ScienceGeist

A perspective from an interdisciplinary group of early career researchers on the value of preprints, advocating the wide adoption of preprints to advance knowledge and facilitate career development.

We’re happy to share two new documents that we hope will aid researchers in their decision to share early work as preprints.

The potential of preprints to drive scientific understanding and innovation, and even support good journalism.

An interview with the directors of PsyArxiv, SocArxiv, and Marxiv.

The scientific community must take measures to keep preprints from distorting the public’s understanding of science, says Tom Sheldon.

From July 2018, the Europe PMC repository will start indexing preprints.

A group of open science advocates have launched the first preprint aimed exclusively at African scientists. The free, online outlet is one of a growing number for academics on the continent to share their work.

Early-career researchers can learn about peer review by discussing preprints at journal clubs and sending feedback to the authors.

Preprints are one of the fastest growing types of content in Crossref.  The growth may well be approximately 30% for the past 2 years (compared to article growth of 2-3% for the same period).

Many biologists are still reluctant to submit preprints, in part out of concern that doing so will allow others to “scoop” their work and undermine their chances of publication in a prestigious journal. I would like to rebut that concern, among others, and to share our research group’s first experience submitting a preprint manuscript.

Introductory report for the Knowledge Exchange working group on preprints, based on contributions from the Knowledge Exchange Preprints Advisory Group.

Why do authors continue to cite preprints years after they've been formally published?  A citation is much more than a directional link to the source of a document. It is the basis for a system of rewarding those who make significant contributions to public science.

On the basis of a survey of 7103 active faculty researchers in nine fields, this paper examines the extent to which scientists disclose prepublication results, and when they do, why?

Including preprints rather than focusing completely on published papers in journal clubs might benefit the scientific enterprise in numerous ways, including by providing direct criticisms to preprint authors before publication, deemphasizing publishing venue, teaching students the art of reviewing papers, and making journal clubs more current by discussing unpublished data.

I’m in graduate school to learn, and preprints—draft versions of journal articles that are shared prior to peer review—offer a great opportunity to do just that. Here’s how preprints help young researchers grow in ways traditional types of scientific communication don’t.

American Chemical Society: Chemistry for Life.

Researchers can submit their work directly from bioRxiv to F1000Research offering more choice and flexibility to authors in deciding when to set preprints to under invited peer review.

To enable peer feedback, collaboration and transparency in scientific research practices, Hypothesis and the Center for Open Science (COS) are announcing a new partnership to bring open annotation to Open Science Framework (OSF) Preprints and the 17 community preprint servers hosted on OSF.

A collection of recent (and not-so-recent) literature on journal peer review.

In order to better serve authors, an agreement between the two organizations outlines broader use of bioRxiv for preprints of papers submitted to PLOS journals.

The Center for Open Science (COS) has launched two new preprint services to provide free, open access, open source archives for the Arab and French research communities.

As preprints in medicine are debated, data on how preprints are used, cited, and published are needed. This study by John P.A. Ioannidis evaluates views and downloads and Altmetric scores and citations of preprints and their publications.

A paper providing a bibliometric analysis of Zenodo records by using different metrics for citedness, including citation, usage, and altmetrics. 

On the role of different stakeholders on how to collectively improve the process of scholarly communications not only for preprints, but other forms of scholarly contributions.

The pre-print database for scientists to test the peer-review waters was set up in 1991 as a relatively simple electronic bulletin board on a single computer. Twenty-six years later, the site arXiv.org has surpassed a full billion downloads of papers and receives more than 10 million submissions each month.