The term “preprint” is actually used for two related, but still slightly different, things. The term can refer to an author’s original manuscript (of an article, a book chapter, or a complete book) as it is submitted for publication (hence also known as “the submitted version” of the text). This submitted version typically remains private, whereas later versions of the text (revised after peer review and/or copy-edited by the publisher) are made available, either behind a paywall or in Open Access. However, the term preprint can also refer to the first public version of a text, which is being disseminated before formal peer review took place and which afterwards might or might not be developed into a more traditional publication. This second meaning of preprint is thus basically identical to what is known as “working papers” in disciplines like economics, law, and political sciences. To put it succinctly: the first meaning of the term preprint refers to a manuscript of an article, a chapter, or a book before publication; the second meaning – typically only used for articles – is considered to be the first public version of a text and therefore oftentimes treated as a publication in its own right. Both meanings of the term have in common that they refer to a text which was not submitted to formal peer review (yet).

Lately, the second meaning of the term preprint has become more dominant, not in the least because the habit of disseminating articles before they have been peer-reviewed is becoming more widespread.

Preprints can be distributed through designated preprint servers, i.e. online repositories where researchers share articles before they have undergone formal peer review. Preprint servers are often connected with a specific discipline, such as medRxiv (health sciences) or bioRxiv (biology), or region, such as AfricArXiv, and typically guarantee some basic form of quality control such as a plagiarism check before the text is accepted for publication as a preprint. However, preprints can also be shared using general repositories which are discipline-agnostic (like Zenodo) and/or platforms which accept all kinds of research outputs (such as the CORE repository of Humanities Commons), and which do not perform such basic quality checks. Preprints typically get a permanent identifier (such as a DOI) and are indexed by services such as Google Scholar, Open Science Framework (OSF) Preprints, or Web of Science’s Preprint Citation Index.

As said, the practice of disseminating preprints is on the rise. In some disciplines, such as astronomy and mathematics, up to 35% of articles start out as preprints, which are seen as an important instrument for Open Scholarship (as preprints can always be shared openly), as a way of speeding up research (since dissemination of research results is no longer slowed down by pre-publication peer review) and as a way to establish priority of discoveries. Preprints also make other innovations in scholarly communication possible (such as open peer review or the publish-review-curate approach – topics which deserve a blog post of their own) and put into question the exorbitant prices of journal subscriptions or article processing charges. Recent research by Brierley et al. and Davidson et al. in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic even brought to light that differences between preprint and final versions of articles published in biomedical journals are limited, which gives cause to reconsider the time and money spent to develop a preprint into a journal article.

Recommended reading:

J. Bosman et al. (2022), New Developments in Preprinting and Preprint Review, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7040997

K. Hettne et al. (2021), A Practical Guide to Preprints: Accelerating Scholarly Communication, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5600535

L. Mesotten – J. Berckmans (2022), To preprint or not to preprint? KU Leuven researchers share their thoughts on the (dis)advantages of preprint publishing, https://www.kuleuven.be/open-science/what-is-open-science/scholarly-publishing-and-open-access/schol-pub/interview-preprints

On Monday 9 May 2022 KU Leuven will organize the 2022 edition of the Open Science day, an event where researchers share their experiences about applying Open Science principles in their research. This hybrid event (online and in Leuven, Irish College) is open to all KU Leuven researchers but registration is required – closing dates for registration: April 25 (if you wish to attend in Leuven) and May 6 (if you prefer to participate online).

The 2022 edition is conceived as a forum for discussion. After an outline of KU Leuven’s Open Science strategy by vice rector research policy Jan D’hooge, researchers will have the opportunity to interact with him and pose questions to an expert panel. The rest of the day will be devoted to two interactive panel sessions and a poster session. The panel sessions will be dedicated to the reproducibility and replication of research on the one hand, and preprints and (open) peer review on the other hand. You can find the full program here and the proceedings will be published on PubPub soon.

For more information see the Open Science Day 2022 website

KU Leuven’s very own interdisciplinary ReproducibiliTea journal club is looking for coordinators and participants who want to learn from each other about what it takes to do open research. Learn more about everything from open data to preprint publishing, preregistration, and handling personal data, like in the following example:

That’s one of the most interesting things about ReproducibiliTea Leuven for me: Every time, I learn something new. For example, about the multitude of different data types that people work with or about the diverse array of issues researchers from different disciplines must consider. In one of our meetings, a colleague from movement sciences explained that they worked a lot with video data, which comes with major privacy issues; when a participant’s arm is being filmed and the participant has a tattoo, that is identifiable data. Another researcher talked about how to handle sensitive interview data from bereaved parents, and it all made me realize how crucial it is that open science practices are flexible, so they can cater to an array of potential use cases.