preLights

A community platform for highlighting and commenting on preprints

In a nutshell

The project aims to help scientists navigate the ever-growing preprint literature and facilitate commenting on preprints.
A group of early-career researchers (the 'preLighters') select preprints that they think are interesting for the community, and write digests about them. These posts also feature personal opinions of preLighters about why the work is important, and engage preprint authors who often reply to questions raised in the preprint highlight.

Goals and intentions

1) Since the launch of bioRxiv, the number of posted preprints has been exponentially growing and is expected to further increase in the future. This will make it more and more difficult for researchers to keep up with the preprint literature. preLights aims to help scientists by selecting and summarizing interesting preprints for them.

2) Despite the growing popularity of preprints, public commenting on preprints hasn't taken off. At preLights, early-career researchers give personal opinions about preprints (which are often in their field of expertise). In addition, anyone can comment on the preLights posts and by also encouraging preprint authors to provide 'author responses', preLights aims to facilitate discussions about preprints.

3) Finally, preLights aims to promote early-career researchers and give them a platform where they can practice their scientific writing and reviewing skills. These ECRs also play an important role in raising awareness and advocating for preprints.

Project status

Active

Types of outputs

Preprints

Review process

Review requested by

Non-authors
Reviewer selected by

Self-nominated
Public interaction

Yes
Author response

Yes
Decision

None

Review policy

Review coverage

Complete paper
Reviewer identity known to

Public
Competing interests

Not included

Social Networks

Gallery

Review features

Manuscript hosting

No
Notes

'News and views' type of summary with personal opinion + questions to the authors; freeform commenting by anyone
Eligible reviewers/editors

preLighters are selected through an application process, in which they have to write a preprint highlight, a short bio and explain their motivation to join
Tags or badges

No

Transparency

Open identities

Results

Number of scholarly outputs commented on

Unknown
Metrics

We track usage of the service and participation of the selected 'preLighters' (Currently we receive cc. 2K views/week on the website and have 130 active 'preLighters'). We also track the number of preprint author comments (currently cc. 30% of posts have author comments)

Naomi Penfold
2019-03-04 at 10:32

Is there a public list of all preprints that have now been ‘preLighted’?

Thanks!
Naomi, ASAPbio

Reply
pmate
2019-03-05 at 09:43

Hi Naomi, since the title of all preLights posts is the preprint title, it is easy to check which preprints have been highlighted. In case you would like to have this list in a spreadsheet, I’m sure we can easily generate this.
Best,
Mate, preLights

Reply