ATG Interviews Michele Avissar-Whiting Editor in Chief, Research Square By Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu> and Katina Strauch (Editor, Against the Grain) <kstrauch@comcast.net> ATG: Michele, you joined Research Square after finishing your postdoctoral work on cancer epigenetics at Brown University. Given your background and training, what was it that you found compelling about working for Research Square? MA-W: I joined Research Square when it was still only known as American Journal Experts, or “AJE,” which was — and still is — a company dedicated to easing barriers to publication for researchers whose mother tongue is not English. I found that mission really appealing and also liked that the company was engaged in a number of other pursuits related to scholarly publishing, such as exploring mechanisms for journal-independent peer review. As a researcher, the part of my work that I found most satisfying was connecting my findings with the rest of the literature, tying together a narrative through prose and visuals. I invested a lot of time and effort into creating effective visuals for my own publications, and so I eagerly got involved with the burgeoning Figure Formatting division soon after joining the company. Later, I would help to start up the Video Abstract service and fully entrench myself in the world of science communication, which became a great passion for me. ATG: Research Square bills itself as “a multidisciplinary preprint and author services platform.” How do your author services and tools work to complement the preprints that are submitted? Can you give us an idea what kinds of support a prospective author can expect after they submit a preprint? Are these services also available to authors who do not submit preprints? MA-W: I like to think of our platform as a new category in publishing: the intersection of manuscript preparation, preprinting, and post-publication assessment. Our most developed and most popular services on the platform are AIbased digital language assessment and automated editing tools, which are available to authors as soon as they upload their manuscript to our platform. Authors get to see their scores before and after editing and have the option of downloading the edited file. We also offer professional assessments for methodological and data reporting, where our in-house experts check applicable sections of a paper for items related to reproducibility and transparency. Authors are given detailed feedback about which items are missing, and those who successfully pass these assessments can earn badges for their preprints to publicly signify their papers’ adherence to these standards. All of this can occur before the preprint is posted. Or, if the author would rather not wait, a revision can be posted once they make the necessary changes. The hope is to empower authors to put their best foot forward while sharing research on their own terms. Right now, our services are tightly coupled with preprint posting, but this won’t always be the case. Keep
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watching us. Exciting developments are coming to our platform in 2022! ATG: In a Scholarly Kitchen article dated June 3, 2021, you championed preprinting *as part* of the journal publication process. Can you elaborate? What role does preprinting currently play? What role should it play? What do you predict for the future of preprints? MA-W: More and more, we are seeing journals and publishers not only adopt permissive policies with respect to preprints, but fully embrace them as part of the publication process. Elsevier has SSRN, Wiley has Authorea, and Springer Nature — of course — has partnered with Research Square to offer a streamlined preprint deposition service that is integrated into the submission process. Publishers are increasingly acknowledging the importance of rapid dissemination for speeding up the pace of discovery. Reputable publishing houses understand that supporting preprints does not undermine the most important functions of the journal, which are to provide validation, endorsement, and curation. In fact, decoupling dissemination from peer review means that the emphasis on “time-to-firstdecision” can be somewhat relieved, giving editors and reviewers the space to do the important work of assessing the manuscript. Having the preprint publicly available also means there are many more eyes on it, which can only stand to make an editor’s job easier. Many of the people who find the preprint organically — researchers who are intimately familiar with the topic — are the ones best positioned to critically evaluate it. These people can catch problems the reviewers or editor may easily miss and leave a comment or send an email to the author, editor, or preprint server. In short, scholarly publishing has been among the slowest industries to evolve in the digital age, and preprints are leveraging the benefits of the Internet in a way that has been long overdue. The future will see preprints go fully mainstream as both funders and major publishers lean in further. What we could see in a preprint-first world is the decommodification of the scientific article. This has the potential to change — for the better — the problematic incentive structures in academia and align them around rigor and transparency as opposed to volume or deeply skewed notions of “impact.” ATG: As you know, some people have expressed concern that preprints can be mistakenly cited as accepted research, possibly leading to misinformation and false results. Are the preprints on the Research Square platform subjected to any kind of quality control that might help diminish the possibility of this occurring? MA-W: We place a huge amount of emphasis on screening here. We have a dedicated team of screeners who follow detailed protocols to ensure that pseudoscience or potentially harmful or unethical research does not get shared on our platform. It isn’t always an easy call though. Particularly during the pandemic,
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