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Foster, IEEE: I would restate this as an opportunity for publishers in a few ways. 1) to invite more authors from around the world into the process, 2) to receive more submissions from authors who are in the early stages of their careers, 3) to help raise awareness of an author’s work as early as possible, 4) to help expedite the peer review and publishing process for scholarly journals with more polished submissions, and 5) to make the lifecycle of research communications richer and more transparent.


This is made possible through the addition of data, code, and other research artifacts to the archival records, and through machine-linking of the various different versions of articles, e.g. conference proceeding, preprint, and the archival journal version of record.


The research lifecycle and research outputs themselves differ dramatically between disciplines”


Macdonald, Sabir, Koder, Pharmagenesis: Preprints not only provide researchers with a faster route of communication than traditional peer-reviewed publication, but also offer an alternative route to open access without the associated article processing costs. As preprints become more popular some authors may opt not to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals at all. Publishers will have to adapt in order to retain article submissions, demonstrating the value added by their peer review, editorial and other publishing processes, and providing authors with viable open access routes.


Where do we go from here? What will the preprints landscape look like in 10 years’ time?


Mellins-Cohen, Microbiology Society: Let me go find my crystal ball… At a guess, we’ll see some consolidation of existing niche preprint servers into larger disciplinary servers, as well as the launch of additional disciplinary and institutional servers for specific communities, but also a proliferation of services built on top of preprint servers.


www.researchinformation.info | @researchinfo


Curno, Frontiers: This may depend on the transition to open access and more technology-driven publishing services, which could speed up publication. Either of these could make preprints redundant as they would undermine its main benefit; rapid and unrestricted dissemination. On the other hand, if there is a clear shift in researcher evaluation (some funders allow preprints to be used in grant applications) and a de-emphasis on peer review as a validation method, it is possible preprints may become more prominent. However, like other well established and long-running industries, publishing moves relatively slowly. It could be that 10 years is too short a timeframe for any significant change to occur in the preprint landscape. There are a number of areas that preprints do need to address to become more prominent. For example: impact data reconciliation, quality control, and AI-ready formats to enable enhanced text and data-mining in the future.


Kenall, Research Square: I don’t see these two ecosystems as at odds. Indeed, I think they work in collaboration. Peer review through a journal provides a method of validation (albeit not a perfect one) and a valuable level of curation in our world of information overload. The challenge will be in the ability to work together to ease the user journey for the author and in ensuring there is no duplication of resources.


Foster, IEEE: I think the open science movement overall will continue to accelerate as more information will be available faster and more broadly than ever before – and that encompasses preprints, data, code, as well as the final peer reviewed articles. IEEE strives to continue to support the varying needs of all of our authors and the scientific community by providing and developing the resources needed to continue to drive global innovation now and in the future.


Macdonald, Sabir, Koder, Pharmagenesis: As the demand for timely access to research outputs grows so will the scholarly community’s engagement with preprints. The clear benefits of preprints in response to public health crises have again been demonstrated in the COVID-19 outbreak. When an inflammatory article suggesting that COVID-19 was engineered by humans was posted to bioRxiv, the scientific community rallied together and the article was quickly withdrawn, demonstrating that even when ‘bad science’ is made public, there are clear steps in place to contain any potential damage. It will be interesting to see whether the use of preprint servers, such as bioRxiv and medRxiv, continues after the COVID-19 crisis is over.


Product Spotlight


International Political Science Abstracts: A global index for researchers and students


Created in 1951 by the International Political Science Association (IPSA), the International Political Science Abstracts (Abstracts) is a research tool to help researchers and students identify and efficiently exploit the most up-to-date articles in professional literature. As a global resource, Abstracts provides non-evaluative abstracts of virtually all relevant articles published in scholarly journals and yearbooks from every region of the world.


English abstracts are provided for journals published in other languages including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, French, Russian, German, Spanish, all Nordic languages and more. Abstracts is an essential roadmap


to literature in political science, political sociology, political economy, political history, political psychology, international relations, international law, human rights, security studies, conflict studies, ethnic studies and other related fields.


Content Includes • Non-evaluative English abstracts of scholarly articles in more than 900 journals


• All abstracts published since International Political Science Abstracts, Volume One (1951)


• Approximately 8,000 new records each year


• Indexing of book reviews published in the major scholarly journals


• Indexing of edited works, including chapters and authors – a novel resource found only in International Political Science Abstracts


Subjects Include • Political method and theory • Political thinkers and ideas • Governmental and administrative institutions


• Political process • Parties and groups • Elections • International relations • Foreign policy


Available through EBSCOhost® and EBSCO Discovery Service™, Abstracts pairs well with Academic Search™ Ultimate and Political Science Complete™, as researchers can link to hundreds of full-text titles in those databases.


For a free trial, visit https://ebsco.is/IPSA1


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