Elisa Fadda — bioRxiv Affiliate

Elisa Fadda has been a bioRxiv affiliate since 2017. She is an Associate Professor at Maynooth University researching on the study of the diverse functional roles of structural disorder and its modulation in carbohydrates (glycans), proteins and glycoproteins with implications on molecular recognition. In this interview, she shares why she likes being an Affiliate and why others should consider it.

When did you join as an affiliate and why?

I have been a bioRxiv affiliate since 2017. I became interested in contributing to this revolutionary (as it was considered at the time) and innovative change in scientific publishing after discussing the matter with a friend who was a long term bioRxiv affiliate at the time. We were both fed up with many aspects of scientific publishing, to name a few: ridiculous costs, elitism, nonsense metrics, conscious and unconscious bias in peer reviewing, and the ridiculous timescale all these factors contribute to, which ultimately delay science advancement. I wanted to play my part in this very exciting change of culture.

Why do you enjoy being an affiliate?

My favourite part in being an affiliate is reading exciting papers and feeling that I am one of the first people, outside of the respective research labs, who gets that opportunity. I regularly find interesting papers, and being an affiliate allows me to keep a close eye on what is coming out pretty much "live".

Why others might like to join?

I think that being an affiliate should be of interest to all research scientists who want to be involved in new ways to communicate knowledge. We read preprints because we are interested in the content, severed from the (potential) clout of the journal the paper ends up in. This is a crucial paradigm change that is transforming scientific publishing for the better.

What do you do?

The job is very easy. I screen the manuscripts in the queue to assess if the work fits with the bioRxiv remit, eligibility criteria and ultimately if it is science. There is no schedule on how often I should screen papers, but I try my best to keep regularly monitor the queue, also (selfishly) for my own personal interest.

What have you learned by being an Affiliate?

Being an affiliate I learned about how bioRxiv is becoming progressively important for the scientific community worldwide. Most colleagues of mine (and my group first and foremost) celebrate a bioRxiv preprint more than its publication in mainstream journals. Once the preprint is out, your work is there for everyone in the community to read, use, celebrate, discard, judge, accept or refute. So, based on these considerations, I would suggest to all bioRxiv users if I may, to submit to bioRxiv with the same attention to details and care you use when submitting to a journal, possibly submit the same draft and not a place-holder (nobody likes those). Ultimately, please keep updating the bioRxiv version of your manuscript to match the one appearing in the journal. The community will thank you for that.

To promote the rapid dissemination of new research, bioRxiv and medRxiv depend on Affiliates who help screen manuscripts. Affiliates are active scientists who volunteer their time to quickly determine whether submitted articles include biological research and do not have the potential to cause harm to the public. Thanks to affiliates we can continue sharing new research within ~48h of submission. To learn more about our screening procedures please click here https://connect.biorxiv.org/news/2022/06/13/screening_procedures