A
preprint is a draft of a
scientific paper that has not yet been published in a
peer-reviewed
scientific journal.
Role of preprints
Publication of manuscripts in a peer-reviewed journal often takes weeks, months or even years from the time of initial submission, because manuscripts must undergo extensive reviewer critique. The need to quickly circulate current results within a scientific community has led researchers to distribute documents known as preprints, which are manuscripts that have yet to undergo
peer review. The immediate distribution of pre-prints allows authors to receive early feedback from their peers, which may be helpful in revising and preparing articles for submission.
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.org and
institutional repositories). Such preprints may be known as
e-prints or .
Stages of printing
While a preprint refers to an article that has not yet undergone "
peer review", a "
postprint" refers to an article which has been peer reviewed but has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
The word
reprint refers to re-publishing of material that has already been previously published; reprints can be made by the journal publisher, but can also can be made from eprints (for example, it can be taken from an electronic database of peer-reviewed journals, such as
EBSCOhost).
Tenure and promotion
In academia, preprints are not likely to be weighed heavily when a scholar is evaluated for tenure or promotion, unless the preprint becomes the basis for a peer-reviewed publication.
Preprint server by research field
arXiv – physics
The e-print archive
arXiv.org (pronounced "archive") was created by
Paul Ginsparg in 1991 at
Los Alamos National Laboratory for the purpose of distributing theoretical
high-energy physics preprints. In 2001, arXiv.org moved to
Cornell University and now encompasses the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, and quantitative biology. Within the field of high-energy physics, the posting of preprints on arXiv is so common that many peer-reviewed journals allow submission of papers from arXiv directly, using the arXiv e-print number.
In some branches of physics, the arXiv database may serve as a focal point for the many criticisms made of the
peer review process and peer-reviewed journals. In 1992
David Mermin facetiously described Ginsparg's creation as potentially "string theory's greatest contribution to science".
Nature Precedings – biology, medicine, chemistry, earth science
Nature Precedings is a free electronic repository for preprints of scientific manuscripts, posters, and unpublished observations. It started in 2007 and is published by the
Nature Publishing Group.
Computer preprints
The ability to distribute manuscripts as preprints has had a great impact on
computer science, particularly in the way that scientific research is disseminated in that field (see
Citeseer). The
open access movement has tended to focus on distributed institutional collections of research, global harvesting, and aggregation through
search engines and
gateways such as
OAIster, rather than a global discipline base such as arXiv.
E-prints can now refer to any electronic form of a scholarly or scientific publication, including journal articles, conference papers, research theses or dissertations, because these usually are found in multidisciplinary collections, called open access repositories, or eprints archives.
See also
