The prehistory of biology preprints: a forgotten experiment from the 1960s

Cobb, Matthew

doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.3174v1

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 17 publications

(21 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In the print era, the high marginal costs associated with distribution favored this coupling of evaluation and dissemination; only manuscripts that passed a certain bar set by the journal were published and incurred printing costs. The resulting delays to dissemination have often prompted scientists to share draft manuscripts informally among close colleagues and more organized mechanisms for sharing preprints widely were piloted as early as the 1960s (Cobb, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

bioRxiv: the preprint server for biology

Grainger

Roeder

Hindle

et al. 2019

Preprint

121

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The traditional publication process delays dissemination of new research, often by months, sometimes by years. Preprint servers decouple dissemination of research papers from their evaluation and certification by journals, allowing researchers to share work immediately, receive feedback from a much larger audience, and provide evidence of productivity long before formal publication. Launched in 2013 as a non-profit community service, the bioRxiv server has brought preprint practice to the life sciences and recently posted its 64,000th manuscript. The server now receives more than four million views per month and hosts papers spanning all areas of biology. Initially dominated by evolutionary biology, genetics/genomics and computational biology, bioRxiv has been increasingly populated by papers in neuroscience, cell and developmental biology, and many other fields. Changes in journal and funder policies that encourage preprint posting have helped drive adoption, as has the development of bioRxiv technologies that allow authors to transfer papers easily between the server and journals. A bioRxiv user survey found that 42% of authors post their preprints prior to journal submission whereas 37% post concurrently with journal submission. Authors are motivated by a desire to share work early; they value the feedback they receive, and very rarely experience any negative consequences of preprint posting. Rapid dissemination via bioRxiv is also encouraging new initiatives that experiment with the peer review process and the development of novel approaches to literature filtering and assessment.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

bioRxiv: the preprint server for biology

Grainger

Roeder

Hindle

et al. 2019

Preprint

121

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…If such a license is added, the full text is displayed on the Europe PMC website and made available via the API and bulk downloads as part of the open access subset. 16 Handling preprint updates Linking preprints to published journal articles Preprints in Europe PMC are linked to the corresponding journal-published versions. The link is established for Europe PMC-indexed journal articles that have a PubMed ID (PMID).…”

Section: Ssrnmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In some disciplines, such as physics, preprints have been part of research communication for decades [14]. Efforts to promote preprints in biology trace back several decades [15][16]. Nonetheless, in the life sciences, it is still a relatively new path to share research findings.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enabling preprint discovery, evaluation, and analysis with Europe PMC

Levchenko,

Parkin,

McEntyre

et al. 2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Preprints provide an indispensable tool for rapid and open communication of early research findings. Preprints can also be revised and improved based on scientific commentary uncoupled from journal-organised peer review. The uptake of preprints in the life sciences has increased significantly in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, when immediate access to research findings became crucial to address the global health emergency. With ongoing expansion of new preprint servers, improving discoverability of preprints is a necessary step to facilitate wider sharing of the science reported in preprints. To address the challenges of preprint visibility and reuse, Europe PMC, an open database of life science literature, began indexing preprint abstracts and metadata from several platforms in July 2018. Since then, Europe PMC has continued to increase coverage through addition of new servers, and expanded its preprint initiative to include the full text of preprints related to COVID-19 in July 2020 and then the full text of preprints supported by the Europe PMC funder consortium in April 2022. The preprint collection can be searched via the website and programmatically, with abstracts and the open access full text of COVID-19 and Europe PMC funder preprint subsets available for bulk download in a standard machine-readable JATS XML format. This enables automated information extraction for large-scale analyses of the preprint corpus, accelerating scientific research of the preprint literature itself. This publication describes steps taken to build trust, improve discoverability, and support reuse of life science preprints in Europe PMC. Here we discuss the benefits of indexing preprints alongside peer-reviewed publications, and challenges associated with this process

show abstract

“…In 1961, the USA National Institutes of Health ( NIH ) launched a program called Information Exchange Groups, designed for the circulation of biological preprints, but this shut down in 1967 (Confrey, 1996;Cobb, 2017). In 1991, the arXiv repository was launched for physics, computer science, and mathematics, which is when preprints (or 'e-prints') began to increase in popularity and attention ( Wikipedia ArXiv#History ; Jackson, 2002).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%