Quantifying the Growth of Preprint Services Hosted by the Center for Open Science

Abstract

A wide range of disciplines are building preprint services—web-based systems that enable publishing non peer-reviewed scholarly manuscripts before publication in a peer-reviewed journal. We have quantitatively surveyed nine of the largest English language preprint services offered by the Center for Open Science (COS) and available through an Application Programming Interface. All of the services we investigate also permit the submission of postprints, non-typeset versions of peer-reviewed manuscripts. Data indicates that all services are growing, but with submission rates below more mature services (e.g., bioRxiv). The trend of the preprint-to-postprint ratio for each service indicates that recent growth is a result of more preprint submissions. The nine COS services we investigate host papers that appear in a range of peer-reviewed journals, and many of these publication venues are not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. As a result, COS services function as open repositories for peer-reviewed papers that would otherwise be behind a paywall. We further analyze the coauthorship network for each COS service, which indicates that the services have many small connected components, and the largest connected component encompasses only a small percentage of total authors on each service. When comparing the papers submitted to each service, we observe topic overlap measured by keywords self-assigned to each manuscript, indicating that search functionalities would benefit from cutting across the boundaries of a single service. Finally, though annotation capabilities are integrated into all COS services, it is rarely used by readers. Our analysis of these services can be a benchmark for future studies of preprint service growth.

The Need for Speed: How Quickly Do Preprints Become Published Articles?

“…To consider the basic overall timeline first, the median amount of time it takes for a preprint to be published is 160 days (Figure 1): that's from the date a preprint is first published to the publication date (from CrossRef ). Our findings here are consistent with those reported in other similar studies: 134 days (Inglis & Sever, 2016) and, later, 166 days (Abdill & Blekhman, 2019). However, the publication date of an article is as much linked to a journal's publishing schedule as it is to the readiness of an article, so this data could be hiding some other trends from view.…”

“…ASAPBio defines preprints as "unpublished draft[s] of a research paper" (Inglis & Sever, 2019) and in recent years, there has been a sharp rise in the number of preprint servers, the variety of research areas they serve (Rawlinson & Bloom, 2019;OSF Preprints), and the sheer number of preprints posted (PrePubMed, accessed 2019). This expansion and proliferation of digital activity around new scholarly works has given rise to examinations of the nature of 'preprinting'-from the subject areas experiencing the most growth in preprint numberssuch as the life sciences, psychology and the social sciences (Narock & Goldstein, 2019) -to the positive correlation found between preprint download activity and the Journal Impact Factor of the journal in which the final published paper appears (Abdill & Blekhman, 2019).…”

Preprints as accelerator of scholarly communication: An empirical analysis in Mathematics

“…While there are still debates on the value of such kind of un-refereed scholarly manuscripts (i.e. preprints) (Teixeira da Silva, 2018; Rawlinson & Bloom, 2019), the growth of preprint publications as well as preprint services is fast in recent years (Wang, Glä nzel, & Chen, 2018;Narock & Goldstein, 2019). Furthermore, in the report of 2019 Altmetric Top 100 released by Altmetric.com on 17 December, 2019 (cf.…”

Promoting Open Science: A Holistic Approach to Changing Behaviour

“…Sharing preprints is becoming increasingly popular for Promoting Open Science: A Holistic Approach to Changing Behaviour Collabra: Psychology Table 1. Colleagues many researchers (Berg et al, 2016;Narock & Goldstein, 2019).…”