The publication of preprints, publicly available scientific manuscripts posted on dedicated preprint servers prior to journal-managed peer review can play a key role in addressing these ECR challenges such as timely publication and increased interdisciplinarity in life sciences research.

Introduction

  • research output comes in very many varieties: research articles, reviews, commentaries, perspectives, theory manuscripts, methods, data, reagents, model organisms, computational models, patents, drugs, vaccines, software, and highly trained researchers
  • still the only “currency” is published articles in peer reviewed journals
  • preprints: online, freely available (open-access) scientific manuscripts posted by authors on dedicated servers prior to peer review and publication in an academic journal
  • sometimes concurrently to journal submission, sometimes sole way of publication
  • no peer review, only screening for appropriate topic
  • some journals do not accept preprinted articles

Values of preprints for ECRs

Preprints accelerate science communication that facilitates ECR career progression

  • long duration of traditional journal publishing can negatively impact ECRs seeking funding, promotion, and hiring
  • added benefit of encouraging collaboration, informal discussion, and sharing and receiving data
  • some funding agencies take preprints into account, in order to evaluate the researcher based on quality of work not only publications

Preprints increase ECR visibility and facilitate networking

  • increase networking
  • discussion in social media
  • higher citation rates of later publications

Preprints can help ECRs accelerate training time and optimize research design and quality

  • faster knowledge and data dissemination with all its benefits like steeper learning cuves, reduction of costs, avoidance of redundancy

Preprints allow ECRs with limited funds to publish their findings with open access

  • low costs open access publishing

Preprints in public health and medical research can boost ECR research

  • Was it used much to fight the pandemic?

Preprints can accelerate the peer-review process to make ECRs more efficient

  • useful if the author has no experts at hand in the field
  • feedback through email or social media
  1. researchers can begin to respond to preprint comments before journal-solicited reviews are received
  2. researchers can submit higher-quality articles to journals after getting feedback from preprint readers
  3. with the exception of a few journals [1], the journal peer review process remains largely opaque and confidential.

If open preprint peer review were to become common practice, rereviewing of the same article could be avoided.

Preprint commenting can help ECRs develop their reviewer skills

Only 20% of scientists perform 69% to 94% of the all journal-solicited peer reviews culminating to 63.4 million review hours a year, 15 million of which are spent rereviewing rejected papers [3,44].

  • Commenting on preprints by ECRs is an opportunity to sharpen their reviewing skills and to give them a voice in academic publishing that can expand and diversify the pool of peer reviewers.
  • more and more interdisciplinary research needs more and more reviewers
  • there are platforms for preprint reviews

Preprints helps ECRs perform corrections via revisions

  • easy corrections instead of retractions

Publishing all research findings and conditions in preprints can benefit ECRs

  • negative results, replication studies

Perceived concerns by ECR on preprinting

Preprinting leads to scooping

  • preprints come with a DOI
  • depends on whether journals allow citing preprints and whether they accept being second

Preprinting prevents publication

  • unclear publisher and journal policies
  • closer collaboration and reverse links between journals and preprint servers could help

Preprints have low visibility

  • any publishing option will benefit ECRs who need to prove productivity over a short period of time
  • some results might not be published at all otherwise
  • preprint search engines are improving

Conclusions

Preprints are already benefiting ECRs and life scientists at large, but we argue that they are underutilized and can be used in new ways to aid ECR development and increase the efficiency of scientific research.

Personal comments

  • I remember a case in which I read a paper on entropy rates in marked Poisson processes and got totally stuck for quite some time. Only to learn much later that this was a preprint and they had several errors in the equations… That was rather annoying.
  • Recently I reviewed a paper and got stuck with some formulas. But it was a review, I knew there might be something wrong, noted it down in my report, and the authors corrected it. So the actual reader later does not have to go through this process anymore, maybe without knowing, it has not been double checked.
  • Sometimes it takes forever to find reviewers, but PhDs need the publications. What does it help however, if preprints are not accepted by the university?

  • Preprints empower authors to decide when their work is ready to be shared with the scientific community.

    • This might be too early.
  • another means for networking, in particular now in Corona times

  • For example, in the biophysics and fluorescence microscopy fields, preprinted methods were used well in advance of the peer-reviewed publication in sample labeling [19–20], instrument design [21–22], and image analysis [23].

    • This is kind of dangerous.
  • might be a first or one of many steps away from the ridiculous current publication system
  • I might consider my Landau constants paper for preprint for I have no expert in the field at hand. Furthermore, I have a negative result that could go on arXiv.
  • How does it help the system if every ECR can publish more and faster?
  • I know that at Imperial College London, they have an internal preprint server.