Preprints

Although as researchers we can strive towards only publishing in open access journals that fully uphold our scientific values, life unfortunately is not that simple! As you learned in previous weeks, in academia, publishing in prestigious journals is incentivised, and impacts researchers’ ability to obtain grants, jobs and promotions. Unfortunately, what’s considered prestigious most often overlaps with for-profit publishers. This is why initiatives like DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment) and responsible metrics are crucial. Rather than evaluating research based on the impact factor of the journal, which promotes the merits of individual works, they advocate evaluating research based on its quality and placing value on a wider range of scholarly outputs.

Although it might seem tempting to boycott all for-profit publishers (and many are doing this), it can be a balancing act for researchers to weigh up the relative costs and benefits of trying to publish in a prestigious journal. Those with more privilege – such as researchers with a permanent job, or enough savings or support to not worry about not having a job for a while – are able to be more radical in their approach, so it’s important to acknowledge that researchers have their individual circumstances to consider when deciding which journals to publish in, and more generally, which open research practices to engage in.

Preprints are a way to ensure that your work is openly accessible to others, regardless of where you publish your research. A preprint is a version of your article that you submit to a preprint repository. There are preprint repositories in many fields, e.g. bioRxiv (pronounced ‘bio-archive’), PsyArXiv (pronounced ‘psy-archive’), and PhilPapers. There are also discipline non-specific repositories, e.g. OSF preprints. All you need to do is upload a version of your paper to the server, and it is available for anyone to read free! This is also a great way to showcase your work before waiting for it to be peer-reviewed and published in a journal, which can be especially beneficial to early-career researchers.

You can upload preprints for work that is already published in a journal, work that you’re submitting to a journal, and even work that you never intend to submit to a journal. There are different benefits to uploading preprints at these different stages:

• Alternative to a journal: If you’re not interested in publishing your paper in a peer-reviewed journal, or don’t have the time to do so, uploading it to a preprint server means that the research community can still read your findings and benefit from your hard work.
• Alongside submission to a journal: Submitting a preprint alongside submission to a journal gets your paper out there quicker than waiting for it to be peer-reviewed and published. If you submit a preprint before submitting to a journal, people outside of the journal’s reviewers can give informal feedback that you can implement in your journal submission (or in the next round of submission).
• After publishing in a journal: Submitting a preprint of work that has already been published in a journal means you can make your work green open access if it is currently published behind a paywall, meaning more people can read it.

  

Many journals will allow you to publish a preprint of your work alongside submission to their journal, or after your article has been accepted in the journal. However, some journals will not. To check the rules for the journal that you’re interested in, enter the journal or publisher information in Open Policy Finder.