Preprints

Benefits of publishing a preprint

Disseminating your work as a preprint benefits you and your readers.

1. Using a publicly available preprint service gives you publicly time stamped certification and registration of your work. This can help you avoid being ‘scooped’ and can also help identify instances of plagiarism.
2. Preprints on some servers are open to comments and feedback. This can help you improve your manuscript and highlight potential collaboration.
3. Rapid dissemination of research findings addresses the problem of delays between submitting to a journal and actual publication.
4. Your work is accessible to those who cannot afford subscriptions or who are outside academia, such as businesses, charities, policy makers and the general public.
5. Open access items get high visibility. This can help increase your readership and citation. Some servers give you the numbers of hits and downloads per item.
6. There is no cost to the author or the reader.
7. It is possible to track the changes to a discussion because the server retains previous versions.
8. You usually retain the copyright of your work on preprint servers.
9. Preprint servers usually assign a unique identifier to each item, enabling your work to be easily cited.
10. Some funding bodies encourage, or even require, you to use preprint servers.
11. It is increasingly common in some disciplines for a preprint service to be the ‘go to’ location to find out about new work in a specific field of study.
12. When your work is published, some preprint servers automatically add a link from the preprint to the published version (as long as the titles match).
13. On some preprint servers, you can submit direct from the preprint server to some publishers’ article submission systems (for example PLOS journals).

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Concerns about preprint

There are some things to be aware of before you decide on preprint. You will need to weigh up these considerations against the benefits we’ve already seen.

1. Although most journals will accept manuscripts that have previously been disseminated on preprint servers (usually if they are not-for-profit), some do consider preprints as prior publication. You can check journal details using Sherpa Romeo. Bear in mind, journal policies are generally changing on this point. You may decide to select a different journal.
2. Some authors are concerned that early versions of the work will be read and cited rather than the final version, which could be confusing and inaccurate. 
3. Some journals require manuscripts to be anonymised for double blind peer review. If a preprint version of the work is available, reviewers are able to discover the identity of the author(s). This can be balanced against the benefits of open commenting. The journal’s policy on deposit of preprints can be contradicted by its use of double-blind peer review.
4. Some disciplines, for example medical sciences, are sensitive to findings being released before they have been peer reviewed, because they might be misinterpreted by non-specialist readers or the press.

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Preprint servers usually hold articles that have not been peer reviewed, but this is changing. 

Initiatives like the ones listed below allow scholarly discussion on preprint works that can help you improve your paper.

In these cases, reviewers evaluate preprints based on rigorous peer review. They may then ‘recommend’ preprints, which will make them complete, reliable and citable without the need to publish in traditional journals.

If your preprint article is ‘recommended’ in this way, you don’t even need to submit to a classic journal as well – although that is up to you. Recommended articles can still be referred to by researchers and cited in the literature.

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