not only teach how toapproach the literature critically but also actually make a difference in the quality ofresearch that is published. (iv) Using preprints deemphasizes the current focus onselecting articles from high-impact journals. This will change the focus from publicationvenue to focusing on the content of the paper and might improve the overall scientificdiscussion and sharpen the ability of students to develop their own view of whatconstitutes rigorous and effective experimentation and communication. (v) Preprintsmight allow a later analysis of the work by comparing the preprint with the final paper.This type of comparison would allow students and scientists to see the effect of thepeer review process on publication, and that would provide additional opportunitiesfor learning.In summary, we see the introduction of preprints into journal club choices as apositive step that might improve the scientific enterprise at many levels, from providingadditional means for prepublication criticism to refocusing the discussion to thescientific issue of the work. The use of preprints in journal clubs was previouslysuggested by others, who argued for some of the same benefits noted above. A Webplatform to facilitate peer review of preprints is already available (http://asapbio.org/preprint-journal-clubs). In this editorial, we strongly endorse those suggestions. Insti-tutions that adapt this practice will further empower the preprint movement.ACKNOWLEDGMENTN.G. thanks Sophien Kamoum for discussions on this topic, which helped shape hisviews.Editorial ®March/April 2018 Volume 9 Issue 2 e00516-18 mbio.asm.org 2 mbio.asm.org on May 1, 2018 - Published by mbio.asm.orgDownloaded from REFERENCES1. Linzer M. 1987. The journal club and medical education: over one hun-dred years of unrecorded history. Postgrad Med J 63:475– 478. https://doi.org/10.1136/pgmj.63.740.475.2. Casadevall A, Fang FC. 2015. Impacted science: impact is not importance.mBio 6:e01593-15. https://doi.org/10.1128/mBio.01593-15.3. Schloss PD. 2017. Preprinting microbiology. mBio 8:e00438-17. https://doi.org/10.1128/mBio.00438-17.4. Bourne PE, Polka JK, Vale RD, Kiley R. 2017. Ten simple rules to considerregarding preprint submission. PLoS Comput Biol 13:e1005473. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005473.5. Vale RD. 2015. Accelerating scientific publication in biology. Proc NatlAcad Sci U S A 112:13439 –13446. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1511912112.6. Bik EM, Casadevall A, Fang FC. 2016. The prevalence of inappropriateimage duplication in biomedical research publications. mBio 7:e00809-16.https://doi.org/10.1128/mBio.00809-16.Editorial ®March/April 2018 Volume 9 Issue 2 e00516-18 mbio.asm.org 3 mbio.asm.org on May 1, 2018 - Published by mbio.asm.orgDownloaded from 

ABSTRACT Journal clubs are important mechanisms for teaching how to approach the scientific literature critically and for disseminating findings. Papers from high-impact journals often dominate journal club selections, a practice that reinforces the unscientific emphasis of placing high value on publishing venue rather than scientific content and critical analysis of the publications. We suggest improving journal clubs by including preprints rather than focusing completely on published papers. This change in practice might benefit the scientific enterprise in numerous ways, including by providing direct criticisms to preprint authors before publication, deemphasizing publishing venue, teaching students the art of reviewing papers, and making journal clubs more current by discussing unpublished data

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Using Preprints for Journal Clubs

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