The webinar was held as part of ASIRA (Access to Scientific Information Resources in Agriculture) Online Course for Low-Income Countries--

This webinar covers three emerging themes in life science publishing, which will begin to influence the way in which the agricultural researchers share and access knowledge:

Faster dissemination: Publishing scientific articles is often a lengthy process, taking several months or even years from first submission. This prevents the research community and others from being able to act on new knowledge quickly, which is especially serious in emergency situations such as emerging infectious diseases. This webinar will cover two ways of tackling publication delays: preprint servers and post-publication peer review platforms.

Increased access & transparency: Open Access has helped remove access barriers to a vast body of scientific knowledge. Other important research outputs that have historically been difficult to access are starting to be published more frequently such as replications, data, code and referee reports.

Assessment of research: Researches are assessed by their publication record. Journal title and Impact Factor tend to be the default assessment criteria, though there is growing awareness of the disadvantages of these approaches, and alternative measures of quality and impact are gaining ground.