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Preprint symposium starting now! Going to put some notes out into the world here...
Preprints are submitted simultaneously with or instead of submission to a peer-reviewed journal -- they are not peer reviewed (are screened) but are *published* and have DOIs. You can see metrics and what people have said about your work on other sites. You can submit revisions!
What about the Ingelfinger rule ("thou shalt not publish twice")? This prevents authors from inflating the impact of their work and protects journal rights to the work. Preprints are generally not considered to be unduly inflating impact.
A big long list of journals partners with preprint servers, and many others accept submissions that have been posted to preprint servers (when in doubt, check).
For NIH purposes: preprints count as publications but are not accepted as post-submission materials or on biosketches (peer-reviewed only).
License options: CC-BY is a sort of default and you can choose commercial or not (NC), adaptable/reusable or not (ND), or even put it out into the public domain and retain no rights (CC0, req'd of federal employees).
If you later publish with a peer-reviewed journal, they have copyright to anything new (that evolves during review and revisions) and you retain the open copyright on the original material, which you can't "undo" to submit to a journal that disallows preprints (e.g. JAMA).
One of the reasons this is happening: journals negotiate rates individually with institutions to gain access. These rates are not publicly available and differ from institution to institution.
The time it takes to get published is also a major concern that at best "sucks the joy out of science" and at worst delays dissemination of critical knowledge. For an egregious example, by the time this paper ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P… was published, six of the authors had died.
Impact factor doesn't imply better work, either (see retraction index). So what options are there besides preprinting? Plan S: all publications from public funding should be open access, or Plan U: all publications should be open access.
Is a preprint right for you? Maybe so if: you have pending job/fellowship apps and need a timestamp on your work before peer review, you want feedback, you want to safeguard open access, or you want to find collaborators for your project!
What if I get scooped? A student experienced someone plagiarizing work from her dissertation (not a preprint). Dissertations and preprints both have DOIs -- this is a measure of protection that gives you the usual routes to follow up if someone republishes your work.
ASAPbio is a nonprofit org started at UCSF to promote innovation and transparency in life sciences communication (see their detailed blogs and FAQs on issues like copyright).
Another Q&A on scooping: how do you avoid someone scooping you based on what you preprinted (getting to peer-reviewed publication first)? We as a community define scooping, precedence, etc. We can decide precedence is established by a preprint.
Phrased another way, is it ethical to act on information from a preprint that is submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, or is that like acting on information you come across as a reviewer? Do it, preprints are meant to disseminate information -- just be sure to cite it!
A note of caution: many journals that accept preprinted work explicitly disallow you disseminating the information via the media prior to publication with them. Check with the journal first!
@AndrewGYork wants to speed up how fast he can get his work to matter -- last cool thing () took 8 years between idea and first other scientists working with it. Preprints and open science generally are super important for methods development.
Dr. Krystal Fontaine at @GladstoneInst timestamped her work on Zika virus (mbio.asm.org/content/9/6/e0…) by preprinting on bioRxiv (biorxiv.org/content/10.110…).
