Analysis and news


“The preprints landscape keeps evolving and is characterised by widespread


publishing workflows with preprint servers at scale would be challenging, but it would include some of the benefits of both models, researcher- and publisher-centric. A key finding of Knowledge Exchange’s


experimentation”


available in preprint form: journals already have authors’ manuscripts, which means they could make them public in a more structured way. An important difference between the


above pathways to preprint posting is where responsibility rests: a researcher- centric approach would tend to be based on shared technical infrastructure and non-profit business models. It would also lead to community ownership, as opposed to handing the reins of preprint posting to academic publishers, which are perceived by some as holding too much power in the scholarly communication landscape. A third view, perhaps somewhere between the others, could see publishers submitting research in preprint form to community-governed preprint servers: this is what PLOS is currently doing by submitting preprints to bioRxiv. Integrating


research is the enabling role played by social media and Twitter in particular. Twitter was found to be the main pathway for people to discover preprints, and it is used to share and comment on them, among other things. This highlights the relevance of social media metrics, as these can be used to track discussions and engagement via a preprint’s DOI, which could otherwise be lost. The preprints landscape keeps evolving and is characterised by widespread experimentation. This is not to be seen as a weakness, but rather as evidence of the transformative role that preprints could play in scholarly communication. To date, preprints have been acknowledged by some research funders as evidence for research achievements (e.g. National Institutes of Health, Zuckerberg Foundation, Wellcome Trust, European Research Council) and are also mentioned in the evolving guidance for the implementation of Plan S. To sum up, we believe that preprints


present a great opportunity to enhance open scholarship. However, their potential


can be delivered in practice, only if the stakeholders involved are actively engaged and collaborate toward a shared vision. As far back as 2003, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities described the internet as an emerging medium for knowledge dissemination and stated that it would ‘significantly modify the nature of scientific publishing, as well as the existing system of quality assurance’. Although there is ample room for further


transformation, the growing adoption of preprints represents a practical demonstration of this principle.


This article was jointly written by Andrea Chiarelli, Juliane Kant and Birgit Schmidt on behalf of Knowledge Exchange. Andrea Chiarelli is a consultant at Research Consulting. Juliane Kant is partner representative for the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) in Knowledge Exchange. Birgit Schmidt is head of knowledge commons at Göttingen State and University Library


Sources:


Chiarelli, A., Johnson, R., Pinfield, S. & Richens, E. (2019). F1000Research (preprint). Preprints and Scholarly Communication: Adoption, Practices, Drivers and Barriers.


Chiarelli, A., Johnson, R., Pinfield, S. & Richens, E. (2019). Zenodo. Practices, drivers and impediments in the use of preprints.


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