And let no one leave offended!
The Chan – Zuckerberg Initiative will sponsor bioRxiv
Julia Korowski, XX2 century
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) will sponsor bioRxiv, a free archive of preprints in biology and related sciences. This was announced by the creators of the service from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to boost sharing of global scientific research in collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
The idea of cooperation with CZI was prompted by the same great goal: to cure all diseases during the lifetime, if not of our generation, then of the next generation. The Facebook founder and his wife promised to spend 3 billion for this over 10 years, and in February 2017 their BioHub project already distributed the first grants. "If we are going to cure all diseases for the lifetime of our children, we need to accelerate science. Among other things, we are hampered by the fact that it may take a year or more to publish in a scientific journal," Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook.
bioRxiv is a website where researchers can download preprints of their scientific papers for free before publication in scientific journals. Articles almost immediately become available for reading and discussion, but they are not reviewed. In fact, this is the arXiv for biological sciences, with the only difference that the arXiv has been working for 25 years, and the brainchild of CSHL is only three years old. Therefore, if the first one has already become relatively popular among mathematicians and physicists, then the second one has yet to grow. Zuckerberg is optimistic and believes that the service is "rapidly becoming the main database for manuscripts of works on biology." His enthusiasm cannot be called unfounded: now 10,000 articles by 55,000 authors from 90 countries have been published in bioRxiv and, judging by the schedule shared on Twitter by CSHL executive director John Inglis, the number of preprints uploaded to the site has been constantly growing all three years. Now it has reached 800 articles per month.
The number of articles in the bioRxiv repository by month.
It is not reported exactly how much the Chan–Zuckerberg Initiative intends to invest in bioRxiv, but it is known that the annual costs for another repository – arXiv – amount to $ 1.3 million. bioRxiv will spend the funds received on salaries of new employees and technological improvements. Inglis told Nature News that he is going to convert articles that are currently being uploaded as PDF files to html or xml format. This will allow, firstly, to read preprints from mobile devices, and secondly, to analyze them using computer algorithms.
Now bioRxiv works on the basis of commercial programs of HighWire Press. It is possible that CSHL will develop its own open source platform with the funds of the Initiative – but in any case, the software made with sponsorship money will be open, Inglis promises. In addition, he intends to create an API for third-party developers that will allow them to use repository data.
To find out how biologists themselves relate to bioRxiv and similar repositories, we asked for a comment from Alexander Panchin, Candidate of Biological Sciences, senior researcher at the IPPI RAS, winner of the Enlightener Prize:
"On the one hand, such an archive has a high risk of being filled with meaningless and erroneous content. Reviewing does not guarantee the absence of errors, but without it everything will be very bad, at least in the field of biomedicine. Scientists are encouraged for the number of publications, and if articles in bioRxiv are taken into account when evaluating such activities, many will be tempted to write nonsense there. Incorrect statistical analysis and small samples are often found in biomedicine. Moreover, such works often have negative social consequences, are picked up by journalists and create persistent myths. On the other hand, it is very difficult to publish negative results, and bioRxiv could help here. So I'm for bioRxiv negative results."
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28.04.2017