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, Filed Under: OAWeek, Open access, Peer review, Publishing

Preprints

As part of our OA Week 2024 celebrations, we hosted a discussion on October 23rd about various open access topics. I’ll be recapping those discussions here on the OA blog.

Today, I’ll share what we discussed related to preprints.

For a little context: Preprints are articles that are posted online before they have gone through the peer review process. They are typically shared on pre-print servers like arXiv, bioRxiv, or PsyArXiv, but can also be shared on institutional repositories like Texas ScholarWorks. A preprint is different from a postprint, which is the version of the article after peer review, but before they go through final copyediting and conversion to PDF.

Our group discussed some of the advantages to sharing your preprint online:

  • All submissions are time-stamped, so you can establish priority for your intellectual argument. In many disciplines, this actually makes it harder for someone to scoop your work. Many journals will not consider an article by another person(s) on the same topic as a preprint until that preprint is officially published.
    • We also discussed the opposite issue- that you could get scooped if your article is stuck in the publication pipeline and not available for people to see that you are working on that topic.
  • Sharing your work online before publication let’s people read and engage with the work immediately.
  • Peer review is usually more about refining and improving an article, rather than deciding whether the work should even be published.
  • There is so much false and low-quality work out there masquerading as authoritative content. Sharing preprints from researchers at universities helps populate the commons with higher quality work.
  • It’s FREE to share your preprint.
  • In some disciplines, like physics, the preprint is the defacto publication of record.
  • In public health, it can be really important to get information out to clinicians and other researchers early so that progress can be made in making people better.
  • Sharing your data/research early can help you find collaborators.
  • Preprints can help raise visibility, especially for early career researchers.

We also discussed some potential pit-falls and myths associated with posting a preprint online:

  • We discussed the importance of clearly labeling preprints as such. They can be confusing to students, journalists and the general public who may not be immediately familiar with what a preprint is and where it fits into the publication cycle.
  • Myth – some people think that if you post a preprint online, a publisher won’t want to publish the article, but there isn’t evidence for this.
  • It’s not really a pit-fall, but if preprints aren’t a part of your discipline, you could feel that posting it online is an extra step you don’t need to take.

If you are interested in reading more, here are some selected resources (not comprehensive):