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There has been strong interest in preprint commenting and review activities in recent years. Public preprint feedback can bring benefits to authors, readers and others in scholarly communication, however, the level of public commenting on preprints is still low. This is likely due to cultural barriers, such as fear by authors that criticisms on their paper will bias readers, editors and evaluators, and concerns by commenters that posting a public critique on a preprint by a more senior colleague may lead to retribution. In order to help address these cultural barriers and foster positive and constructive participation in public preprint feedback, we have developed a set of 14 principles for creating, responding to, and interpreting preprint feedback. The principles are clustered around four broad themes: Focused, Appropriate, Specific, Transparent (FAST). We describe each of the FAST principles and designate which actors (authors, reviewers and the community) each of the principles applies to. We discuss the possible implementation of the FAST principles by different stakeholders in science communication, and explore what opportunities and challenges lie ahead in the path towards a thriving preprint feedback ecosystem.

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, a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals, including Journal of Cell Science, gathered together at the Annual Meeting of The American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco, CA, USA to discuss current issues related to how the quality of research output is evaluated, and how the primary scientific literature is cited.

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Guangshuo Ou as an Editor on Journal of Cell Science. Guangshuo obtained his PhD in cell and developmental biology from the University of California, Davis. His thesis work, conducted under the guidance of Dr Jon Scholey, focused on ciliogenesis in Caenorhabditis elegans neurons and elucidated how microtubule-based motor proteins are used to build neuronal cilia. Guangshuo received his postdoctoral training with Dr Ron Vale at the University of California, San Francisco, where he developed imaging techniques to study neuroblast migration and division in C. elegans larvae and discovered a new myosin-based mechanism underlying neuroblast asymmetric division. In 2011 he was recruited by the Chinese government with the Junior One Thousand Talent Plan Award as an investigator at the Institute of Biophysics Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2013 his group relocated to the School of Life Sciences at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and he became a principal investigator of the Joint Center for Life Sciences at Tsinghua and Peking Universities. He continues to study neuroblast development using C. elegans as a model organism. Guangshuo has had a long-standing interest in understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms of cell division and cell migration in developmental systems. Guangshuo has developed imaging methods to follow neuroblast development in a living nematode larva, and his laboratory devised the somatic CRISPR-Cas9 technique to generate conditional knockouts in order to dissect the underlying molecular regulation. His laboratory has obtained new information regarding signalling pathways that direct neuroblast migration in vivo. He continues to work on intraflagellar transport and introduces genome-editing tools to model human ciliary diseases. Guangshuo has received international awards, including the Newton Advanced Fellowship from the Royal Society, the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Award, the Norton B. Gilula Award from the American Society for Cell Biology and a Chinese National Outstanding Youth Scholarship. We are very pleased to welcome Guangshuo to Journal of Cell Science and look forward to working with him.