Thank you, Dr. Goldman for the clarification. I think pre-prints are just as valuable and authentic as any published paper in a refereed journal. Journal articles allow authors to cite for example, "xxxxx, Private communications, January 28, 2019" as a valid reference. There is no way to verify that if indeed a piece of communication took place between the author and the person "xxxxx," yet this is an accepted way of citing a reference. In contrast pre-prints are more reliable and well-documented. Go figure! I empathize with your predicament. I remember in the 1980s with the cold war still on, when I was doing my dissertation, the faculty looked down upon any citations from Russian (USSR) journals as not being reliable or authentic!

RG affords a variety of places to post your work including pre-prints, Technical Reports, "Work in Progress," etc. It is a good idea to upload your work under one of these categories so that readers have an opportunity for early dissemination. Later on the paper may be submitted for peer-review in a journal. It does not take away the fact that the original upload as a pre-print or in some other format is no less valuable because it was not originally peer-reviewed.

Srini Vasan, all good points. However, what I was trying to comment on was that there are many out there who view preprints as invalid sources of information. It's almost an ad hominem or genetic fallacy used to dismiss any finding of a preprint, as if somehow publication in a "traditional" peer reviewed journal magically validates the work and findings.

Totally agree with you. Often preprints are a good way to communicate the results. As far as you want to communicate your ideas, there is I think no big difference between preprint if written carefully and peer reviewed paper. I have seen many unpublished nice papers with great citations. But unfortunately our institutions force us to get the papers published in peer reviewed journals. Usually their requirement is minimum. Once that is fulfilled we are free to publish in any form. I hope, the platforms like ReseachGate will play crucial role to replace the traditional way of publishing the research.

Thanks for sharing the link.

Thank you, Dr. Goldman for the clarification. I think pre-prints are just as valuable and authentic as any published paper in a refereed journal. Journal articles allow authors to cite for example, "xxxxx, Private communications, January 28, 2019" as a valid reference. There is no way to verify that if indeed a piece of communication took place between the author and the person "xxxxx," yet this is an accepted way of citing a reference. In contrast pre-prints are more reliable and well-documented. Go figure! I empathize with your predicament. I remember in the 1980s with the cold war still on, when I was doing my dissertation, the faculty looked down upon any citations from Russian (USSR) journals as not being reliable or authentic!

I see nothing wrong with preprint servers, but they have the disadvantage of a limited indexation, since the "official databases" such as WOS do not have comprehensive coverage of all preprint servers and, for those indexed the curation of the information is incomplete.

Nevertheless, this way of scientific communication has been growing and these servers deserve recognition, because it seems they are here to stay.

Some editors regard this new channel as a menace to the establishment of Scientific Publication (

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/05/21/journals-lose-citations-preprint-servers-repositories/

), but the scientific community cannot and should not stay aside of the overwhelming social storm unchained by the universal access to internet. And, for instance, even the smallest houses have Facebook and Tweeter portal to advertise their latest papers and news.

Now regarding peer review, much has been said about it (

https://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/nature05032.html

), and we all agree it is somehow biased and neither correctly, nor efficiently can it sort the noise from the true scientific advancements. But the true problem is the human nature of reviewers, for as any other human, scientists are prone to bias, prejudice and the passionate placement of self opinion over the opinion of others. Nevertheless, the replacement of scientists by other-than-human beings seems unlikely in the sort term.

In any case, the scientific community has not devised any better system than relying in the opinion of the so called "field specialists"; and ventures to replace peer review have not brought the expected benefits (

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/feb/07/scienctific-research-peer-review-reproducing-data

).

To directly address your question about How do I deal with the "paper censorship" run by the leading scientists and the top publishing houses? (Hope I did interpreted this write). My strategy is nature-inspired, fight (answer) reviewers when you know you have a fair winning chance, seek an alternative when stakes are not in your favour. It is what seems to work best, at least for me. I also try to avoid being too passionate about findings, specially if these seem exciting. Passionate science is a misleading cliché. Science is not passionate but objective.

I see nothing wrong with preprint servers, but they have the disadvantage of a limited indexation, since the "official databases" such as WOS do not have comprehensive coverage of all preprint servers and, for those indexed the curation of the information is incomplete.

Rogelio Rodríguez-Sotres, this really needs to change. I think it will, as more and more people start to publish on preprint servers, and especially if people start to cite preprints in their own peer reviewed papers.

Dear Daniel Goldman ,

I think this is no t a problem of the number of authors only. There is also some limitation on the side of Academic Institutions and evaluation bodies; since the recognition of this kind of papers is still quite variable - some assign them a value comparable to "standard" journals, some rate them as secondary, and some ignore them.

As a consequence of this last fact, many authors do place their paper on the preprint server as a temporary deposit, meanwhile the submission and publication process takes place in some regular journal (probably this was the original intent of preprint servers, I am not quite certain).

So until the status quo changes in relation to preprint servers, and there is a de jure recognition of this kind of publications as a regular and stable channel, there will be little pressure to indexation services for the inclusion of these papers in their DB, and the coverage will stay fragmentary.

My impression is that there is a movement to stablish Preprint servers as a regular "science communication channel", equivalent to traditional journals. But, time will tell - let's hope for the best.

Best wishes,

Rogelio

So until the status quo changes in relation to preprint servers, and there is a de jurerecognition of this kind of publications as a regular and stable channel, there will be little pressure to indexation services for the inclusion of these papers in their DB, and the coverage will stay fragmentary.

I think one thing that will help these alternative repositories, aside from renaming them, as "preprint" server implies that they are not final prints, is the ability to easily review them. I think we we had some kind of tagging system on RG, where we could tag an article as scholarly, non-scholarly, "justifies its position" or "does not justify its position", and so on, then people would have more confidence in the papers.

Sure, renaming them helps, and also defining a paper "maturation state", so a fully mature paper may be closed for re-edition and "placed" in a separate section or tagged appropriately.

This because one thing I foresee as a problem is:

What about when you did cite some data supporting the analysis/discussion of your research in the final version of your paper, and the data is later removed? - your argumentation may become crippled, even useless.

This limitation can certainly make you doubt about citing a preprint paper still in an early maturation stage, and if you cannot rate the "maturation stage", you may decide not to cite it.

Best wishes,

Rogelio

A "draft" vs "final" tag would be nice. I think DOIs should have better versioning too.

Wrote a short piece suggesting that we use "omniprint" when referencing articles that may be on repositories like RG, OSF, ArXiv, etc. https://medium.com/@dgoldman0/from-preprints-to-omniprints-762504e3a5ae

I find difficult to predict how self-archiving will change with the evolution of the new model of self archiving and interactive peer-review, but you may find this interenting:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00595-y

Check also how this will a impact publication prices to the author:

https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/b6365b76/setting-a-fee-for-publication

E-publishing or not, still, no free meals in sight...

Best wishes

Rogelio

For those interested in this thread, the next paper could be enlightening:

https://osf.io/preprints/metaarxiv/796tu/

In addition, you may have known already, but if you did not, preprint papers do has a special indexing service, where you can search for literature:

http://www.prepubmed.org/

According to this service, the number of papers in preprint Web-sites has growth exponentially*:

http://www.prepubmed.org/monthly_stats/

Best wishes

Rogelio

*ONLY FOR COMPLETENESS!

The data does fit an exponential function pretty well, with a duplication half life of 15.45 months. Details follow,

f(x)= A1+Ao*exp(k*x)

x is date in months from 1 (Jan/2007) to 226 (dec/2012)

A1 is the starting offset, Ao+A1 is the papers in deposit at month 0, k is the growth constant

final sum of squares of residuals : 779351

rel. change during last iteration : -5.39507e-07

degrees of freedom (FIT_NDF) : 141

rms of residuals (FIT_STDFIT) = sqrt(WSSR/ndf) : 74.3459

variance of residuals (reduced chisquare) = WSSR/ndf : 5527.31

Final set of parameters Asymptotic Standard Error (C.V.)

================ ==========================

A1 = 89.155 +/- 9.854 (11.05%)

Ao = 4.20412 +/- 0.5588 (13.29%)

k = 0.0448721 +/- 0.000956 (2.131%)

correlation matrix of the fit parameters:

A1 Ao k

A1 1.000

Ao -0.683 1.000

k 0.654 -0.997 1.000

I'm actually interested in MetaArXiv itself. It seems right up my ally.