A preprint is an early draft of a scientific manuscript that is made openly available before being subjected to any editorial or reviewer oversight. Most preprints are assigned digital object identifiers (DOIs) when posted on dedicated repository servers. Authors, therefore, might use them in their bibliographies or grant applications. On the bright side, because most preprints have DOIs, scholars can use them to claim priority and publish their findings more swiftly. They can also artificially puff up their bibliographies, thus boosting their chances for promotions or grant applications. However, on the negative side, early drafts that have not been peer-reviewed could contribute to the spread of fake news and misinformation. Besides, the perpetuation of preprints online after being published might create confusion with the published ones. Here are some interesting relevant reads.

Brierley, L. (2021). Lessons from the influx of preprints during the early COVID-19 pandemic. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(3), e115–e117. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00011-5

Quan-Hoang, V., Anh-Vinh, L., Viet-Phuong, L., Phuong-Hanh, H., & Manh-Toan, H. (2020). Making social sciences more scientific: Literature review by structured data. MethodsX, 7, 100818. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mex.2020.100818

Vlasschaert, C., Topf, J. M., & Hiremath, S. (2020). Proliferation of papers and preprints during the Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic: Progress or problems with peer review? Advances in Chronic Kidney Disease, 27(5), 418–426. https://doi.org/10.1053/j.ackd.2020.08.003

Xu, F., Ou, G., Ma, T., & Wang, X. (2021). The consistency of impact of preprints and their journal publications. Journal of Informetrics, 15(2), 101153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2021.101153

Best,

Very important question, and I omitted some of my pre-press research from RG for fear of the same reasons you mentioned. And it is really worrying.

Thanks a lot dear Mohialdeen for the shared references. Instructive and showing that the debate is ongoing.

Now it is all a question of balance benefits vs risks. More benefits of spreading and exchanging faster vs more risks or spreading unchecked wrong science.

We wil see...

Thanks you for relaying your experience dear Raya!

You are right

I really do not subscribe to the idea of posting preprint for two major reasons

First, because the authenticity of the study has not been reviewed and validated by other professionals (reviewers) and Secondly for plagiarism related issues

I agree with you, ive never understood why people publish preprints, they can't be used as references and they can contain wrong results.

Until a paper is published, there's no accepted recognition for the article. Hence preprints have no established recognition. Also their is a risk of information stealing and plagiarism. Hence I personally do not believe in preprints though ResearchGate encourages.

Thanks for your constructive comment Mike. This constant need for accelaration in every domains of our lives is a real problem, not only for science and publications unfortunately.

First of all, I highly appreciate the adressed dicussion topic! Being (and staying) an „old-school“ researcher and rather frequent reviewer for my field of expertise, I look at pre-prints suspiciously for reasons already expressed here in the discussion by some colleagues. Some don´t understand why some researchers do make their results public before publication? Well, I personally believe that some (luckily not all) researchers take this as an dishonest opportunity to gather new ideas, hints for errors or forgotten literature etc., that they can incorporate into their manuscripts without acknowledgement and claiming it as their own earnings. In the long run I suspect that this shot backfires thus further eroding the willingness for peer-review acceptances in the future. We are all sitting in the same boat and this cannot be the solution!

I like preprints. The review process does filter errors, but it’s a far cry aasuminf that peer-reviewed papers are ‘true’ or ‘high quality’. They just meet some standard set by two people and an editor and there are loads of peer-reviewed papers with flawed reasoning. And peer-review provides a very lengthy delay of at least 6-9 months and often well over a year, and all the while, your next project is delayed and frustrated. So preprints for me are just papers that may change before acceptance. I also plan to use preprint servers to share unsuccessful datasets that were expensive but inconclusive, that I won’t submit fot peer review.

Thanks Douwe for this point of view. Sharing your unsuccessful datasets is really nice but you do not need preprints servers for! You could make them open whenever.

But I see your point and obviously I can just agree on the fact that reviewing process can be long and sometimes inefficient. One of my point is that with the multiplication of the preprints servers, we may soon do not need anymore official publications. What's the point of loosing time in publishing classicaly ifyou can get a DOI and make you publication list as long as you which with preprints?

As usual I'd say that it may have been a good idea initially, but our natural attraction to extreme behaviors leads to an abused use of preprints. Like social medias or other examples...

Have a nice day.

Benoit

I would like to underline the statement of Douwe van Hinsbergen "The review process does filter errors, but it’s a far cry aasuminf that peer-reviewed papers are ‘true’ or ‘high quality’. They just meet some standard set by two people and an editor and there are loads of peer-reviewed papers with flawed reasoning."

There are inconvenient truths with the classic review process. This week, Jocelyn Kaiser reports in Science "An ambitious project that set out 8 years ago to replicate findings from top cancer labs has drawn to a discouraging close. The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology (RP:CB) reports today that when it attempted to repeat experiments drawn from 23 high-impact papers published about 10 years ago, fewer than half yielded similar results."

https://www.science.org/content/article/more-half-high-impact-cancer-lab-studies-could-not-be-replicated-controversial-analysis

I don't like to go public with any of my work until it has appeared as an on-line published article. I have no interest in pre-prints (for my own work or that done others), nor do I give talks at seminars and conferences on unpublished research. I also prefer to work with small teams of authors - this avoids the problem associated with most committee-type bodies where horses almost invariably get reconfigured as camels.

I think I agree with most of your ideas there, but I also do believe that this is due to the constant "race": I was the first one to think about this... A kind of pressure that all scientists are under, you need ideas, publications fast and all this in order to develop your lab, team and eventually get more money to do more research. That's my feeling. Still keep in mind that some of this preprints can indeed be cited since they have DOI!!! Some of my coauthors do that, submit preprints. I have a contrasted feeling about this, because like you said, I believe that our science should be judged/assessed by others for any potential flaws or misconception. On the other side, we know that sometime, the reviewing process is unfair and that competition between labs/scienstists and so on, is affecting the process.

As you say dear Christophe, it is a contrasted feeling. I guess the pre-print fashion is on its way now anyway, and whatever we can think about. But we will see where this new expression of the constant acceleration or our world will lead us...

That's an excellent topic for discussion in RG. First I have to say that I generally agree with most of your considerations here, however I incline towards a more positive view about preprints. This is based on the following facts:

1) Preprints have a DOI meaning that they are officially citable. If someone can 'steal' your preprint then they can also 'steal' your peer-reviewed paper.

2) Preprints assist in developing an active discussion with peers by allowing comments on the submitted manuscripts. Such a discussion is important for authors in order to improve their work. In other words it is just another form of review.

3) Sometimes there are outputs that need to be communicated timely. Considering that the time duration between paper submission and paper publication lasts about 3-4 months on average, it is understood that preprints are preferred when there is urgency.

In the end, preprints are not something good or bad by default. It all depends how we use it. If preprints are used for massive communication of low-quality science just for building up the scientific profile that is called a misuse and it is something problematic. We should filter-out such preprints in the same way we do for standard papers. On the other hand, preprints that assist in speeding up the communication of worthy science would find their way and even become official publications.

Absolutely Evangelos. All points are valid and good!

I would just however respond to the "urgency" for papers to be published. Not to offense people, apart for medical science I see little domains were urgency would be a cause of using preprints. I think that we, as geoscientists, can wait easily for few months to be published, isn't it? And a risk in the medical domain is to see many things spread away in preprints without a clear constraint. There are several exemples with this Covid crisis of preprint findings that diffused away out of preprint servers into classical medias, without any checking. It is also more and more common to find references to preprints without specifying that the source is a preprint, making it at the same level as a published paper. This also brings confusion to non expert people.

It is then hard for non medical people (I am) to differentiate correct and incorrect studies. That's only an exemple.

But again, as you say, there are probably positive things to get out of this preprint fashion, as far as we do not go towards an extreme behavior (like with social media, which are probably possibly good things initially, but suffer from a too intensive use).

I do not post preprints and I would not cite a preprint. I fail to understand why an author would wish to make public work which is not in the final state for publication. If an author agrees to revise a manuscript after peer review s/he is acknowledging that the submitted manuscript was flawed, so why rush to post the uncorrected manuscript as a preprint? We are getting buried in a flood of publications and now non-publications such that publication system may soon collapse. As both the pre-print and the final publication can have DOI numbers, authors are self-plagiarizing their work by publishing it twice.

I have never posted a preprint & would not cite one. I have posted rejected papers or inconclusive research on my blog when I feel they do have redeeming qualities and might be useful for someone. They are always clearly labelled as such. Some examples: https://geography.as.uky.edu/blogs/jdp/trees-behaving-badly, https://geography.as.uky.edu/blogs/jdp/dialectics-geomorphic-complexity. The point is that there are many ways to get unpublished or not-yet-published ideas on the record without self-plagiarizing or flooding the DOI system.

Posting pre-print copies may also helps to get comments from interested people,

so it depends on author, scientists interest, and journal,

Some open journals also do posting pre-print copies of their papers in their own home page,

all the best,

I disagree with the question about the plagiarism problem. A material should be considered plagiarized not only if it reproduces something already presented in another article without the proper citation, but if also reproduces something already available in other media as well. In most countries copyright is a matter of course once written material is made public. In other words, the pre-print is also a way to make a material public, even if it is not linked (yet) to an indexed periodical. If someone sees a pre-print, and tries to copy their essential ideas, results and discussions and send it for publication elsewhere, this is considered plagiarism, as there was already a published document in which these ideas, results and discussions were presented. I think it is a distorted idea that only materials presented in indexed journals are worthy of consideration to judge possible plagiarism, or even as sources of information for a scientific work. There are numerous technical reports, books, and other forms of present and discuss data that often gather and analyze information in a more dense and rigorous way than most journal articles considered to be highly rated. Unfortunately, the consultation of these sources is being lost, since access to them is often more difficult and requires a greater effort on the part of researchers than just typing the words of interest in an internet search engine.

I guess the preprint is useless, what is the point behaind the preprint.

The question raised is a valid as it is difficult to answer universally.

The points brought up for and against this fairly new method are most certainly true. Hence, the answer to the question, whether pre-prints are an advantage for science is to be answered just like most scientific questions: It depends!

I believe that an open discourse before publication can be highly fertile for a paper if it remains within the frame of the occasion. Means: Assuming that all people participating in the discussion and all people reading the pre-print follow best scientific practise accepting the fact, that it's a preprint and intellectual property. With regards to the fact that most scientists are human beings, though, I have reasonable doubts that pre-prints will be treated the way they should, to be a usefull tool for an accelerated scientific discourse and improved scientific publications.

Do I find preprints useful for myself? I’ve posted one, because I wanted something to ‘show’ for a grant application. It didn’t help because the preprint was regarded by the reviewer(s) as unpublished work. This attitude might change over time, though. Apart from that, I’d rather not publish a preprint (i) to avoid the embarrassment of published papers that still have flaws in them (nobody is perfect), and (ii) not to unnecessarily inflate the already overwhelming body of scientific literature.

Do I find other researchers’ preprints useful? Yes, because I’m always interested in new research. No, because it is annoying to follow them up for years to see what the ‘real’ published paper looks like.

Do I find them offensive in my role as editor or reviewer? No – my work/time is not wasted.

Am I worried about plagiarism? No, because preprints have a doi. If I’d be worried about that, I’d rather think twice before presenting something ‘half baked’ at a conference.

Dear Steffen, you may shed some light on one point for me. When a preprint is submitted it gets a DOI. If the manuscript is rejected or abandonned, what does this DOI become? Is it recorded or deleted?

Thanks for your reply to the discussion.

Benoit, I guess that depends on the preprint-'journal'....

According to the BioRxiv website "Once posted on bioRxiv, articles are citable and therefore cannot be removed." Thus it´s not going to be ´rejected´ in the way a proper journal may reject a manuscript.

I guess the question emerging from this is "Shall we cite manuscripts that are just posted on a preprint server but not published in a proper journal?" Some codex might develop about this over time, and I wouldn´t be surprised if it will be similar to citing conference abstracts.

A preprint that would have underwent a classical review process, and that would have been rejected and not finally published, would then keep its DOI. It would then remain available and possibly citable. There is something possibly wrong in the system here, don't you think?

So your question is absolutely right and something should be developped fast then. Have a nice day.

This is no different to the situation of a scientific article published in a regular journal. If that's printed and the copies are distributed in the libraries around the planet, they are available and citable, even if the authors later retract the article. Would you propose that librarians around the world should be asked to physically cut retracted articles out of printed journals? I don't think there is "something wrong in the system", but that this is a very minor issue that we simply have to live with.

C'mon, there is a big difference! Peer-reviewed published papers are VERY rarely retracted, while manuscipts are commonly strongly altered after review process. Two versions of the same paper (before and after review) is a mess.

Dear Steffen, indeed for some domains that's a minor issue, but for others this may be slightly more impacting. The origin of the discussion comes from the exponential use of preprints and their referencing within debates during the COVID crisis in medical domains.

Dear Benoit, please let´s keep geology and covid separate. In the case of a rapidly spreading new virus that potentially threatens the lives and well-being of millions to billions of people, the benefits of rapidly disseminating new findings may outweigh the (valid) issues that you’ve raised. But this is not my field and I’m not in a position to judge this.

@Andrzej: I think you misunderstood my point. I fully agree with you that “Two versions of the same paper (before and after review) is a mess.” Even worse are journals that not only publish those two versions, but also the reviews. This does not create “transparency” but is just an unnecessary inflation of the already overwhelming body of literature. What I referred to were those indeed very rare cases of published papers that get retracted – these are not physically cut out of printed journals (and are hence findable and citable), just like a doi can (allegedly) not be removed.

A solution here might be directing the doi to a site or document stating “This document was retracted by the authors and is no longer available.” Some might call this intransparent or say it creates problems with traceability. However, I think Dave Eggers has nicely outlined the pitfalls of this “no information should ever be deleted”-attitude in his book The Circle. (old-school as I am, the book was much better than the movie, of course!)

Dear Steffen,

thanks a lot for your detailed and fruitful replies in this discussion. Indeed, let's keep Covid aside all this. I just mentionned that this disssemination you speak about was the initiation of the present discussion. Now, indeed, things are different in our domains, but I thought the question was worth to me mentionned. Have a nice day.

I think that preprints are a good thing.

1) The article when it is in preprint has a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and a publication date. This allows to protect your original work until its publication in a "real" journal.

2) The article that appears after review is considered as the final version of your work. Often there are very few differences and this allows the reader to early access your work (even before publication).

3) However, the author has not to forget to attach additional information to the preprint, such as the reference of the journal where the article was published after review. Without this information one can conclude that the article has no real value proven by a "true" publication.

Preprints are the paradox of the field of research they exist but true rationale is limited...

Agree.

That is right. I agree with all of points.

I am of the opinion that one of the most important problem regarding of preprint is that it can be cause of waste time. How?

For example I have sent a manuscript for a journal and during of submission I selected the preprint option but my manuscript has been rejected from this journal. Hence, I have sent this paper to other journal but at the end of process that means after review that took more than three month the editor of this journal said that your manuscript has more than 70 percent overlay with other manuscripts. Although I said that this overlay is just with preprint of this paper but they rejected it after four months.

Therefore, I lost more than four months because of preprint.

I prefer to write conference proceedings in this case as a first take of the future paper. In case of the Acoustical society if America, they even provide an editor review for such proceedings. So you can stake out the results and get sole feedback from the side (both at the conference and from the editor).

I must admit that for these reasons I am rather reluctant to read preprints.

I think the freedom of sharing preprints has been a positive step in science. The peer-review process is a highly erroneous and time-consuming process with - in most cases - relatively small impact on improving the manuscript. With preprints, you still have the chance to get feedback from the public as well as experts, and in fact -- as opposed to the standard publishing process - you have the opportunity to update the manuscript. This basically turns your research products into living organisms that can grow and become less flawed at any time after the first publication (this is not possible with legacy journals). In addition, there are notable proprietary benefits in preprints in comparison to the standard peer-review process. I understand the sensitivity of topics in certain branches of science and the necessity of a vetting procedure for publications, but I think the passage of time and crowdsourced feedback can do a better job compared to the occasionally ineffective process of standard peer-review. Of course, the process of preprint sharing can become a lot more effective and bullet-proof.

p.s., regarding the potential pitfalls of the preprint sharing that are suggested in the main question, I think some of them are yet speculative and are equally likely in both worlds (preprints vs. peer-reviewed papers). And some are perhaps opportunities for future improvements in the preprint platforms.

I have seen papers undergoing significant changes (often becoming more focused) in the peer-reviewing process. Thus I can vouch that a pre-print made public before any peer review can (but doesn't have to) look vastly different from the finished published paper.

But I also see the benefit of getting input from the wider scientific community of the field in question as well as making the information contained in the paper available for discussion (how different is sharing a pre-print from pointing out verbally where one's research is going at a conference?).

Thus I see the role of preprints and the right time to share them is more after the initial reviewers response. That way the most impactful round of changes on the development of a paper that can change it's very direction will have passed and the alterations influenced by this round of reviews will have been made. By releasing a preprint at this point the contents will be much closer to the final publication with major changes of the contents being added at this stage being unlikely and yet be available to the scrutinizing eye of the wider scientific community of the field in question before most of the editoral process (that still can improve the paper's clarity but will also take time).

A preprint is a way to share research with the wider community who may not have access to journal articles. I considered this a positive step in the right direction for science communication. Privileged people may not see this as an efficient option.

Dear Partha Pratim Mandal,

I agree. A preprint is a way to share research also with “privileged people”. Science communication today is not limited to articles published in journals. I suspect that privileged people will also take the opportunity to check their expertise through preprints and other forms of presentation.

I agree that there is a problem with the costs of accessing peer review journals in general. This is however another topic, and I do not think that preprints are "another" way of communicating science. Preprints are part of the publishing process, but unchecked science (as already explained although I also agree that the reviewing process is far from being perfect).

I'd like to know what is a priviledge researcher...

Dear honorable researchers,

Preprints are defined as an author’s version of a research manuscript prior to formal peer review at a journal, which is deposited on a public server. ResearchGate (RG) said about "Preprints": early-stage research. On the other side, RG is not a publisher and, in turn, uploaded unpublished text is not regarded as a publication. Hence, a preprint is an author's own original or draft version of their paper before any peer review has taken place and before it is published.

Before answering this valuable question, please let me give my own opinion about the preprint dilemma (مُعضلة ما قبل الطباعة):

I have a different perspective on uploading any preprint anywhere before it has been published. Why do you let others know about your insights and methodologies before publication? You should avoid telling the other researchers about the details of any one of your papers until it has been published and seeing your name by yourself. You may say that I am somewhat old-fashioned, but I have a different perspective on uploading any preprint anywhere before it has been published by your name. My advice is not to put your research anywhere until it is published. It is a security issue:

• Your manuscript may be copied and then published by others before you can do that. This stealing of your paper might be happening. So, you must wait until the paper is accepted and then published in that journal. Then, upload that research item on any platform you wish.
• A journal may have automated plagiarism software to check the paper before admitting it to the reviewing process. There are chances that your paper can get a rejection at any point. Thus, to avoid this problem. Publish the preprint after you got the paper as "ACCEPTED".
• There may be a "cold war" between the professors of a given department. They do not like to discuss ideas as others will "steal" them and publish an article on them without giving credit to the one from whom they got the idea. My suggestion is to keep your work "private" and share it only with those who are really interested.
• Academic publishing remains a competitive process. If someone else has recently published a paper very similar to mine, mine is less likely to be accepted. So although I may share my topic, I prefer to keep my methodology, findings, and discussion private, until published in a peer-reviewed journal. So. there is a high chance that someone may claim your idea as theirs!
• Preprint gives a false feeling of security. Personally, I would always wait until the paper is accepted by the editor of a journal. After that, I can post it as a regular research item on any platform you wish.

Finally, for the coming future, do not upload any paper anywhere until it is published with your name. Even if it is a "preprint"! For the time being, If you had done something like that as a "preprint", for instance, I advise you to delete the preprint from any elsewhere and wait for two months before sending the paper to any journal.

One of my friends was accused of plagiarism; do you know why?

After about three months, his research paper was rejected because of plagiarism. When he checked the journal report, he found that his paper was accused of plagiarism with a 61% percentage. The reason is that his manuscript was previously uploaded as a preprint. It took him another two months to solve the problem and remove the manuscript from the database of the preprint.

So, in order to solve this type of issue, it may take several months of following up to remove the manuscript from the database of the preprint. Anyhow, If there were accusations of plagiarism, it is not well for any researcher's reputation, in any meaning.

we are a community. The peer-reviewing process is the least worst system it has devised to exist. OK it is not perfect, but it should rather be strengthened (by increasing the recognition of rewiewing work, by increasing the number of reviewers, ...). Most of us are employees of governmental companies, our responsibility is to make public only texts endorsed by our community.