Moving from ‘personal communication’ to ‘available online at’: preprint servers enhance the timeliness of scientific exchange

Excerpt

A preprint is a scientific manuscript uploaded by its authors into a public server prior to peer review or publication. The preprint contains the complete information of a scientific article and can be described as an ‘interim research product’ because it has not yet gone through the back-and-forth edits that typically occur during peer review. Rather, after a brief quality-control inspection by the preprint server to ensure that the work is scientific in nature and meets ethical standards, the manuscript is posted promptly (usually within a day or two) and can be viewed online for free by anyone. This allows for authors to receive prompt feedback from a far larger community of colleagues than the two or three experts who might typically review their manuscript. It also increases the visibility and speed with which research findings are disseminated and can help to counterbalance the effects of publication bias. Work posted as a preprint is frequently the same exact manuscript being submitted to a traditional, peer-reviewed journal, often simultaneously. In this way, preprints (which are efficient and rapid, but not validated through peer-review), can work in tandem with journal publications (which are slow, but provide validation through peer-review) as a communication system seeking to improve scientific research [1]. …