Journal of Information and Knowledge (Formerly SRELS Journal of Information Management)

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The Normalization of Preprints


Affiliations
1 Steering Group, International Science Council’s Project on Scientific Publishing♣, International Science Council, Paris, France
     

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The last few years have seen an explosive growth in the use of preprints and the associated preprint servers by large sections of the scientific community. This article addresses the history of the preprint, its advantages, and potential disadvantages, and concludes with some recommendations for how the growing acceptance of preprint posting should be handled within academia and the changes in cultural norms (in other words its normalization) that this entails. (Garisto, 2019).

Keywords

Digital Archives, Open Science, Preprints, Research Visibility, Scholarly Communication.
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About The Author

Luke Drury
Steering Group, International Science Council’s Project on Scientific Publishing♣, International Science Council, Paris
France


Notifications

  • Garisto, D. (2019). Preprints make inroads outside of Physics. APS News, 28(9). http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201909/preprints.cfm.

  • Feder, T. (2021). Joanne Cohn and the Email List that Led to ArXiv. Physics Today. https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.6.4.20211108a.

  • ASAPbio maintains a list of mainly life science preprint servers https://asapbio.org/preprint-servers, and the Confederation of Open Access Repositories plans to launch a preprints directory https://www. coar-repositories.org/news-updates/ccsd-and-coar-announce-plans-to-launch-preprint-directory/.

  • Xie, B., Shen Z., Wang, K. (2021). Is preprint the future of science? A Thirty Year Journey of Online Preprint Services. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.09066.pdf.

  • Mallapaty, S. (2020). Popular preprint servers face closure because of money troubles. Nature, 578(7795): 349-349. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00363-3. PMid:32071446.

  • Garisto, D. (2022). ArXiv.Org Reaches a Milestone and a Reckoning. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/arxiv-org-reaches-a-mile-stone-and-a-reckoning/.

  • Grothkopf, U., Bordelon, D., Meakins, S. and Emsellem, E. (2017). On the Availability of ESO Data Papers on arXiv/astro-ph. The Messenger, 170: 58-61. https://doi.org/10.18727/0722-6691/5056.

  • Fraser, N., Brierley, L., Dey, G., Polka, J.K., Pálfy, M., Nanni, F., et al. (2021). The evolving role of preprints in the dissemination of COVID-19 research and their impact on the science communication landscape. PLoS Biol, 19(4): e3000959. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000959. PMid:33798194 PMCid:PMC8046348.

  • Hinchliffe, L. J. (2022). The State of the Version of Record. The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2022/02/14/the-state-of-the-version-of-record/.

  • Michael Barber’s occasional paper for the International Science Council, Strengthening Research Integrity, https://council.science/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2021-11-Research-integrity.pdf

  • Avissar-Whiting, M. (2022). Downstream Retraction of Preprinted Research in the Life and Medical Sciences. MetaArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/xdekq.

  • Johnson, R. and Chiarelli, A. (2019). The second wave of preprint servers: How can publishers keep Afloat? The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/10/16/the-second-wave-ofpreprint-servers-how-can-publishers-keep-afloat/.

  • Fu, D. Y. and Hughey, J. J. (2019). Releasing a Preprint is Associated with More Attention and Citations for the Peer-Reviewed Article. P. Rodgers and O. Amaral (eds). ELife 8 (December), p. e52646. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.52646. PMid:31808742 PMCid:PMC6914335.

  • Davis, P. (2018). Journals Lose Citations to Preprint Servers. The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/05/21/journals-lose-citations-preprint-servers-repositories/. However his argument is that citations are split between the preprint and journal version, and not that total citations are reduced.

  • Ginsparg, P. (2021). Lessons from ArXiv’s 30 Years of Information Sharing. Nature Reviews Physics, 1-2. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-021-00360-z.

  • Enago (2020). Will Crowd-based Peer Review Replace Traditional Peer Review? https://www.enago.com/academy/will-crowd-based-peer-review-replace-traditional-peer-review/.

  • Franco Iborra, S., Polka, J. and Puebla, I. (2022). Guest Post: Preprint Feedback is Here - Let’s Make it Constructive and FAST, The Scholarly Kitchen, https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2022/02/28/guest-post-preprint-feedback-is-here-lets-make-it-constructive-and-fast/

  • O’Sullivan, L., Ma, L. and Doran, P., 2021. An Overview of Post-Publication Peer Review. Scholarly Assessment Reports, 3(1): 6. http://doi.org/10.29024/sar.26.

  • Brembs, B., Huneman, P., Schönbrodt, F., Nilsonne, G., Susi, T., Siems, R., Perakakis, P., Trachana, V., Ma, L. and Rodriguez-Cuadrado, S. (2021). Replacing Academic Journals. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5526635.

  • Brierley, L., Nanni, F., Polka, J.K., Dey, G., Pálfy, M., Fraser, N., et al. (2022). Tracking changes between preprint posting and journal publication during a pandemic. PLoSBiol, 20(2): e3001285. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001285

  • Nicholson, D. N., Rubinetti, V., Hu, D., Thielk, M., Hunter, L. E. and Greene, C. S. (2022). Examining linguistic shifts between preprints and publications. PLoS Biol, 20(2): e3001470. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001470; PMid:35104289 PMCid:PMC8806061.

  • Heesen, R. and Bright, L. K. (2021). Is peer review a good idea? British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 72(3): 635-63. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axz029.

  • Andrew Wakefield’s paper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud; https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/elisabeth-bik-didier-raoult-hydroxychloroquine-study.

  • Murray Gell-Mann’s (1961). Nobel prize-winning “Eightfold way” paper; and, more recently, the three papers by Grigory Perelman solving the Poincaré conjecture, for which he won the Fields medal and Clay Millennium prize, which were immediately recognized for their significance by the peer community and only circulated as preprints without appearing in a traditional journal.

  • Aczel, B., Szaszi, B. and Holcolmbe, A. O. (2021). A billiondollar donation: Estimating the cost of researchers’ time spent on peer review, Research Integrity and Peer Review, 6(14). https://doi.org/10.1186/ s41073-021-00118-2.

  • Watson, C. (2022). Rise of the preprint: How rapid data sharing during COVID-19 has changed science forever. Nature Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01654-6. PMid:35031791.

  • Watson, C. (2021). Australian funder backflips on controversial preprint ban. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02533-3.

  • Preprint server. https://www.cos.io/products/osf-preprints.

  • Altman, M., Cohen, P.N. and Polka, J. (2021). Preprints and pandemics: Interventions into the dynamic system of scholarly communication. MetaArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/6nzhe.

  • Arvan, M., Bright, L.K. and Heesen, R. (2022). Jury theorems for peer review. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. https://doi.org/10.1086/719117.

  • Weissgerber, T., Riedel, N., Kilicoglu, H. et al. (2021). Automated screening of COVID-19 preprints: Can we help authors to improve transparency and reproducibility? Nat Med, 27: 6-7. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-01203-7. PMid:33432174 PMCid:PMC8177099.

  • https://scicrunch.org/ASWG.

  • The ASWG tools. https://www.scicrunch.com/news/2020/8/11/sciscore-to-launch-a-pilot-with-the-american-association-for-cancer-research-to-help-authors-improve-rigor-and-reproducibility-in-their-published-work.


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  • The Normalization of Preprints

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Authors

Luke Drury
Steering Group, International Science Council’s Project on Scientific Publishing♣, International Science Council, Paris, France

Abstract


The last few years have seen an explosive growth in the use of preprints and the associated preprint servers by large sections of the scientific community. This article addresses the history of the preprint, its advantages, and potential disadvantages, and concludes with some recommendations for how the growing acceptance of preprint posting should be handled within academia and the changes in cultural norms (in other words its normalization) that this entails. (Garisto, 2019).

Keywords


Digital Archives, Open Science, Preprints, Research Visibility, Scholarly Communication.

References