Archives des mots-clés : Preprint

The evolving preprint landscape: Introductory report for the Knowledge Exchange working group on preprints

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Authors : Jonathan Tennant, Serge Bauin, Sarah James, Juliane Kant

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). The Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) was launched in 1994, and in 1997 Research Papers in Economics (Wikipedia RePEc) was launched.

In 2008, the research network platforms Academia.edu and ResearchGate were both launched and allowed sharing of research papers at any stage. In 2013, two new biological preprint servers were launched, bioRxiv (by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) and PeerJ Preprints (by PeerJ) (Wikipedia BioRxiv; Wikipedia PeerJ).

Between these major ongoing initiatives were various, somewhat less-successful attempts to launch preprint servers, including Nature Precedings (folded in April 2012) and Netprints from the British Medical Journal (Wikipedia Nature Precedings; BMJ, 1999).

Now, a range of innovative services, organisations, and platforms are rapidly developing around preprints, prompting this overview of the present ecosystem on behalf of Knowledge Exchange.

URL : The evolving preprint landscape: Introductory report for the Knowledge Exchange working group on preprints

DOI : https://dx.doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/796TU

Prepublication disclosure of scientific results: Norms, competition, and commercial orientation

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Authors : Jerry G. Thursby, Carolin Haeussler, Marie C. Thursby, Lin Jiang

On the basis of a survey of 7103 active faculty researchers in nine fields, we examine the extent to which scientists disclose prepublication results, and when they do, why? Except in two fields, more scientists disclose results before publication than not, but there is significant variation in their reasons to disclose, in the frequency of such disclosure, and in withholding crucial results when making public presentations.

They disclose results for feedback and credit and to attract collaborators. Particularly in formulaic fields, scientists disclose to attract new researchers to the field independent of collaboration and to deter others from working on their exact problem.

A probability model shows that 70% of field variation in disclosure is related to differences in respondent beliefs about norms, competition, and commercialization. Our results suggest new research directions—for example, do the problems addressed or the methods of scientific production themselves shape norms and competition?

Are the levels we observe optimal or simply path-dependent? What is the interplay of norms, competition, and commercialization in disclosure and the progress of science?

URL : Prepublication disclosure of scientific results: Norms, competition, and commercial orientation

DOI : http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/5/eaar2133

How Many More Cites is a $3,000 Open Access Fee Buying You? Empirical Evidence from a Natural Experiment

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Authors :  Frank Mueller-Langer, Richard Watt

This paper analyzes the effect of open access (OA) status of published journal articles on peer recognition, as measured by the number of citations. Using cross-sectional and panel data from interdisciplinary mathematics and economics journals, we perform negative binomial, Poisson and linear regressions together with generalized method of moments/instrumental variable methods regressions.

We benefit from a natural experiment via hybrid OA pilot agreements. Under these agreements, OA status is exogenously assigned to all articles of authors affiliated with hybrid OA pilot institutions.

Our cross-sectional analysis of the full sample suggests that there is no citation benefit associated with hybrid OA. In contrast, for the subpopulation of journal articles for which neither OA pre-prints nor OA post-prints are available, we find positive hybrid OA effects for the full sample and each discipline separately.

We address the issue of selection bias by exploiting a panel of journal articles for which OA pre-prints are available. Citations to pre-prints allow us to identify the intrinsic quality of articles prior to publication in a journal.

The results from the panel analysis provide additional empirical evidence for a negligible hybrid OA citation effect.

URL : https://ssrn.com/abstract=3096572

arXiv popularity from a citation analysis point of view

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Author : Alireza Noruzi

This study aims to provide an overview of the citation rate of arXiv.org since its launch in August 1991, based on the Scopus citation database. The total number of citations to arXiv in Scopus in the 26 year period was 135,782 of which the highest number of citations was 23,288 in 2016.

It is also shown that arXiv-deposited papers are highly cited by physics and astronomy, mathematics, computer science, and engineering. It can be seen that researchers from the United States, Germany, China, United Kingdom, France, and Italy cite arXiv-deposited papers more than others.

The analysis of document types indicates that articles rank first with 69% of all Scopus documents citing arXiv from 1991-2016, followed by conference papers (24.7%), reviews (3.2%), and book chapters (1.5%).

It can be concluded that arXiv is cited increasingly by different subject areas, by different languages (especially English, Chinese and French), and by various countries.

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/31996/

The arXiv of the future will not look like the arXiv

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Authors : Alberto Pepe, Matteo Cantiello, Josh Nicholson

The arXiv is the most popular preprint repository in the world. Since its inception in 1991, the arXiv has allowed researchers to freely share publication-ready articles prior to formal peer review.

The growth and the popularity of the arXiv emerged as a result of new technologies that made document creation and dissemination easy, and cultural practices where collaboration and data sharing were dominant.

The arXiv represents a unique place in the history of research communication and the Web itself, however it has arguably changed very little since its creation. Here we look at the strengths and weaknesses of arXiv in an effort to identify what possible improvements can be made based on new technologies not previously available.

Based on this, we argue that a modern arXiv might in fact not look at all like the arXiv of today.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.07020

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

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Author : Matthew Cobb

In 1961, the NIH began to circulate biological preprints in a forgotten experiment called the Information Exchange Groups (IEGs).

This system eventually attracted over 3600 participants and saw the production of over 2,500 different documents, but by 1967 it was effectively shut down by journal publishers’ refusal to accept articles that had been circulated as preprints.

This article charts the rise and fall of the IEGs and explores the parallels with the 1990s and the biomedical preprint movement of today.

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

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3174v1

 

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

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Authors : Cameron Neylon, Damian Pattinson, Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin

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.

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

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11408.1