Ben Catt (Open Research Librarian) describes the benefits of research preprint sharing and support provided by the University Library
‘Stack of books on table’ by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash
The Open Research team recognises the importance of preprints – early versions of research publications, typically articles which have yet to undergo peer review – to many in our research community. The sharing of preprints is common practice across a range of disciplines and ties in with the theme of this year’s International Open Access Week as a fundamentally noncommercial and community-based approach to open research dissemination.
The opportunities presented by preprints and considerations for researchers are addressed in our Open Research Skills Framework. Preprint sharing has been widely championed in recent years by proponents such as the Center for Open Science (COS), and strongly encouraged by funders including UKRI (in particular MRC and BBSRC) and Wellcome. Preprint sharing benefits authors by enabling them to disseminate their work rapidly and directly to the research community at a global scale through subject-specific open access repositories or servers. Preprints are versionable (they can be updated or corrected) and provide a route for researchers to receive feedback and commentary from peers. They are indexed by the likes of Google Scholar, PubMed and Scopus, and can help authors to improve the visibility and reach of their work. Many repositories now provide item-level DOIs (digital object identifiers) which make preprints easily citable and part of the permanent scholarly record.
‘Preprints enable rapid dissemination’ by Jessica Polka from Preprinting to broaden scholarly dialog, incorporating FxEmojis by Mozilla; provided under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
It’s difficult to measure the full scale of activity across the University, but many researchers have recorded their preprints in Pure and several of those recognised in our York Open Research Awards have shared preprints of their work. This includes Early Career Researchers (ECRs) for whom preprint sharing provides an opportunity to contribute to their field and establish the priority of their findings and ideas ahead of publication or for inclusion in grant applications. Our Graduate Engagement Leads will soon be launching faculty-specific surveys into open research at York which will help us better understand the current rate of engagement with preprints and other practices amongst our community.
Researchers in a wide range of scientific disciplines will already be familiar with arXiv, the original preprint distribution service launched in 1991 and now hosted at Cornell University with over two million papers in their repository. The Library has been an institutional member of arXiv since 2018, one of our early efforts to help fund external infrastructure which enables open research practice (see Supporting the wider open research ecosystem for more of our commitments in this area). Preprint sharing has become established in other disciplines in recent years and we are pleased to announce that we have made small donations to four other repositories, spanning each of our academic faculties at York:
- engrXiv – engineering, operated by OpenEngineering
- MediArXiv – media, film, and communication studies, initiated by Open Access in Media Studies and hosted by the Open Science Framework (OSF))
- PsyArXiv – psychology, maintained by the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) and hosted by OSF)
- SocArXiv – social sciences, operated by the University of Maryland (SocOpen) and hosted by OSF
Logos are the legal property of their respective owners, used with permission or in accordance with their terms; arXiv logo is a registered trademark of arXiv and Cornell University; MediArXiv and SocArXiv logos are provided under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
We acknowledge that there are issues to be addressed in the rise of preprint sharing, principally how the dissemination of unreviewed papers may contribute to the spread of misinformation in certain fields. This is especially serious when it comes to questionable medical research which made headlines at the height of the pandemic, although advocates may argue that this is not a new issue and that problematic preprints can be addressed rapidly whereas it has taken years for published papers to be formally retracted by journals. Many repositories have responded to concerns of quality-control with moderation and screening processes as well as crowd-based open peer review features to help scrutinise submissions and tackle misinformation. The Library also supports the PCI (Peer Community in) non-profit organisation which provides a review and curation process for preprints across many scientific fields, as well as facilitating onward publication in around 100 compatible journals.
Most publishers accept preprint sharing as standard practice and encourage authors to engage with the process, for example BMJ supported the launch of the medRxiv preprint server for health sciences in 2019 which became an important source of Covid-related research the following year. Big commercial publishers have also been investing in preprint infrastructure, for example Elsevier’s acquisition of the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) in 2016. However, some publishers and journals may still reject papers which have been disseminated prior to submission so it’s important for researchers to understand publisher policies when considering their options (Sherpa Romeo provides a useful policy search tool).
We know that some researchers see limited value in preprint sharing, or regard the practice with scepticism or concern. We would therefore like to invite our research community to contact the team directly (lib-open-research@york.ac.uk) to share views on preprinting, raise suggestions for training needs or to propose any other repositories or initiatives that the Library should consider lending its support to.
Further reading:
Additional guidance on preprints can be found in this Primer from UKRN (video embedded above) and ASAPbio have shared resources and activities to promote good use. Other useful resources include OSF Preprints, a search tool covering all of their hosted repositories and a wide range of disciplines, and the Directory of Open Access Preprint Repositories provides a comprehensive list of services. A recent paper by Doron and Branch-Elliman examines and makes recommendations on the state of preprinting in medical research since the height of the pandemic, and Knöchelmann goes in depth on the applicability of preprinting in the wider context of ‘open humanities’. Finally, a critical take on preprinting culture is offered by Emily M. Bender, who makes a nuanced case that Scholarship should be open, inclusive and slow.