Ten simple rules to consider regarding preprint submission
Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: description of a body of scientific work that has yet to be published in a journal.Typically, a preprint is a research article, editorial, review, etc. that is ready to be submitted to a journal for peer review or is under review.It could also be a commentary, a report of negative results, a large data set and its description, and more.Finally, it could also be a paper that has been peer reviewed and either is awaiting formal publication by a journal or was rejected, but the authors are willing to make the content public.In short, a preprint is a research output that has not completed a typical publication pipeline but is of value to the community and deserving of being easily discovered and accessed.We also note that the term preprint is an anomaly, since there may not be a print version at all.The rules that follow relate to all these preprint types unless otherwise noted.In 1991, physics (and later, other disciplines, including mathematics, computer science, and quantitative biology) began a tradition of making preprints available through arXiv [1].arXiv currently contains well over 1 million preprints.While late to the game [2], the availability of preprints in biomedicine has gained significant community attention recently [3,4] and led to the formation of a scientist-driven effort, ASAPbio [5], to promote their use.As a result of an ASAPbio meeting held in February of 2016, a paper was published [6] that describes the pros and cons of preprints from the perspective of the stakeholders-scientists, publishers, and funders.Here, we formulate the message specifically for scientists in the form of ten simple rules for considering using preprints as a communication mechanism. Rule 1: Preprints speed up disseminationA recent analysis highlighted that the median review time-the time between submission and acceptance of an article-is around 100 days, with a further 25 days or so spent preparing the work for publication [7].However, these figures-slow as they are-do not include the time researchers spend "shopping around" for a journal to publish their findings, which can induce rounds of editorial rejection before or after peer review.Stephen Royle, a cell biologist at the University of Warwick, undertook an analysis of his published papers over the past dozen years and concluded that the average time from first submission to publication was around 9 months [8].Royle's is one example of a well-studied phenomenon [9].In summary, at a time when technology allows research findings to be shared instantly, the time to access research output appears glacial and similar to the pre-internet era.
Source: PLoS Computational Biology
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems and Management
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,043
OpenAlex ID: W2610310340