On the origin of nonequivalent states: How we can talk about preprints

Abstract

Increasingly, preprints are at the center of conversations across the research ecosystem. But disagreements remain about the role they play. Do they “count” for research assessment? Is it ok to post preprints in more than one place? In this paper, we argue that these discussions often conflate two separate issues, the history of the manuscript and the status granted it by different communities. In this paper, we propose a new model that distinguishes the characteristics of the object, its “state”, from the subjective “standing” granted to it by different communities. This provides a way to discuss the difference in practices between communities, which will deliver more productive conversations and facilitate negotiation, as well as sharpening our focus on the role of different stakeholders on how to collectively improve the process of scholarly communications not only for preprints, but other forms of scholarly contributions.

Ten hot topics around scholarly publishing

“…Препринт, как правило, является версией исследовательской работы, которая распространяется на онлайн-платформе до или во время официального процесса рецензирования [6][7][8]. Препринтные платформы стали популярны во многих дисциплинах из-за растущего стремления к представлению результатов исследования в открытом доступе и могут быть созданы издателем или сообществом.…”

“…На рисунке 2 показаны распределения цитирования для восьми выбранных журналов (данные Lariviere et al, 2016 [19]), а также их импактфакторы и процент цитируемых элементов ниже ИФЖ. Распределения явно искажены, что делает среднее арифметическое неуместным для использования, не говоря уж об отдельных работах 7 ASAPbio -Accelerating Science and Publication in Biologyнекоммерческая организация (прим. переводчика).…”

A conceptual peer review model for arXiv and other preprint databases

“…To avoid possible misunderstandings, it is necessary to make it clear that this paper discusses subject-based preprints and non-reviewed original papers submitted to subject-based preprints and not repositories of articles published in journals. The most typical example is famous preprint database arXiv (Neylon, Pattinson, Bilder, & Lin, 2017).…”

Open Science in the Humanities, or: Open Humanities?

“…A preprint is a manuscript of an article, book, or chapter that is being published in a distinguished online repository before it is formally published in a journal or as a book [51,52]. This quite general definition can be discussed in more detail with respect to its elements: the manuscript is usually one authored for the purpose of being published in a peer reviewed journal or book; publication online in a repository means that the manuscript is published rather informally-i.e., not necessarily formatted according to a publisher's guidelines-on an online server that functions as a repository for such manuscripts, optionally specifically for a discipline.…”