Feature


Growing share for preprints


Five organisations define, describe, and share their thoughts on a subject that has become something of a hot topic in recent times


Please tell us how you would define a preprint?


Tasha Mellins-Cohen, director of publishing, Microbiology Society: Preprints are a way for researchers to make their work available when they are ready for it to be seen – and reviewed – by people outside of their immediate research group. Authors have always shared early drafts of their work with colleagues so in a way, preprints as we understand them today are a new model for a very traditional phenomenon.


Mirjam Curno, publishing director, Frontiers: A ‘preprint’ is a scholarly article posted in an openly accessible platform; namely, a specific repository or preprint server. Typically, submissions occur either prior to, or alongside, peer review, although preprints are also used to share author versions of published articles, in which case they are already peer- reviewed. Clearly, preprints short-circuit the time to publication. On the other hand, however, it means they have not yet been subject to a rigorous peer review process which validates the paper before official publication.


Amye Kenall, VP of publishing and product, Research Square: A preprint is the author-submitted version of the manuscript before peer review.


Michael Foster, managing director for publications, IEEE: We define a preprint as a draft version of a scholarly or scientific article, the preliminary work by an author prior to formal peer review and publication in an archival journal or


10 Research Information April/May 2020


proceedings. Authors can now post these types of drafts to TechRxiv.org, a new preprint server for the global technology community developed by IEEE. Authors can post preprints to TechRxiv regardless of where they eventually intend to submit and publish their work. Think of TechRxiv.org as a collaborative hub that facilitates the rapid and open dissemination of early scientific findings in electrical engineering, computer science, and related technologies. A preprint server such as TechRxiv.


org enables researchers to share early results of their work ahead of formal peer review and publication and gain community feedback on a draft version of their research. We should note that all submissions to TechRxiv.org are screened prior to acceptance by a panel of experts, and although not peer reviewed, the documents are checked for plagiarism and inappropriate content.


Steph Macdonald, Sarah Sabir, Tim Koder, Pharmagenesis: Our Open Pharma team would define a preprint as public version of a research manuscript that has not been through formal peer review.


After a quiet start, the use of preprints has surged in the last few years. Why?


Mellins-Cohen, Microbiology Society: I suspect that the biggest blocker to uptake of preprints was traditional publishers suggesting that a preprint counted as ‘prior publication’, which meant they would not review or publish preprinted articles. In the last few years most publishers have acknowledged that this view was not aligned with the changing models of


scholarly communication and have started to embrace preprints. Other factors to the accelerating uptake of preprints are likely to include increasing awareness of preprints outside of the physics community, which has used and valued arXiv for decades, and the ease of setting up new preprint servers on commercial and not-for-profit platforms (e.g. OSF Preprints).


Curno, Frontiers: Researchers increasingly recognise that there are benefits in being able to share their work quickly and disseminate it extensively via the preprint route. This can be either prior to publication, so results are disseminated rapidly alongside the potential to claim ‘first discovery’, or post-publication, which means authors can share their work more widely in case it was published in a subscription journal. Beyond that, the surge in preprints could also be because the research community now regards them as an additional channel through which to publish their work, alongside traditional journals.


Kenall, Research Square: In the past few years, preprints in the biomedical sciences have grown significantly. This is likely due


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