SFARI is excited about preprints; they help to get results (including ‘negative’ results) out to the research community without the significant delay that almost always come with publishing in a peer-reviewed journal — albeit with the caveat that the results are not yet peer reviewed. There are many other benefits too (see ASAPbio.org).

Last year, we changed our grant award letter to strongly encourage all SFARI Investigators to post preprints on recognized servers in parallel with or even before submission to a peer-reviewed journal. We also updated our biosketch form to include space for SFARI grant applicants to list manuscripts deposited in preprint servers; we and our external peer reviewers take these manuscripts into consideration when making funding decisions.

Now, we’ve also started a dedicated SFARI channel on bioRxiv, one of the most used preprint servers. We hope this will allow readers to find preprints reporting SFARI-funded research findings on autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders more quickly. More generally, we hope that it will encourage more investigators to post preprints and thus speed the progress of autism research.