Better science and higher impact with Overleaf and DeSci Publish

This is a guest blog written by Philipp Koellinger, co-founder of DeSci Labs.

Introduction

As a scientist, I often feel frustrated by the painfully slow publishing process. And I frequently question the trustworthiness of papers I read and cite, particularly when they make bold claims without sharing the data or code to back them up. Does that sound familiar?

That’s why we started DeSci Labs. Our mission is to accelerate scientific progress by making research more accessible, transparent, and reliable.

What is DeSci Publish?

If you are reading this, you probably know how to use Overleaf and appreciate its ease of creating beautiful manuscripts. DeSci Publish is a preprint network that enables you to add data, code, and other files to your paper. Our submission process automatically extracts relevant meta-data from your paper, enabling you to get a DOI and share all your work in just one minute.

Once you’ve uploaded your paper, our advanced AI tools will highlight closely related research and calculate novelty scores for your article. Recently featured in Nature, these novelty scores are faster and often more accurate than subjective expert judgments. They also show a strong correlation with future citation counts, giving you early insights into the potential impact of your work.

DeSci Publish allows you to easily update and add files without overwriting older versions. Ideally, you’ll upload all major milestones of your research project, from an initial analysis plan to data, code, and the final manuscript. This creates a transparent track record of how your results were achieved, ensuring you never lose files or forget progress. Referees and editors highly value such transparency, boosting trust in your work and improving your publication chances.

Here’s an example of a fully reproducible research object that includes data and code for all the figures and tables in the manuscript:

DeSci Publish lets you claim validated Open Data and Open Code badges, even before journal submission. These badges are added to the ORCID profiles of all co-authors as recognized contributions, increasing visibility and giving you immediate credit for making your resources publicly available.

Here is an example of the ORCID record for an Open Data attestation:

When you’re thinking about where to submit your paper, you can look at the closely matching articles that we found for your manuscript to see in which journals they were published. The authors of these closely related articles are also often natural reviewers for your research.

When you're ready to submit your paper to a journal, use the 'Produce Submission Package' function to generate a cover page for your manuscript. This cover page highlights the Open Data and Open Code badges you've earned, signaling to editors and reviewers that your submission includes not just the paper but also readily accessible data and code. This transparency gives you a head start in the review process. Additionally, the links to your research on DeSci Publish will display your novelty scores, which can further enhance your chances of getting published in the journal of your choice.

Importantly, DeSci Publish is an open-source software project that is free to use and cannot be bought or shut down. All content shared on the platform is stored on an open peer-to-peer network, safeguarding against data silos and paywalls. Each file receives a machine-actionable persistent identifier resistant to link rot or content drift (DPID). This allows you to programmatically import data or code into local computing environments with a single line of code, which can be copied directly from the DeSci Publish webapp. By combining persistent identifiers with metadata, your work becomes Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR), meeting funder requirements (e.g., ERC).

What’s coming next

We are currently developing a token-based system to reward fast, high-quality peer reviews. The concept is simple: every scientist who begins using DeSci Publish will receive free tokens. These tokens can be used to have their own research quickly reviewed by qualified peers. Additional tokens can be earned by reviewing others' work. All reviews will be public, allowing authors to include them in their submissions to traditional journals.

With these tools in place, we will then also be able to offer diamond open-access journals that can quickly review and publish papers, data, code, and other research artifacts.

Call to action

DeSci Publish is reimagining how research is shared, reviewed, and recognized. By combining powerful open-source technologies, we empower scientists to enhance the transparency and impact of their work while speeding up high-quality peer-review and rewarding those who do the work.

Join us on this journey to accelerate scientific progress.