Preprint
In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset version available free, before and/or after a paper is published in a journal.
History
Since 1991, preprints have increasingly been distributed electronically on the Internet, rather than as paper copies. This has given rise to massive preprint databases such as arXiv.org and to institutional repositories. The sharing of preprints goes back to at least the 1960s, when the National Institutes of Health circulated biological preprints. After six years the use of these Information Exchange Groups was stopped, partially because journals stopped accepting submissions shared via these channels.In 2016, several new preprint servers were proposed by Crossref, Centre for Open Science and ASAPbio.
In January 2017, the Medical Research Council announced that they will now be actively supporting preprints beginning in April 2017. Also in January 2017, Wellcome Trust stated that they will now accept preprints in grant applications. In February 2017, a coalition of scientists and biomedical funding bodies including the National Institutes of Health, the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust launched a proposal for a central site for life-sciences preprints. In February 2017, SciELO announced plans to set up a preprints server – SciELO Preprints. In March 2017, the National Institutes for Health issued a new policy encouraging research preprint submissions. In April 2017, Center for Open Science announced that it will be launching six new preprint archives.
At the end of the 2010s, libraries and discovery tools increasingly integrate Unpaywall data, which indexes millions of preprints and other green open access sources and manages to serve over half of the requests by users without the need for subscriptions.
Role
Academic practices
Publication of manuscripts in a peer-reviewed journal often takes weeks, months or even years from the time of initial submission, owing to the time required by editors and reviewers to evaluate and critique manuscripts, and the time required by authors to address critiques. The need to quickly circulate current results within a scholarly community has led researchers to distribute documents known as preprints, which are manuscripts that have yet to undergo peer review. The immediate distribution of preprints allows authors to receive early feedback from their peers, which may be helpful in revising and preparing articles for submission.Most publishers allow work to be published to preprint servers before submission. A minority of publishers decide on a case-by-case basis or interpret the Ingelfinger Rule to disqualify from submission.
Stages of printing
While a preprint is an article that has not yet undergone peer review, a postprint is an article which has been peer reviewed in preparation for publication in a journal. Both the preprint and postprint may differ from the final published version of an article. Preprints and postprints together are referred to as e-prints or eprints.The word reprint refers to hard copies of papers that have already been published; reprints can be produced by the journal publisher, but can also be generated from digital versions, or from eprints self-archived by their authors in their institutional repositories.
Tenure and promotion
In academia, preprints are not likely to be weighed heavily when a scholar is evaluated for tenure or promotion, unless the preprint becomes the basis for a peer-reviewed publication.Some important results in mathematics have been published only on the preprint server arXiv. After nearly a century of effort by mathematicians, between 2002 and 2003 the mathematician Grigori Perelman published a series of preprint papers on the arXiv where he presented a proof of the Poincaré conjecture. Perelman was offered both the prestigious $1 million Millennium Prize and the Fields Medal for the mentioned work published exclusively on arXiv, but he declined both prizes.
Servers by field
General
was launched in 2012 as a collaborative writing platform used by researchers to write, cite, collaborate, host and post their articles. The site is the only preprint server that displays manuscripts as HTML with interactive figures and hosted data.PeerJ PrePrints is a free preprint server operated by PeerJ. Articles submitted undergo a basic screening process but are not peer-reviewed. Commenting is allowed by any registered user, and download and pageview data are supplied. All articles are published with a CC-BY license. As of September 2016, 2,439 articles have been made available. On September 3rd, 2019 PeerJ PrePrints announced it would stop accepting new preprints as of September 30th, 2019. Zenodo is a repository for research data that has been used also as preprint repository, because it offers document preview and a DOI number for the submitted document. MDPI launched an additional preprint server in 2016.
is a free multidisciplinary preprint server that launched in 2018. Articles are rendered in full HTML and commenting is allowed without registration. Research Square is also home to In Review, an opt-in service that posts manuscripts as preprints to Research Square while they are under consideration at participating journals. In Review features a peer review timeline, which publicly displays information like when an editor is assigned and when peer reviews are received. Research Square also hosts the which is an open repository of community-contributed protocols sponsored by Nature Research.
is the early content platform from , designed to provide researchers with space and resources to connect and collaborate with their communities, and rapidly disseminate early research. It is free to upload and read content. Cambridge Open Engage content is primarily for the research community, across disciplines, but it is also freely accessible to all audiences. Content on Cambridge Open Engage is not peer-reviewed, but goes through a moderation process before it is posted. Cambridge University Press also partners with organizations such as learned societies, university departments or research centres. The first partner space was , launched on behalf of the American Political Science Association in August 2019.
Library and information science
There are two servers for LIS and allied fields: Eprints in Library and Information Science and the . e-LIS was launched in 2003, and is an international open access repository for academic papers in Library and Information Science, run by volunteers. LISSA was launched in 2017 as an open access repository for all materials created by those in LIS and allied fields, including work that happens outside the traditional realms of academia, such as oral histories, community works, code, data, and manuscripts. It is run by members of the library and archives community, and their technology partner, the Center for Open Science, using the Open Science Framework to host materials.Physical sciences
The e-print archive arXiv is one of the best-known preprint servers. It was created by Paul Ginsparg in 1991 at Los Alamos National Laboratory for the purpose of distributing theoretical high-energy physics preprints. In 2001, arXiv.org moved to Cornell University and now encompasses the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics. Within the field of high-energy physics, the posting of preprints on arXiv is so common that many peer-reviewed journals allow submission of papers from arXiv directly, using the arXiv e-print number.In some branches of physics, the arXiv database may serve as a focal point for the many criticisms made of the peer review process and peer-reviewed journals. In his column in Physics Today, April 1992, David Mermin described Ginsparg's creation as potentially "string theory's greatest contribution to science". About 8,000 preprints per month are uploaded to arXiv as of 2016.
An engineering preprint server, engrXiv, was launched in 2016 by the Center for Open Science and administrated by the University of Wisconsin–Stout. Whilst under development, it used a temporary email deposit system. As of April 2017, the official home for engrXiv went live after the web interface was launched in December 2016.
The server viXra was established in 2009 for authors who are excluded from arXiv and other repositories owing to submission filtering.
Computer science
The ability to distribute manuscripts as preprints has had a great impact on computer science, particularly in the way that scientific research is disseminated in that field. The open access movement has tended to focus on distributed institutional collections of research, global harvesting, and aggregation through search engines and gateways such as OAIster, rather than a global discipline base such as arXiv. E-prints can now refer to any electronic form of a scholarly or scientific publication, including journal articles, conference papers, research theses or dissertations, because these usually are found in multidisciplinary collections, called open access repositories, or eprints archives.Biological and chemical sciences
The biological sciences have lagged behind the physical sciences in their use of preprints. Based on the success of arXiv, bioRxiv was introduced in 2013, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Therapoid Preprint was launched in 2017 by Open Therapeutics, and ChemRxiv was announced in 2016 hosted by the American Chemical Society. In 2017, it was confirmed that ChemRxiv was going to be powered by figshare. Articles undergo basic screening for offensive and/or non-scientific content but do not undergo a peer review process. In early 2019, the Beilstein-Institut announced their intention to provide authors intending to submit to the Beilstein Journals the option to publish a preprint version of their manuscript to the with a single click. Preprints published in the Beilstein Archives will be limited to the fields in which the Beilstein Journals covers, namely organic chemistry and nanotechnology.Between 2007–2012 Nature Publishing Group ran their own preprint server, Nature Precedings. It hosted manuscripts, posters, and unpublished observations.
ASAPbio is "a scientist-driven initiative to promote innovation and transparency in life sciences communication" through the use of preprints.
Social science and humanities
One of the earlier preprint servers is PhilSci-Archive, launched in 2001 for all subfields of Philosophy of Science, hosted by the University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh.An open archive of the social sciences. SocArXiv was formed in July 2016 by a group of sociologists, members of the academic library community, and their technology partner, the Center for Open Science, using the Open Science Framework. It is administratively housed at the University of Maryland and directed by Philip Cohen. SocArXiv officially launched in December 2016. Frequently asked questions about SocArXiv.
PsyArXiv is a similar preprint service for the psychological sciences which launched in 2016 by the and the Center for Open Science.
The Social Science Research Network is a repository for both working papers and accepted papers, which shows download and citation data within the site for each stored paper. In May 2016, SSRN was acquired by Elsevier.
Agriculture and allied sciences
is the global preprint service for agriculture and allied sciences, and was formally launched on 14 February 2017 by . In June 2020 the hosting and management of agriRxiv was transferred to CABI , an international, inter-governmental, not-for-profit organization that improves people’s lives worldwide by providing information and applying scientific expertise to solve problems in agriculture and the environment.Paleontology
In May 2017, launched as a preprint server for paleontology and published its first submissions in August 2017.Sport
Under construction in April 2017 is SportRxiv, a preprint archiving service for the sport, exercise, and rehabilitation sciences which was launched in August 2017 with support from Open Science Framework.Law
The service LawArXiv 'Legal Scholarship in the Open' was announced in May 2017.Theses and dissertations
Launched in August 2017 is Thesis Commons, a preprint service for free open publication of student theses and dissertations supported by Open Science Framework.Medicine
is a preprint server that evolved from JMIR Publications' experiments in open peer-review. It contains primarily submitted manuscripts which are currently under open peer-review.MedArXiv is a preprint service for the medicine and health sciences which is under development with support from Open Science Framework. It was announced in September 2017 by Harlan Krumholz at American Medical Association's Eighth International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication.
Geoscience and Earthsciences
Two preprint servers in the field of geoscience were confirmed in September 2017. One option is the Earth and Space Science Open Archive run by The American Geophysical Union with support from Wiley. Moreover, Earth scientists who have published in the many journals of the European Geosciences Union have already become accustomed to such openness and are posting their work prior to peer-review as a discussion on the Copernicus platform.In addition, EarthArXiv run by a group of scientists powered by the Center for Open Science launched in October 2017. Post launch, some further resources here.
Marine climate science
MarXiv is a free research repository for ocean-conservation and marine-climate science. Initial funding was provided by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation. It is due to launch in November 2017 via the Center for Open Science Preprints framework.Electrochemistry
ECSasXiv is a preprint research repository for electrochemistry, solid state science and technology. It will be run by The Electrochemistry Society and built and hosted by Open Science Framework.Philosophy
, an archive linked to PhilPapers, is an archive for philosophy in general, while is a research repository for philosophy of science in particular.Education
, a preprint server for education research was announced on August 19, 2019. It is to be hosted by the Open Science Framework.
Regional
Africa
A pan-African preprint repository, was launched in June, 2018.Arabic
is a preprint server that hosts manuscripts in many scientific disciplines mainly in Arabic but other languages are also considered. It has been built in January 2018, in partnership with the Center for Open Science.China
Operated by National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences, launched in 2016.