This article was also published by ASAPbio.

ASAPbio works to drive open and innovative communication in the life sciences and promotes the productive use of preprints. IndiaBioscience aims to increase the visibility of science in society, by serving as a platform for science communication, policy discussions, and the dissemination of information to the scientific community. Open Access India is an active community of scientific stakeholders that seeks to raise awareness and drive policy change for publicly funded research in India, advocating for open access, open data and open education.

On the 7^thof June this year, the three organisations joined hands to conduct a workshop to discuss preprints and the value they can add to research assessment frameworks in India.

The goal of the workshop was to understand challenges around current assessment frameworks in India and the opportunities that preprints bring to the scientific community. In addition, it facilitated a discussion with Indian researchers on steps that can support change in assessment and recruitment frameworks to incorporate preprints. The event also served as a platform to bring together the Indian scientific community to discuss and highlight the current state of scientific publishing and preprinting, and draw from their personal experiences.

The workshop was kicked off with an introduction by Iratxe Puebla from ASAPbio. She summarised the work and goals of the different host organisations and the objectives for the workshop. This introduction was followed by the keynote speaker Satyajit Mayor, director of the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore and member of DORA’s Steering committee. Mayor summarized the challenges and state-of-the-art of the Indian research and publication ecosystem. He emphasised that one of the biggest challenges lies in changing the mindset of the scientific community and policymakers to adapt and accept alternatives to the existing publishing and scientific dissemination options, for example, incorporating preprints. Mayor also highlighted that although certain organisations are open to new assessment frameworks, implementing these changes can be complex and may take time. He did note though that we are seeing positive steps as several institutes, such as the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and NCBS, are actively promoting practices such as preprinting to their researchers.

During the interactive Q&A session with the audience, a particular topic that stirred the discussion was how to make the assessment criteria for researchers more holistic and less focused on impact factors and publication records, given the challenge this presents for early-career researchers in particular, and for the overall acceleration of the scientific publication process. The discussion called for research assessors to move from evaluating impact factors and the number of publications to evaluating the science behind the research. Such a focus on the scientific content over journal-based metrics is also needed to address other challenges such as predatory journals. This shift would drive researchers to put out articles of more expansive and impactful research. Mayor concluded by putting his faith in the coming generation of researchers to pick up these issues as their own and steer the wheels of change. There is already groundwork in place for this discussion, thanks to the work of organisations such as DORA over the last ten years; a number of Indian institutions and funding bodies are DORA signatories and we should call on them to lead the way in implementing updates to assessment frameworks, to incorporate preprints, among different steps to reduce reliance on journal metrics.

Followed by this broad discussion, breakout rooms, facilitated by Iratxe and the ASAPbio Fellow Yamini Ravichandran, were launched for a deeper dialog with attendees. These discussions involved a diverse group of stakeholders, including early career researchers, principal investigators and community members. A summary of the points raised is outlined below.

Challenges of current assessment frameworks in India

• Overemphasis on publication outputs & impact factors, rather than on the quality of the research – ‘Publish or Perish’ culture, frameworks driven by global institutional rankings
• Lack of straightforward alternatives to evaluate the quality of individual research works
• Lack of focus on integrity or on open-science practices
• Financial barriers associated with article-processing charges (APCs) to publish open access
• Early-career researchers are penalised as they have less publications and are more disproportionately affected by peer review & publication timelines

Benefits that preprints can bring in research assessment

• Preprints are aligned to DORA, they allow evaluating the paper for its merits, free of journal-associated metrics
• Preprints provide proof of productivity in a faster timeframe than that of the journal process (and also for work that may not publish in a journal e.g. negative results) – more control for the researcher
• Feedback on the preprint can increase integrity & rigor – more eyes on the paper earlier allows improvements to the manuscript before it goes to a journal
• Preprints align to open science principles – there are no access restrictions, allowing visibility of research outputs to a wide audience

What steps can researchers take to support recognition of preprints in research assessment?

• Garner support from group leaders and institutions to publish preprints
• Encourage discussion of preprints at society conferences and committees
• Run local events to raise awareness of preprints
• Promote awareness at private institutions as these have their own models for research assessment and may favour implementation of frameworks that include preprints
• Raise requests within their institutions to incorporate preprints into hiring & promotion processes
• Raise requests to their funders to recognize preprints
• Encourage pro-preprint policies at journals
• Support early-career researchers interested in sharing their manuscript drafts as preprints

ASAPbio, IndiaBioscience and Open Access India thank Mayor and all attendees for their contributions during the workshop. Following the energizing discussion at the workshop, we will pursue further steps to engage the scientific community in India, as well as other stakeholders, in additional events and initiatives towards raising awareness and recognition of preprints in the region.

We welcome input from the community as we move ahead. If you would like to take part please contact us at iratxe.puebla@asapbio.org (ASAPbio), sridhar@openaccessindia.org (Open Access India) or hello@indiabioscience.org (IndiaBioscience).

From mountains to rivers, oceans, woods, and islands, the landscapes and their inhabitants make India a rich and diverse ecosystem. One such unique landscape — a volcanic island in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and its biodiversity — inspired Rohit Naniwadekar, Scientist at the Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysuru, and his team to reach out to the stakeholders of this ecosystem and the general public with their new findings from the island.

Located about 250 kilometres northeast of Port Blair, Narcondam Island is a volcanic island of about 6.8 square kilometres in area. The island is the only home for the Narcondam hornbill, a fascinating bird that helps preserve the biodiversity of the island.

Having studied the hornbills in Northeast India for about two decades, Naniwadekar led a five-member team of scientists and artists on an expedition to the Narcondam island in December 2019. The goal was to study the Narcondam hornbill and the plants of the island. The team spent two months on the island, counting and observing the hornbill by the day and resting on the seashore by night.

“The place is a paradise,” Naniwadekar says. “We fell in love with the place and the species, and we thought we should spread the word about this bird as far as we could.” That’s when an opportunity came his way in the form of the first IndiaBioscience Outreach Grant. Naniwadekar and his collaborators decided to apply.

“Increasingly, I’ve realized that scientists have to take that extra effort to communicate their science. It just can’t remain in journal articles. It’s our moral responsibility to communicate it to a wider audience, particularly because public funds support a lot of the research being done,” Naniwadekar says. “That is why we decided to take this step to communicate our research to the general audience.”

Working on research projects with grants that have little to no room to allocate money for outreach, Naniwadekar found it exciting to have a grant exclusively dedicated to science outreach. With such a grant, it was now possible to spread awareness about this vulnerable ecosystem among the stakeholders of the island — the local people, the policemen, and the administration — and the general public.

Seizing the opportunity, Naniwadekar teamed up with some of his friends and newer collaborators for this project. The team consisted of Sartaj Ghuman, Artist and Writer; Adarsh Raju, Photographer, Filmmaker and Web Developer; Prasenjeet Yadav, Photographer and Filmmaker; and Sangeetha Kadur, Graphic Designer.

“We had spent time with about 40 police officers on the island during our expedition. While it was nice to see that they were all concerned about the island’s biodiversity, they were not fully aware of the same,” Naniwadekar says. To build a rapport with them, and create awareness about the island, the team prepared posters that were given to the officials to be deployed on the island.

The team also made calendars featuring Ghuman’s paintings, depicting the island and its hornbill. Kadur designed the calendar to have postcards with the paintings, which could be used later (calendar can be downloaded here).

“We met with the police officials and personally passed on the calendars,” Naniwadekar recollects. The team also connected with teachers and birdwatchers in Port Blair and distributed the calendars to them.

The calendars were a huge hit, and people have been preserving them well beyond the calendar days for the paintings and the content. “I was in Port Blair recently, where I met this person who had framed the cut-outs of these postcards. I was touched by the gesture — that somebody had valued it so much,” Naniwadekar says. “It was also heartening to see our calendars on desks, for the paintings, even after the year was over.”

Naniwadekar, Ghuman, and Yadav have also written popular articles to share the story with a larger audience.

Through the grant, the team has also been building a website to spread awareness about their exciting findings from the Narcondam expedition. They hope to launch the website by August this year. In their own words, it is “a one-stop location for all information from the time the hornbill was discovered by Allan Octavian Hume in the 1870s.”

The team hopes to make short videos on hornbill ecology in the near future. “We are still looking for people who can work with us to create these videos that can be shared on social media,” Naniwadekar adds. “Most of us may not be able to go to such places, but to even know that there is such a place in India, and see them in photographs or videos, is still amazing.”

Although the team embarked on this project with great enthusiasm following their exciting expedition, it has been a bumpy ride. The team had all the material that they needed to communicate in place, but the pandemic and the associated lockdowns made it difficult for them to communicate with each other and with the stakeholders of the island.

“It was all great when we were working together on the island. We were all pumped up, drawing energy and inspiration from each other. But it was difficult working in isolation,” Naniwadekar says. The long conversations the team members used to have in-person, during their travel, which culminated in art and articles, were now not possible.

Even as they complete the objectives of their current project, Naniwadekar thinks that there is a lot of ground to cover, both for them and for science communicators at large. He is also actively looking for people who can collaborate with them to share their science to a wider audience through different platforms.

“There are people out there, who have been captivating their audience with fascinating content. It is for scientists to connect with such people to create interesting content (and disseminate them) through diverse media — blog posts, articles, social media content, etc.,” Naniwadekar says. “There’s a lot of room for collaboration, a lot of work to be done. And I’m sure, like us, there will be hundreds and thousands of stories to be told.”

'A bane or a boon' – though a cliché, there couldn’t be a better phrase to describe the ease and pace of communication that WhatsApp provides. With the instant messaging app and its broadcast lists, the information, disinformation and misinformation spreads like fire. During the last two years of the pandemic, WhatsApp emerged as one of the primary sources of COVID-19 misinformation. Most of the times, the content shared used ‘science-y words’ but was not scientifically accurate. Misinformation effects the actions of readers and can have broad societal implications.

Information also comes in multiple forms sometimes overselling scientific results. Dissecting these claims, comprehending the nuances of research and sifting facts from jargon requires journalists to connect to experts on the subject which is often a daunting task. Aniket Sule, Associate Professor at Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE), TIFR, Mumbai, contemplated using WhatsApp for fast and accurate exchange of information by bringing these two crucial stakeholders together - people who do science and write science. “I have been interacting with journalists in Mumbai for more than a decade. Print and television journalists are often on tight deadlines. They might not have the expertise to comprehend the technical details of a press release or recent research. Often press releases are made in the evening when journalists hardly have time since the news needs to be up the next morning”, says Aniket.

Aniket received requests from journalists covering stories in different areas of science. Soon Aniket realised that he was not always the right person to tease out the details for the journalists. “Though I’d put them in contact with experts in the field, the chances of getting factually correct information depended upon the availability and promptness of the expert”, says Aniket. Hence, he started a WhatsApp group with the aim to make communication between scientists and journalists less challenging. The platform was to help journalist reach experts quickly and still produce scientifically sound information in a short time.

Another motivator for Aniket to begin the WhatsApp group was his work during COVID-19 “Towards the end of 2020, while working on the Indian Scientists’ Response to COVID-19 (ISRC), I realized that even if we produce outreach material on COVID-19, unless journalists had access to this, the material will not reach people”, recollects Aniket. The WhatsApp group in essence helps everyone - scientists, science educators, writers, editors, practitioners, content developers who aim to improve and expand the perspectives and understanding of science in society. “I was one of the few people at ISRC in touch with journalists, many other scientists who were a part of ISRC were enthusiastic about science communication but they did not know whom to contact and how to help. Chasing every story while being objective and with scrupulous attention, was tough for journalists. Hence, 2020 was the right time for this initiative”, recollects Aniket.

The group presently has about 200 scientists, writers, editors from various media houses, freelance science journalists and educators. Most of the journalists in the group report in English, Hindi, Marathi and Bengali. A journalist can post a query to look for an expert in the group who would be interested to talk about a particular study. Scientists also share their recent research expressing interest in discussing it with the journalists.

Journalists need to ask difficult questions, dig deeper, fact-check potential sources. Aniket’s face lights as he explains, “This group provides just that! Diversity of opinions with finer details in a time-efficient manner. We allow discussions to happen in the group when a piece of news or research requires inputs from experts from different fields. If journalists need an opinion on a particular topic, they can introduce themselves and if they hear from an expert, the following conversation can happen personally.”

The WhatsApp group helps writers understand caveats in scientific findings and alternate explanations. The group also ensures writers are more certain about the narrative and assertions that are being made in the article/podcasts/videos. There are a lot of sources on the internet and gauging through the reliable ones can be taxing. The group acts as a well-grounded resource by the experts, making reporting hassle free and more precise.

It is 5 PM on a Saturday. A group of children are glued to their screens, awaiting the host’s permission to join the week’s episode of Talk To A Scientist (TTAS).

Week after week, children from across the country have been tuning in to this webinar platform co-founded by Karishma S. Kaushik, Assistant Professor at the Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU), Pune, and Snehal Kadam, PhD student at Hull York Medical School, University of Hull, Hull, United Kingdom.

It started as a one-time webinar on the novel coronavirus for children amidst a lockdown on 30 March, 2020. Thanks to the participants who asked when the next session would be organised, Kaushik and Kadam decided to make it a weekly event. The program has been running successfully for over a year and a half in the form of a thematic series: each season having ten episodes, the finale being a hands-on session. Along the way, TTAS has received prestigious national and international outreach grants, including the IndiaBioscience Outreach Grant (IOG). The co-founders’ faces light up even as they describe how this ‘passion project’ started.

“If you ask a child to name a few Indian scientists, perhaps they will say names like C. V. Raman, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, Janaki Ammal, Kamala Sohonie or Anandibai Joshi,” Kaushik says. “But nobody will name scientists like Manu Awasthi (a computer scientist), Avinash Sharma (who was part of an Indian expedition to Antarctica) or Bhaktee Dongaonkar (who studies memory and learning). It is important to know about contemporary scientists, living and working in India in a very different time from Raman and Ramanujan. Further, all of us scientists are funded on public money – money from Indian taxpayer families – so it is our national duty to inform and engage them with ongoing scientific pursuits in the country.” So, Kaushik and Kadam decided to fill this gap by introducing and engaging 6–16-year-old kids to contemporary science and scientists in India, and it has been a rewarding journey.

The stakes are really high, you can’t let kids down when they show up with eager faces asking, ‘when are we starting, ma’am?,’ ‘who’s the guest scientist, ma’am?’, and ‘what’s the next session, ma’am?’ - Karishma Kaushik

As the show runs successfully and amasses support from various quarters, it is the passion and drive of the co-founders, and the enormous work that goes on behind the scenes that ensures the show goes on. “When you think about it, it is a lot of things to be done on a weekly basis,” Kadam explains. “Every week, you need to spend several hours before the session preparing the content or going through the content of guest speakers to make it understandable and appropriate for the kids. And then, there is the management aspect: preparing posters for social media, sending out e-mail links, responding to queries, coordinating with the guest speakers, and so on.”

While Kaushik and Kadam are proud of their platform, they also gracefully acknowledge its limitations. “Having said that (we catered to an existing gap), we don’t plug all gaps,” Kaushik says. “We are not multilingual, and we are internet-based. We recognise that we cannot communicate in Kannada, Telugu, Bhojpuri, and every language in India. We also can’t reach children and families who don’t have internet access. But I think it is important to recognise that outreach cannot have a ‘one-size-fits-all’ formula.”

Kadam adds, “Any communication form will have its limitations. If we chose to reach the children offline and visit schools, we would be limited by geography. We would then have to restrict ourselves to the schools in Pune. It was really important for us to accept that we can’t do everything, and there is always going to be a segment or situation we cannot cater to.”

Not only did the duo realise the limitations of the platform, but they also came to terms with the limitations of their scientific expertise, and the need to open up the platform to the scientific ecosystem. They had embarked on the project all by themselves, from preparing content to managing the show. However, they soon realised that they could talk to the kids only about a few topics. “Even within biology, there are specific areas that we cannot explain adequately enough,” Kadam says. “For example, I don’t think I would feel confident about explaining the nitty-gritty of neuroscience even though I have a basic understanding of the field. Having heard the kind of questions these kids were asking, within the first few sessions, we realised that the show would need expert speakers.”

The team was happy to invite like-minded experts to talk to these children. To their surprise, they received an overwhelming response from the expert community – to the point that they have to put guest speakers on a waitlist!

“I think this gave the platform a different edge,” Kadam says. “This also freed us up a bit, giving us time to plan the sessions better.” So far, TTAS has featured more than 60 guest speakers, introducing the kids to a range of topics from astrobiology, the working of the internet, plant communication to sleep in mammals.

Further, having younger role models as guest speakers (undergraduate, Master’s, and PhD students) has helped the children a lot, as Kaushik and Kadam say. The show has also hosted people who explained the science behind their work or pursuit — say, in breadmaking or pistol shooting — to the great enthusiasm of kids. This exercise has, in a sense, broadened the definition of a scientist for these kids — from the stereotype of senior academic researchers or industry experts to anyone who applies science in their study and work.

In some ways, TTAS has also helped the co-founders realise their childhood dreams. “The first time I met a scientist was when I was around 17 years old, and that was only because I decided to pursue science. Had I decided otherwise, I don’t think I would have ever met a scientist in my life,” Kadam says. “So, for these kids to meet with scientists at such a young age and know that there are these actual people that they’ve met and can approach with a question, opens up many possibilities.”

The road, however, has not always been smooth. While there have been days when the hosts are so overwhelmed by the number of participants that they have had to quickly stream on YouTube, there have also been days when few kids have shown up. But this has not deterred them because they have a different definition of growth. “While most platforms define growth in numbers, it has never been the case for TTAS,” Kaushik says. “For us, the main purpose is to inspire. So, we have focused rather on building a rapport with the kids who show up week after week and making a difference in their view of science and scientists.”

“We can see (that difference) in the kind of questions they ask now versus those they asked in the first session,” Kadam adds. “We have had scientists tell us that the questions the kids are asking are open research questions in the field.”

Drawing a close to the first IOG, and embarking on the extension grant with scale-up plans, the duo says that running an outreach program demands exceptional professionalism, almost like a ‘second full-time job’, contrary to the notion of science outreach being a ‘soft job’. TTAS has also recently received a grant from the American Geophysical Union (AGU) to publish archived content, based on edited recordings of the sessions, to expand its reach to settings with limited resources.

“The stakes are really high,” Kaushik says. “You can’t let kids down when they show up with eager faces asking, ‘when are we starting, ma’am?,’ ‘who’s the guest scientist, ma’am?’, and ‘what’s the next session, ma’am?’”