Preprint
In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset version available free, before or after a paper is published in a journal.
For broader coverage of this topic, see Manuscript (publishing).History[edit]
Since 1991, preprints have increasingly been distributed electronically on the Internet, rather than as paper copies. This has given rise to massive preprint databases such as arXiv and HAL (open archive) etc. to institutional repositories. The sharing of preprints goes back to at least the 1960s, when the National Institutes of Health circulated biological preprints. After six years the use of these Information Exchange Groups was stopped, partially because journals stopped accepting submissions shared via these channels.[1] In 2017, the Medical Research Council started supporting citations of preprints in grant and fellowship applications,[2] and Wellcome Trust started accepting preprints in grant applications.[3]
In February 2017, a coalition of scientists and biomedical funding bodies including the National Institutes of Health, the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust launched a proposal for a central site for life-sciences preprints.[4][5][6] In February 2017, SciELO announced plans to set up a preprints server – SciELO Preprints.[7] In March 2017, the National Institutes for Health issued a new policy encouraging research preprint submissions.[8][9] In April 2017, Center for Open Science announced that it will be launching six new preprint archives.[10] At the end of the 2010s, libraries and discovery tools increasingly integrate Unpaywall data, which indexes millions of preprints and other green open access sources and manages to serve over half of the requests by users without the need for subscriptions.[11]
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for published research on the disease spurred a wave of research articles being released as preprints,[12] bypassing the peer-review and publication process, which was proving too slow in the context of an active and novel pandemic. The release of COVID-related preprint articles, along with other COVID-related articles published by traditional journals, contributed to the largest ever single-year increase in scholarly articles.[13]