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What are Preprints, and How Do They Benefit Authors?

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Preprints are research papers shared before peer review. Here we discuss the benefits to authors including rapid credit, visibility & feedback.

Updated on March 29, 2018

Most researchers don't share their work until after it's been published in a journal. Due to lengthy publication times, this can result in delays of months, sometimes years. Authors are understandably frustrated by the amount of time it takes to share their research & reap the benefits of a published, citable research article.

But what if you could put post your manuscript online while it's going through peer review so that your peers and colleagues can see what you're working on? That's the idea behind preprints, and more and more researchers are using them for exactly this purpose.

Definition of a preprint

A preprint is a full draft research paper that is shared publicly before it has been peer reviewed. Most preprints are given a digital object identifier (DOI) so they can be cited in other research papers.

A preprint is a full draft of a research paper that is shared publicly before it has been peer reviewed.

Benefits of preprints

Preprints achieve many of the goals of journal publishing, but within a much shorter time frame. The biggest benefits fall into 3 areas: credit , feedback , and visibility .

When you post a preprint with your research results, you can firmly stake a claim to the work you've done. If there is any subsequent discussion of who found a particular result first, you can point to the preprint as a public, conclusive record of your data. Most preprints are assigned a digital object identifier (DOI), which allows your work to become a permanent part of the scholarly record - one that can be referenced in any dispute over who discovered something first.

For these reasons, the US National Institutes of Health and Wellcome Trust , among other funders, allow researchers to cite preprints in their grant applications.

For a complete list of funder policies see here .

In the traditional system, a submitted manuscript receives feedback from 2 or 3 peer reviewers before publication. With a preprint, other researchers can discover your work sooner, potentially pointing out critical flaws or errors, suggest new studies or data that strengthen your argument or even recommend a collaboration that could lead to publication in a more prestigious journal. The feedback can be provided publicly through commenting, or privately through email. Here is one scientist's story about the benefit of sharing his work as a preprint:

Last year I posted a preprint. Doing this set off a chain of events that convinced me I should post a preprint for ALL my manuscripts.Here's my story (1/17)— Dan Quintana (@dsquintana) February 10, 2018

Here's another author's journey from skepticism to loving preprints. By posting a preprint, this author was able to share their research 10 months earlier & it was viewed over 1,500 times in the first 2 months.

“To all researchers out there, I encourage you to stop worrying and love the preprint. Submit your manuscripts, but also read preprints and make comments.”

Visibility (and citations)

Preprints are not the final form of a research paper for most authors. Thankfully, preprints and infrastructure providers like Crossref link to the final published article whenever possible, meaning that your preprint can serve to bring new readers to your published paper. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association saw notable increases in citations and Altmetric scores when authors had posted their work first as a preprint.

Posting a preprint led to a significant increase in Altmetric attention scores and citations for the final published paper.

The citation effect is small, and more studies will be needed to confirm this finding, but the evidence for more attention in news and social media is strong (nearly a 3-fold increase in Altmetric attention scores). The more places you can be discovered by your peers and the public, the more attention your research is likely to get.

Conclusions

Preprints are a small but rapidly growing piece of scholarly communication. They present several strong advantages to improve the way research is shared - including credit for your work, early feedback & increased visibility - and we hope you will consider giving them a try.

A note to readers: AJE is a division of Research Square Company . Our colleagues built and operate the Research Square preprint platform. For more author resources on preprints we encourage you to browse the content on the Research Square Blog .

This article was updated by our team February 2020 .

Ben Mudrak, PhD

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The Pros and Cons of Preprints

Preprints are drafts of scholarly articles and research papers that are made publicly available prior to peer review, meaning that researchers can get their work out quickly and receive feedback at a relatively early stage. There’s plenty more uses and benefits to them, including that they’re citable and open for comments from other researchers.

There are some limitations to preprints, however, including a lack of awareness among the general public and limited acceptance in academic journals and publication platforms.

Let’s have a look at the pros and cons of preprints here.

Preprints pros

·       a way for researchers to get results out quickly.

Preprints are most useful for researchers. Researchers can share their results by publishing their initial drafts and receive feedback on their findings from other researchers across the world. This can be helpful because a wider pool of researchers providing feedback means that any flaws in research are more likely to be noticed before the publication of full research papers.

Feedback can come in other forms, including as recommendations for new research directions. As preprints are open to comments, they’re perfect for advancing fields in which preliminary results are key. And they might even strengthen the review process given that researchers are able to consider feedback on preprints from researchers across the globe.

·       Crediting innovative research

By making research visible before official publication, researchers with innovative ideas can be suitably credited. The process from finalizing a draft to publishing a peer-reviewed article can be lengthy. Because of this, preprints can help researchers to get results out quicker. This is especially useful if any major delays are experienced during the review process, or if similar research comes out before the publication of full research papers.

·       Preprints are citable 

Preprints receive their own digital object identifier (DOI), meaning that researchers can easily cite preprints. Publishers often provide “ How to Cite ” instructions for anybody looking to reference research from preprints. And because preprints are citable, academics can discuss information and results from preprints within their work.

·       Preprints are screened

Preprints  can come in various forms, including as reviews and case reports. And once preprints are submitted for publication, they are subject to certain checks. For example, at MDPI, preprints undergo a thorough series of checks to make sure they’re reliable. Preprints published through preprints.org, an MDPI initiative, undergo a screening process that includes making sure that basic publication ethics are adhered to, conflicts of interest are disclosed by authors, and that “ no harmful, provocative, controversial, or pseudoscientific statement ” is included.

Preprints cons

·       preprints reliability.

Because preprints aren’t as established yet, it can be difficult to make clear that the information available in preprints isn’t verified in the same way as information in other research articles. As witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic, this can lead to problems during major health crises.

The pandemic illustrated both the pros and cons of preprints. Due to the novelty and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people were looking to find out more about the science behind it. While preprints helped researchers to share data about the pandemic at a rapid pace, problems arose as many news outlets picked up on the information. The circulation of preliminary findings as facts meant conflicting information was delivered to the public. This led to issues such as misinformation and lack of trust in the science.

These issues can be solved by making clear that preprints haven’t been peer reviewed, and that the research in preprints is therefore less reliable than the information available in other academic publications. Defining and explaining the purpose of preprints are steps in the right direction.

·       Lack of acceptance and publication of full papers

Despite being about for around 30 years online, preprints only really took off during the COVID-19 pandemic , when fast-paced research became key. The rise in interest since then has led to considerations of the pros and cons of preprints. And they’re most often distributed over the internet as opposed to in the form of paper copies today, following the trend of most academic publications.

However, there is less space made for preprints across journals. Many publishers don’t accept preprints or have certain stipulations for the research published in preprints. For example, when publishing a preprint, researchers should be mindful that some journals prohibit the republication of research included in preprints. If you have any plans to publish your work with a certain journal, double check that you’ll still be able to do this once you’ve published your preprint.

Preprints at MDPI 

So, while preprints offer benefits such as efficiency and collaboration, there are still some issues that need to be worked on. We’ll hopefully see some of these issues resolved as we raise awareness about their functions and purpose.

If you’re interested in publishing your work as a preprint, or want to know more about the process, have a look at the Multidisciplinary Preprints Platform , an MDPI initiative. Here, you can learn more about publishing articles developed from preprints in MDPI journals.

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My correct question is: “How long does a paper stay in the preprint journal before it is accepted and published?”

Hi, A paper can stay published as a preprint and never appear in a journal. If it does get published in a journal, the time depends on how long it takes the journal to publish it, which varies greatly.

I hope this answers your question, Jack

Is the plagiarism generated due to preprint affect the acceptance of journals.

Can my manuscript, currently under review with MDPI, be affected by a previously published manuscript with a DOI as a preprint?

Hello Alzafer,

My understanding is that this is possible. Hope this helps.

I have got this email. It means my paper is excepted or not yet or good indicator?

We are pleased to inform you that we have established a direct connection with “Preprints.org”, a free preprint platform ( https://www.preprints.org ). Your article has been recommended to the Preprints.org

Abdirahman,

Please contact preprints as we do not have access to that information. They will be able to provide you with more details on this question.

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Open Access Publishing

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What are Preprints?

A preprint is an early version of an academic article that has been made available by the author for others to read for free online before it has been peer reviewed or published in an academic journal.

What are the Benefits of Preprints?

Publishing an article as a preprint serves several important purposes:

• It allows the information contained in the article to be shared with the academic community more rapidly and openly than traditional publication. The formal journal publication process is often lengthy, and it can take many months for an article to be reviewed and published.
• Research has shown that publishing a journal article as a preprint can  increase citations  to the final peer reviewed article.
• By posting a freely accessible version of an article online, the author has the opportunity to receive comments and reviews by readers that might lead to changes and improvements in the final published draft.
• It can be used by researchers to provide evidence of productivity when applying for jobs or submitting grant proposals, and it can also generally help to establish priority of discovery and ideas.
• Posting an article as a preprint can also particularly  benefit early career researchers  by helping then to find research collaborators, and helping to improving their professional network, which can lead to more opportunities for these researchers.

Things to Keep in Mind About Preprints

• Preprints have not been peer reviewed : While preprints are scholarly articles, they have not yet been formally peer reviewed. Some preprint servers may do a rudimentary check to ensure that submitted content is legitimate scientific/academic research, but they are not checking the reliability and accuracy of information in the article. It is important that those reading and using preprints keep this in mind.
• Some journals might not accept article submissions that were published as preprints: While an increasing number of publishers and journals welcome the submissions of articles that have been released as a preprint, some journals might not accept them. It is important to check the policies of any journal you may wish to submit to before releasing a preprint. The Sherpa Romeo database can be used to learn if publishers and journal support preprinting, and the  Transpose  database provides even more details about journal policies toward preprints. 

Selected Preprint Servers

Below are a few selected preprint servers of relevance to the Longwood community. A comprehensive list of preprint servers (and one that compares server policies) can be found on the ASAPbio website .

Discipline-Specific

• bioRxiv : biology and life sciences (informative  article about bioRxiv , including statistics and a history of the preprint server)
• medRxiv : health sciences/clinical research
• arXiv : physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics ​
• NutriXiv : nutritional sciences (note: NutriXiv is no longer accepting new submissions) ​

Multidisciplinary

• Google Scholar : Indexes preprints from many popular servers, including some of the ones mentioned here.
• OSF Preprints : Supported by the Center for Open Science, OSF is a free and open platform that supports a variety of discipline-specific preprint servers. The OSF search aggregator allows users to search through its own preprint collections and those of other organizations.
• Preprints.org : Multidisciplinary preprint server.
• PrePubMed : An independent effort to index preprints from a variety of sources (including ones mentioned above) that fit the profile of articles which would appear in PubMed, once published.

Preprints and the NIH

The National Institutes of Health specifically  supports the use  and citation of preprints as "interim research projects" to "speed the dissemination and enhance the rigor" of an author's work. NIH notice NOT-OD-17-050 discusses the benefits of preprints and provides guidance for authors on selecting a reliable preprint server to post their articles to. This NIH  blog post also offers additional explanation related to this notice. In brief:

• Authors are encouraged by the NIH to include preprints in their "My Bibliography."
• Authors can then associate grant awards with those preprints by logging on through ERA Commons.
• Authors are asked by the NIH to choose a Creative Commons license to release their preprint under, so that it is easily identified as an openly accessible article. Learn more about different CC licenses from ASAPBio .

To learn about other funder's policies towards preprints, you can consult  https://asapbio.org/funder-policies

Common Questions About Preprints

• "These concerns are valid, but there is good reason to believe that they can be mitigated and managed...[with]...attention and inspection from our scientific community....preprints can be screened before posting to block attempts to propagate misinformation. Furthermore, some preprint servers display disclaimers on the top of each article to make clear that preprints are not validated through peer-review." ( ASAPBio )
• Preprint servers should include a "timestamp indicating when the article appeared, which is usually within 24 hours of submission. This date, along with the preprint itself, is made open access... and thus, anyone can determine the order of priority relative to other published work or, indeed, other preprints. While journals provide an important service of validation through peer review, establishment of priority can be significantly delayed because the work is not public during the process of peer review in most journals." ( Ten Simple Rules )
• "As jobs and grants become very competitive, there is increasing worry...about scooping, ie that their ideas/results will be published by others and that they will not receive proper attribution....Our argument is that this is unlikely, and indeed there is likely be to greater protection and overall fairness in establishing credit for work by submitting both to a preprint server (for fair and timely disclosure) and to a journal (for validation by peer review)." ( ASAPBio )
• "Certainly, the peer review process can add significant value to the work, pointing out errors or areas for improvement. Nevertheless, authors must stand behind their submitted preprint, because it is a public disclosure (and hence a citable entity), albeit a non-peer-reviewed one. Even without peer review, their scientific colleagues will be reading and judging the work, and the authors’ reputations are at stake." ( Ten Simple Rules )
• This will help the journal and preprint repositories connect your preprint to the final published article.
• Also, since plagiarism detection software will pick up preprints as a match, the journal will more easily be able to review those reports if they know you have published a preprint. 
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A guide to preprinting for early-career researchers

Cassandra l. ettinger.

1 Department of Microbiology and Plant Pathology, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA

Madhumala K. Sadanandappa

2 Department of Molecular and Systems Biology, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Hanover, NH 03755, USA

Kıvanç Görgülü

3 Comprehensive Cancer Center Munich, Klinikum rechts der Isar, Technical University of Munich, 81675, Munich, Germany

Karen L. Coghlan

4 George C. Gordon Library, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA 01609, USA

Kenneth K. Hallenbeck

5 TerraPrime, Danvers, MA 01923, USA

Iratxe Puebla

6 ASAPbio, Cambridge, UK

Associated Data

The use of preprints, research manuscripts shared publicly before completing the traditional peer-review process, is becoming a more common practice among life science researchers. Early-career researchers (ECRs) benefit from posting preprints as they are shareable, citable, and prove productivity. However, preprinting a manuscript involves a discussion among all co-authors, and ECRs are often not the decision-makers. Therefore, ECRs may find themselves in situations where they are interested in depositing a preprint but are unsure how to approach their co-authors or advisor about preprinting. Leveraging our own experiences as ECRs, and feedback from the research community, we have constructed a guide for ECRs who are considering preprinting to enable them to take ownership over the process and to raise awareness about preprinting options. We hope that this guide helps ECRs to initiate conversations about preprinting with co-authors and encourage them to preprint their future research.

Summary: Are you an early-career researcher considering preprinting, but unsure how to approach conversations about the possibility? Here, we discuss preprinting and provide tips to enable you to take ownership over the process.

Introduction

Preprints have attracted the attention of life scientists due to their growth in recent years and their role in facilitating the prompt sharing of research findings related to the COVID-19 pandemic ( Fraser et al., 2021 ). Preprints support the rapid dissemination of research, accelerate scientific progress, and directly benefit individual researchers, particularly early-career researchers (ECRs) including undergraduate students, graduate students, postdocs, research associates, research scientists, junior group leaders, staff scientists, and other researchers. In addition to offering more control over how and when to share research work compared to publication at a journal, preprints enable researchers to present their research contributions to funding agencies and hiring committees while the manuscript is undergoing the editorial process at a journal.

Though ECRs are often interested in open science and preprints ( Sarabipour et al., 2019 ; Wolf et al., 2021 ), many find themselves in situations where the decision on how to publish their research does not lie solely with them. Whether to preprint a manuscript involves a discussion among co-authors, and the ECR's advisor, the group leader, or the corresponding author will often make the final decision. Therefore, ECRs may find themselves in a situation where they would like to preprint but are unsure how to approach their advisor about preprinting. Drawing on our own experiences as ECRs and feedback from the research community, we have constructed the following guide for ECRs interested in preprinting their research. In this guide, we focus on: (1) what preprints are and current trends in the life sciences, (2) how to approach conversations about preprints with co-authors and advisors, (3) common concerns about preprinting, (4) practical steps for depositing preprints, and (5) how to get involved with preprints more broadly. Besides raising awareness, we hope that the resources and suggestions in this article will be informative and helpful to ECRs in understanding the advantages of preprints.

Do your research: what is a preprint?

A preprint is defined as a full draft version of a research manuscript shared publicly prior to the peer-review process ( Tennant et al., 2018 preprint; Mudrack, 2020 ). Posting a preprint serves as a public, permanent disclosure of one's research. In patent terms it would serve as prior art, assigning a date in the scholarly record for any subsequent discussion of who found a particular result first. Preprints are assigned a persistent identifier, most commonly a digital object identifier number (DOI), which allows them to become a permanent part of the scholarly record ( International DOI Foundation, 2021 ). The DOI records metadata for ease of discoverability. Many funders, such as the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the US, the European Research Council, or the Australian Research Council, now allow preprint citations in grant applications or reports ( Kaiser, 2017 ; Watson, 2021 ). The preprint can be cited in subsequent papers furthering the scholarly record and making research results available in a timely manner.

Preprints can enhance the reachability and visibility of research findings, as they are not associated with access barriers ( Fraser et al., 2020 ). Thus, preprints enable open science as the servers are free-to-use and free-to-access, thereby facilitating early discovery and global public engagement ( Maggio et al., 2018 ; UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, 2021 ). Preprints also support an international and equitable scientific community: there is no paywall, which means that researchers can read and cite work they otherwise would not be able to access due to barriers caused by journal subscription fees.

Preprints are not new to the research community. In the 1960s, the NIH created the Information Exchange Groups (IEGs) to circulate copies of biological preprints. The IEGs ended up growing into seven different groups with a membership of more than 3600 participants and distributed over 2500 documents. However, by 1967 the IEGs were abandoned after several journal publishers refused to accept articles circulated as preprints ( Cobb, 2017 ). Physicists experimented with similar models, and in 1991, arXiv was founded as a repository for manuscripts in the physical sciences ( ArXiv, 2021 ). While physicists adopted preprints to disseminate work with colleagues, preprints in the life sciences did not take off until the 2010s, with the start of bioRxiv and initial signs of support by funders and publishers ( Puebla et al., 2022 ).

Preprint servers and landscape

Preprint adoption in the life sciences started with the launch of bioRxiv in November 2013. Currently, over 50 preprint servers cover a wide range of disciplines; for a list of preprint servers relevant to life sciences, biomedical, and clinical research, refer to the ASAPbio webpage ( https://asapbio.org/preprint-servers ; Kirkham et al., 2020 ). While these servers follow different governance models, they are operated by academic communities, academic institutions, or publishers. Similar to journal publications, searching for preprints is straightforward, as Google Scholar and Europe PMC index many preprint servers including bioRxiv, Research Square, and medRxiv. This means that many of the ways that one uses to keep up with published literature (for tips see Pain, 2016 ) can also alert you to the latest preprints.

The number of cumulative submissions to preprint servers over time demonstrates increased acceptance of preprinting among life science researchers ( Tennant et al., 2018 preprint); for the evolution of life science preprints in that time period, see the data indexed by Europe PMC ( Europe PMC, 2021 ). bioRxiv, the largest biology preprint server, had cumulatively published over 200,000 preprints by early 2022 ( Fig. 1 A; bioRxiv reporting, 2021 ). Their sister server medRxiv launched in June 2019 for health sciences, now hosts over 40,000 preprints ( Fig. 1 A). Researchers from over 170 countries have deposited preprints in bioRxiv, with the majority of preprints originating from the USA and the UK ( Fig. 1 B) ( Abdill et al., 2020 ). Previous studies looking at the country distribution of preprints before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, also highlight that the US, China and countries in Western Europe are the most represented in bioRxiv and medRxiv ( Abdill et al., 2020 ; Fraser et al., 2021 ). Disparities in preprint deposition across countries relative to their overall scientific output suggest that geographical barriers may exist to preprint adoption ( Abdill et al., 2020 ).

(A) Monthly new submissions to bioRxiv (orange - November 2013 to December 2021) and medRxiv (grey - June 2019 to December 2021). (B) A heat map showing the country-wise distribution of preprints in both bioRxiv and medRxiv based on the institutional affiliation of the corresponding author. The color coding uses a log scale. (Data curated from bioRxiv and medRxiv- from servers launch untill August 2021).

Consideration of preprint servers based on discipline, scope, policies, and readership is relevant to inform where to deposit your preprint, and in turn to maximize visibility for the work and opportunities for feedback from researchers in your specific field. Data suggests that the adoption of preprints varies from one discipline to another within the life sciences. Neuroscience, microbiology, bioinformatics, cell biology and evolutionary biology are among the fields most extensively represented in bioRxiv ( Abdill and Blekhman, 2019 ; bioRxiv reporting, 2021 ), whereas infectious diseases, epidemiology, and public and global health preprints are strongly represented in medRxiv ( bioRxiv reporting, 2021 ). The strongest disciplines in medRxiv closely overlap with those relevant to COVID-19 research, as many researchers shared their preliminary data related to COVID-19 in the form of preprints to help inform the response to the pandemic. During the initial months of the pandemic there was not only a surge in the deposition of preprints but also in public engagement with preprinted COVID-19-related research. COVID-19 preprints also received more citations, reactions on social media and coverage in the press compared to non-COVID-19 preprints ( Fraser et al., 2021 ).

Engagement with preprints can also vary according to the server and whether it is predominantly linked to a journal's submission process ( Kirkham et al., 2020 ). Researchers seeking to share their work with their communities before or in parallel to journal submission may post to community-operated servers such as bioRxiv, medRxiv or servers that serve regional communities such as AfricArxiv, RINarxiv or IndiaRxiv. On the other hand, some researchers post their preprint upon journal submission, by opting into services offered by journals to post at a preprint server their publisher runs or has a partnership with. Examples of this type of service include Cell Sneak Peak and Preprints with the Lancet (owned by Elsevier) offered by journals in the Cell and Lancet families, or journals in the Springer Nature portfolio, which offer authors the option to deposit at Research Square, a server partnered with the publisher.

I am thinking about preprinting my paper - how should I approach it with my advisors and co-authors?

Talking to your advisor, colleagues, and co-authors.

So, after considering all the above, you would like to preprint your paper; how to get started? As a first step, have a conversation with your advisor about preprinting your next paper. If you are unsure about where they stand regarding preprints, you can start by asking about their views on preprinting. If you have these discussions with your advisor or co-authors by email, we have provided some draft email structures to help you ( Fig. 2 ; Text S1 ). Here are a few important things to consider:

Draft email to one ’ s advisor. An email template to help with initiating conversations about preprinting with one's advisor. We have included the same template and a template for emailing co-authors in text format in the supplementary materials ( Text S1 ).

• Keep it simple.
• Familiarize yourself with your institution or funder policy for communicating the work. Do they encourage or require preprints?
• Find out your advisor's priorities for sharing the group's work.
• Provide examples of other researchers in your field who have preprinted.
• Offer additional resources or seek further input about using preprints.

If you are meeting with your advisor in person, even if you come prepared with all the answers, remember that your advisor may have questions that you did not anticipate or may still be unsure of what might be best for the work after your conversation. They may need time to mull over the options and get back to you; not everything needs to be settled in one conversation. You could offer to gather more information on preprinting or their specific concerns to share with them and then continue the conversation at the next meeting. All authors must be on board to preprint the manuscript, so having these meetings early on can leave time for you to address concerns.

In addition, consider the language and construction of the argument that you will use in your preprinting conversations. Try to use ‘I’ language when discussing your goals and motivations and remind all parties how this aligns with your values or will benefit your career. If someone has a different opinion on preprinting than you do, investigate this opinion further by asking them how they reached that conclusion. Come prepared with resources to share and be aware of common concerns (see below and Table 1 ), but do not pressure your advisor or colleagues to decide right away. Be ready to compromise and table the discussion to be followed up with in the future.

Table 1.

Examples of concerns or questions that may come up in conversation with your co-authors about preprints, along with information and considerations to raise in response when making a case for preprinting

Construct your argument - what concerns may come up in conversations about preprints?

Several concerns or issues may come up in conversations with co-authors, colleagues, advisors, or others in the community. These issues might be influenced by research field, career stage, or experience. For example, those working in medical fields may raise concerns about sharing findings that may affect patients before peer-review; the stakes in patient treatment and public health are higher than in other fields. Preprint opinion may also differ depending on the level of acceptance of preprints in a discipline. For instance, in research fields with strong preprint adoption, it is less likely to receive the response ‘I did not see your work!’ when you preprint. On the other hand, concerns about visibility or scooping may be more significant for fields with relatively lower adoption or acceptance of preprints.

We outline below ( Table 1 ) some of the concerns or questions that may arise during discussions about preprints. In addition, we explore two of the most common themes in greater detail: scooping and sharing the work before the journal peer-review process.

Concern #1: I'll get scooped

A common concern among researchers is the risk of scooping – that another competing group will see the preprint and rush to publish their results in a journal before the preprint authors can do so themselves, thereby depriving the preprint authors of the career benefits of publishing in their target journal ( Bourne et al., 2017 ). Interestingly, there is no evidence that the prevalence of scooping in preprints is higher than in the context of journal publications. For instance, in the 2019 bioRxiv survey, only 0.7% of respondents indicated that preprinting prevented them from publishing in their journal of choice ( Sever et al., 2019 preprint).

Most remarkably, researchers have used their preprints as an opportunity to initiate collaborations with other groups in the field or to coordinate the publication of their work together, thereby avoiding concerns about priority claims. For example, Dr Josh Hardy discussed how upon seeing a preprint from another group, they got in touch with the preprint authors. The two groups coordinated the journal publication of their respective papers, which ended up appearing in the same journal ( Hardy, 2021 ).

Preprinting allows researchers much more control of when they disseminate their work and is thus an opportunity to prevent being scooped while waiting for the paper to be published in a journal. In addition, preprints provide an avenue for researchers in rapidly moving fields to promptly share their work with their community, where the delay associated with peer review may come at the cost of priority. In the bioRxiv survey, 28% of respondents stated that preprints helped them stake a priority claim in their field ( Sever et al., 2019 , preprint).

Preprints enhance visibility

Visibility is an important element in the context of scooping concerns: preprints must be readily discoverable by researchers in the field, which in turn, allows attributing credit to the authors. Will the preprint be seen by colleagues in the field? Or is there a risk that the preprint may be overlooked, and competitors may not cite it?

In the bioRxiv survey, 74% of respondents stated that preprinting increased awareness of their research ( Sever et al., 2019 , preprint). Preprints are readily searchable online, as indexing services and literature search tools increasingly incorporate them (Scopus, Google Scholar, Europe PMC, and Crossref all index preprints). In addition, authors can quickly disseminate preprints on social media platforms. For example, Twitter plays an important role in increasing the visibility of preprints, with many research groups sharing their latest preprints via Twitter or commenting on colleagues’ latest preprinted work ( Chiarelli et al., 2019 ). Furthermore, social media platforms can allow scientists to immediately measure the community's reactions and engagement with the work by the number of tweets, re-tweets, and likes the preprint receives. Many authors now post Twitter threads highlighting the main findings of their preprints or journal articles. In fact, before writing this guide we used a Twitter thread with polls to gauge ECR interest in preprinting, with 92.5% of respondents recommending preprinting to ECRs ( n =40) ( Fig. S1 , Table S1 ). If you are new to social media, there are several existing guides for scientists that can help you get started ( Bik and Goldstein, 2013 ; Heemstra, 2020 ; Cheplygina et al., 2020 ).

In addition, studies have shown that posting preprints results in more attention on social media and a higher number of citations for the article once it appears in a journal ( Fu and Hughey, 2019 ). Altmetric scores are generally higher for articles deposited as preprints; journal publications that have associated bioRxiv preprints receive more mentions on blogs and Wikipedia than non-deposited articles, as well as more mentions in Twitter or Mendeley ( Abdill and Blekhman, 2019 ; Fraser et al., 2020 ). COVID-19 preprints have also been widely reported in the lay media ( Fleerackers et al., 2022 ). The early accrual of citations for the journal publication suggests that the community had already taken note of the preprint, which gave them a chance to consider the work as part of their own research between the preprint appearance and the journal publication.

Preprints establish priority

An important step in the research process is to disseminate your findings to the scientific community, and in turn, be able to claim credit for the work. Recognition for research productivity is essential to establishing a reputation in the field, acquiring grants, and career progress. A preprint provides a permanent time-stamped record for the research findings in a much shorter timeline than a journal publication. Thus, when time is critical (e.g. when completing your thesis or finishing a project before moving to another position), preprinting can greatly benefit ECRs.

In the coming years, life scientists might use preprints as a channel to establish priority, which has been established practice in the physics community for years ( Vale and Hyman, 2016 ). In support of this idea, several publishers such as EMBO Press, PLOS, and eLife have ‘ scoop protection’ policies that recognize the date of the preprint deposition as the date at which their policy applies. The scooping-protection policy stipulates that from the date of the preprint, if another publication appears reporting similar findings, that would not impact the consideration of the paper submitted to their journals.

Researchers often worry about the potential risk of scooping when they present their preliminary findings at conferences or symposiums. Attendees could use the information they heard at the conference and scoop the presenter. As the information would have been available only to the conference attendees, there is limited audience to vouch for who has priority over that work and it would not be easy to establish who did what and when. Depositing a preprint before the conference presentation records the priority claim with a time-stamp and provides protection from scooping.

Preprints are citable

A tangible benefit of preprints is that they are citable and can prove productivity for prospective funders. Many funding agencies now have policies that allow citing preprints as part of grant applications and reports (more information on funder policies at asapbio.org/funder-policies). We expect to see more funding agencies update their policies, recognizing the importance of preprints in the future. Besides funders, several research institutions have started to include preprints in their processes for hiring and promotion (see asapbio.org/university-policies).

Concern #2: My work hasn't been peer reviewed yet

Another common concern that may arise in conversations around preprints is sharing work before peer review. Some researchers worry about disseminating their findings before completing the traditional peer-review process, which provides feedback on the work and can also address any errors before the broader circulation of the manuscript. It is important to note that the preprint should be carefully prepared before depositing it to the server, similar to journal manuscript preparation. To this end, ensure that all co-authors check the paper before posting and consider receiving feedback from colleagues prior to submitting the paper to the preprint server.

Preprint feedback focuses on the science and not on journal fit

An advantage of posting a preprint is that feedback received from the scientific community can help to improve the manuscript and is independent of subjective evaluations about journal fit. Incorporating community feedback into the manuscript can even increase the chances of eventual publication. A preprint brings more eyes and a broader range of perspectives to the paper than the traditional two or three reviewers from the journal's peer-review. Thus, it can provide a robust mechanism to identify any issues before a manuscript enters the journal's editorial process and valuable input on specific aspects including the statistical analyses, methodology, or the interpretations of the data. Importantly, preprint servers allow authors to submit new versions of the preprint. It is straightforward for authors to post a revision as a new preprint version after incorporating additional work or correcting any oversights. The mechanisms for preprint versioning allow updates or corrections to the paper in a faster and simpler path compared to corrections to the article's version of record at a journal.

Preprints enable journal-independent peer-review

Several platforms offer feedback and evaluations on preprints, and in some of these the peer-review process runs similarly to the traditional journal peer review. For example, Review Commons, an initiative by EMBO Press and ASAPbio, allows researchers to submit their preprint for peer review prior to journal submission. Review Commons has partnered with 17 affiliate journals — the Company of Biologists’s journals, EMBO Press journals, PLOS, eLife , Journal of Cell Biology , and Molecular Biology of the Cell — that have agreed to use the reviews provided by Review Commons to inform their evaluation and editorial decision, thus avoiding multiple review rounds. Review Commons requires the authors to post a preprint before submitting the manuscript to an affiliate journal.

Services such as Review Commons and Peer Community In - which also completes evaluation of preprints - involve the review of preprints in a process coordinated by an editor or similar role. On the other hand, other platforms, such as PREreview and PubPeer, allow any community member to provide feedback on the preprint ( Table 2 ). In addition, many preprint servers offer commenting features that allow readers to contribute comments on preprints in a variety of formats; such comments may involve praise for the work, queries to the authors, comments on specific aspects of the study, summaries from journal club discussions or even copies of full reviews for the preprint ( Malički et al., 2021 ).

Table 2.

Preprint commentary and review platforms and their characteristics. Information for the different platforms is based on the records available at ReImagine Review.

Public comments posted on the preprint can also help inform and positively shape the editor's decision upon manuscript submission to a journal. Some journals such as Proceedings of the Royal Society B and Open Biology have appointed preprint editors who check the latest preprints to solicit submissions to their journals ( Neiman et al., 2021 ).

Preprints generally change little upon journal publication

A majority of the manuscripts posted as preprints go on to be published in a journal; a study of bioRxiv preprints found that two thirds of the preprints appeared at a journal within 2 years ( Abdill and Blekhman , 2019 ). Additional studies that have evaluated the content of preprints and their associated journal publications found that the reporting quality in preprints is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles ( Carneiro et al., 2020 ) and that the main content and conclusions changed little between the preprint and the journal publication for the same work ( Brierley et al., 2022 ; Nicholson et al., 2022 ; Zeraatkar et al., 2022 ). These studies suggest that there is no evidence to consider research findings reported via preprints as less trustworthy than journal publications. The peer-review process at journals provides a valuable mechanism to scrutinize research work and identify potential flaws or oversights, but it is important to remember that peer review is not infallible ( Schroter et al., 2008 ), and the ‘peer reviewed’ label does not imply that a particular published finding is reliable; all research works should be critically appraised, whether they appear at a journal, at a preprint server or in another format.

Next steps - how to preprint your paper?

Once you have your co-authors’ green light to preprint the work, here are a few actionable steps to complete the preprint deposition ( Fig. 3 ).

Preprint submission checklist. A suggested checklist to help with preprint submission after having a successful conversation and the green light from advisors and co-authors to preprint.

Preprint server

First, you need to choose a preprint server for your manuscript. Think carefully about your audience and what server will best reach the targeted audience (see above). If you plan to submit the manuscript to a journal, familiarize yourself with the journal's editorial policies about preprints. Check if the journal specifies any preprint servers they accept for preprint deposition, for example, some journals have policies only allowing preprints to be deposited on non-profit servers (e.g. bioRxiv, AfricaArXiv ).

Preprint license

It is also important to think about the license you will apply to the preprint. You have several options - from retaining all rights (i.e. meaning you do not give default permission to reuse the work) to a range of Creative Commons (CC) licenses, which standardize permissions for the type of use allowed for the work (asapbio.org/licensing-faq). A CC BY license allows any type of re-use without requiring permission from the author, providing credit is given to the original author(s). This type of credit is called attribution ( AboutCCLicenses, n.d. ). The CC BY license is the most common type and its designation has been shown to increase citation and visibility of monographs ( Snijder, 2015 ). There are additional license options that can be used to preserve copyright, the more licenses options chosen increases the restrictions on reuse: CC BY-NC (cannot be used for commercial purposes), CC BY-ND (non-derivative, must be shared in its original form) and CC BY-SA (share-alike, if re-used must be published under the same or a more restrictive license). These license options (BY, NC, ND, and SA) can be chosen in combination to retain rights and further specify reuse restrictions (e.g. CC BY-NC-SA, etc). While some preprint servers offer a range of license options (e.g. bioRxiv, medRxiv, OSF Preprints), others require a CC-BY license (e.g. Research Square, preprints.org, SciELO Preprints).

Preprint preparation

In general, preprint servers are format agnostic, meaning they accept a single file of your manuscript in any format (for example, a single PDF file in the formatting style of the journal of your choice!) and then authorship information. You can link the preprint-related data and additional resources deposited in public repositories to your preprint. This may be important if your target journal has an open-data policy (e.g. ASM journals, BMC-series journals) which requires all data and code to be publicly available.

Preprint submission

Now that you've chosen a preprint server, license type, and prepared your manuscript, decide who will submit the manuscript and when it will be submitted. In the bioRxiv survey, authors preferred preprinting either before journal submission (42%) or concurrent to journal submission (37%) ( Sever et al., 2019 preprint). Some journals work with preprint servers, like bioRxiv, to also allow for direct submission of your manuscript to a journal after posting to the preprint server. After the preprint submission, don't forget to share your new preprint on social media ( Heemstra, 2020 ; Cheplygina et al., 2020 )!

If your co-authors aren't interested in preprinting this time...

Irrespective of the field, many researchers are still wary of preprinting, and it is understandable that other authors may have concerns or may need additional time to consider your request. Almost half of the respondents in our Twitter survey who were unable to convince their co-authors to preprint, indicated that their co-authors might be open to preprinting in the future. Offer to continue the conversation another time and suggest to them that it's worth keeping an eye on the latest preprints coming out in your field. You may also suggest you revisit the option of preprinting for another paper where they may view the stakes as less high. If your co-authors are still uninterested, there are still many other ways to get involved with preprints even if you are unable to preprint your current work.

Other ways to get involved with preprints

Beyond providing an opportunity to promptly share your work and get credit for it, preprints also offer other benefits to your scientific career. For example, several communities with an interest in open science also support preprints. Getting involved with one or more of those groups can be a way to expand your professional network and connect with other researchers in your discipline.

ASAPbio has an international community of researchers and others in the science communication space, who drive initiatives to support preprints and interact and support each other. ASAPbio also runs a fellows program allowing participants to learn more about preprints and develop skills to drive discussions about the productive use of preprints in the life sciences. eLife coordinates an ambassadors program, which aims to bring together ECRs interested in promoting change in academic culture and science communication. preLights, an initiative of the Company of Biologists, provides a platform for ECRs to highlight preprints they find of interest and is another way to engage with preprints.

If you are interested in developing your review skills, several options are currently available. Preprint journal clubs are an excellent opportunity to keep up to date with the latest research in your field and connect with others. If you are part of a local journal club, you can suggest incorporating preprints, if they are not already covered. If you do not have a local journal club, you can explore online options, e.g. PREreview coordinates live-streamed preprint journal clubs.

We hope that this informational guide will be useful for readers, especially ECRs, interested in preprinting their research. In addition to exploring the current landscape of preprints in the life sciences, we have discussed common concerns around preprints that might come up in conversations with colleagues. The tips provided in this article are useful for having conversations with advisors and co-authors about preprinting, including email templates and practical steps needed to preprint your work.

In this piece, we may have missed many tips and suggestions, but as preprints continue to grow, so will our collective expertise as well as the evidence around the use of preprints for science communication. We are excited to watch the preprinting community continue to grow and look forward to seeing more preprint engagement from ECRs in the coming years.

Supplementary Material

Acknowledgements.

We thank ASAPbio for hosting the ASAPbio Fellows program and we are appreciative of the support received from the 2021 cohort of ASAPbio Fellows. We further thank bioRxiv and medRxiv for providing data on the country distribution of preprints at their servers. We are also grateful to Jessica Polka (ORCID: 0000-0001-6610-9293) and Samantha Hindle (ORCID: 0000-0002-3708-3546) for helpful suggestions on this manuscript. KG is supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (Project no: 492436553).

Competing interests

IP is an employee of ASAPbio, a non-profit organization promoting the productive use of preprints.

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The what, why, and how of preprints and peer review

Preprints: what they are how they can help improve your research skills..

Preprint servers have been around for almost three decades [ 1 ], so if you’re a researcher, chances are you’ve heard of these by now.

Preprint servers were created to speed up scholarly publishing and allow authors to receive peer feedback on their preprint manuscripts before they submit it to a journal [ 2 ]. Some journals don’t allow for this: they don’t want any version of a manuscript to have been printed elsewhere even as a preprint. Other journals, however, don’t mind or even welcome it [ 3 ].

We’re a big fan of preprints at Publons. We see these servers as a great way to advance research,  boost discoverability , and to improve the professional development of researchers and reviewers.

With that in mind, this blog post will demonstrate how you can use preprints to get ahead in job and funding applications, and to enhance your writing, research, and reviewing skills in our free online  Publons Academy .

Let’s start off by taking a look at the preprint landscape and seeing which servers are currently out there for you to benefit from.

What are the different preprint servers?

The most well-known preprint server is probably  arXiv  (pronounced like ‘archive’). It started as a server for preprints in physics and has since expanded out to various subjects, including mathematics, computer science, and economics. The arXiv server is now run by the Cornell University Library and contains 1.37 million preprints so far.

The  Open Science Framework  provides an open source framework to help researchers and institutions set up their own preprint servers. One such example is  SocArXiv  for the Social Sciences. On their website you can browse more than 2 million preprints, including preprints on arXiv, and many of them have their own preprint digital object identifier (DOI). In cases where the preprint has now been published it also links to the publication’s DOI.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory set up  bioaRxiv , a preprint server for Biology in 2013 to complement arXiv. The bioaRxiv server has a direct transfer service to several journals such as Science and PNAS [ 4 ,  5 ] and a bit over 60% of papers in bioaRxiv end up published in peer reviewed journals [ 6 ].

In more recent years a lot of new servers have popped up covering almost every field including the social sciences, arts, and humanities fields. Here’s a quick overview of some of the rest:

• EngrXiv  – Engineering
• ChemRxiv  – Chemical sciences
• PsyArXiv  – Psychological sciences
• SportaRxiv  – Sport and exercise science
• PaleoarXiv  – Paleontology
• LawArXiv  – Law
• AgriXiv  – Agricultural sciences
• NutriXiv  – Nutritional sciences
• MarXiv  – Ocean and marine-climate sciences
• EarthArXiv  – Earth sciences

What about the medical and health sciences?

The medical and health sciences is the only field lacking a dedicated preprint server at the moment. The reason behind this is in part due to the implications of sharing non-peer reviewed research with the general public [ 7 ].

Imagine a popular news outlet running a headline story based on research that has not yet been peer reviewed, or a patient wanting to try a new therapeutic drug they have read about without understanding the difference between something being screened for a preprint server and actually being peer reviewed?

Yale University are in talks with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who run bioaRxiv to set up a  MedaRxiv  server but the announcement has had mixed feedback [ 8 ]. One thing is for certain to garner a positive respose: it needs to be clear to the wider public what a preprint server is and why peer review is the recognized standard for maintaining the quality and integrity of research.

The benefits of preprints

Showcasing your expertise

Now we’ve learned a bit about which preprint servers are out there, it’s time to look at how they can benefit you.

Since 2017, the  Wellcome Trust  in the UK has allowed researchers to cite preprints in grant applications and end-of-grant review reports [ 9 ]. This means that they recognize preprints as a valid early form of publication.

That’s great news for researchers and reviewers!

That’s because it can help you:

• Bulk up your publications list:  if you’re applying for funding or a new job it might make a lot of sense to be able to add more items to your ‘published publications list’ rather than under ‘submitted’ or ‘in print’.
• Showcase your expertise:  following on from the point above, if you have not reviewed a whole lot yet you could link to open reviews you’ve written on preprints to highlight your skills.
• Make your research more discoverable:  you may want a larger readership and to release your research without the typical wait with a journal. If you publish a piece of research as a preprint you can start sharing it on social media and get traction and citations before it’s formally published in a journal.

There are a bunch more benefits we can add to this list, including using preprints to provide a timestamp for your ideas or method, and making a home for scholarly content that would otherwise be lost (particularly pertinent with replication studies and negative results). You can find more on these points  in this article .

Sharpening your research and review skills

Last year we launched the free, online  Publons Academy  because training in peer review was lacking. We heard as much from researchers across all career stages – especially reviewers new to the scene. Many told us they were not confident enough to accept those first review invitations, while others said they did not know how to get into reviewing and connect with journal editors.

This is a key reason why peer review training courses are essential to the health of the system – and central to the theme for this year’s  Peer Review Week  in September: diversity and inclusion in peer review.

Preprints help to bridge that gap in learning. We actively encourage researchers to benefit from this movement during the Publons Academy because they offer:

• New research to learn from and critique
• A way to showcase your skills and expertise in your field
• A chance to connect with researchers in your line of work
• Insight into how other researchers are looking at and learning from new research

To review a preprint on Publons:  simply go to your private dashboard and under Review Records select ‘Add review’. Preprints are considered published on Publons so click the post-publication review option, then simply add in the title and the DOI or arXiv ID, and then write your review. Publons also has an integration with preprints.org allowing any comments written on their site to be optionally added as a post-publication review on submission.

Top tips to critically review a preprint

Ready to start reviewing your first preprint? A little while back we asked Publons Academy Advisor,  Elisabeth Bik  for advice on how to read a manuscript critically. As her advice almost directly relates to preprints as well, we thought we’d share it here, too:

• Do you have a conflict of interest when reviewing this paper? Do you collaborate with these authors, are they your personal friends, or are they direct competitors? Have you reviewed (and rejected) this paper before? If so, you need to let the editors know.
• Do the title and abstract cover the main aspects of the work, would it spark interest to the right audience?
• Is the Introduction easy to follow for most readers of this particular journal? Does it cite the appropriate papers? Does it provide a hypothesis or aim of the study?
• Does the Methods section provide enough details for the general reader to repeat the experiments?
• If you skip the Methods, does the Results section give the right amount of detail to understand the basic details of the experiments?
• Do the Results refer to the figures in a logical order? Do the numbers in the tables add up correctly? Are any figures/tables mislabeled or unclear?
• Given the data that was obtained in this study, did the authors perform all the logical analyses? Did they include the proper controls?
• Does the Discussion address the main findings, and does it give proper recognition to similar work in this field?
• In general, is the paper easy to follow and does it have a logical flow? Are there any language issues?
• Did the authors make all their data (e.g. sequence reads, code, questionnaires used) available for the readers?
• Is this paper novel and an advancement of the field, or have other people done very similar work?
• Finally (and hopefully you will never have to answer yes to any of these questions): Does the paper raise any ethical concerns? Any suspicion of plagiarism (text or experiments), duplicated or tampered images, lack of IRB approval, unethical animal experiments, or “dual use of research concern”?

You can read our full blog post with Elisabeth,  here .

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Preprints Involving Medical Research—Do the Benefits Outweigh the Challenges?

• 1 Ms Flanagin is Executive Managing Editor, Dr Fontanarosa is Executive Editor, and Dr Bauchner is Editor in Chief, JAMA and the JAMA Network
• Research Letter Altmetric Scores, Citations, and Publication of Studies Posted as Preprints Stylianos Serghiou, MBChB(Hons); John P. A. Ioannidis, MD, DSc JAMA
• Viewpoint Medical Preprints—A Debate Worth Having David M. Maslove, MD, MS JAMA
• Research Letter Preprint Servers’ Policies, Submission Requirements, and Transparency in Reporting and Research Integrity Recommendations Mario Malički, MD, MA, PhD; Ana Jerončić, MSc, PhD; Gerben ter Riet, MD, PhD; Lex M. Bouter, MSc, PhD; John P. A. Ioannidis, MD, DSc; Steven N. Goodman, MD, PhD; IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, MSc, PhD JAMA
• Research Letter Submissions and Downloads of Preprints in the First Year of medRxiv Harlan M. Krumholz, MD, SM; Theodora Bloom, PhD; Richard Sever, PhD; Claire Rawlinson, BSc; John R. Inglis, PhD; Joseph S. Ross, MD, MHS JAMA
• Viewpoint Will Medical Preprints Change Oncology Practice? Jie Xu, MD; Lanjing Zhang, MD, FRCPath JAMA Oncology
• Research Letter Assessment of Preprint Policies of Top-Ranked Clinical Journals Dorothy S. Massey, BA; Michelle A. Opare, BS; Joshua D. Wallach, PhD, MS; Joseph S. Ross, MD, MHS; Harlan M. Krumholz, MD, SM JAMA Network Open
• Research Letter Preprint Research Corresponding Author Gender Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic Mackenzie R. Wehner, MD, MPhil; Yao Li, MS; Kevin T. Nead, MD, MPhil JAMA Network Open

A preprint is a complete manuscript posted to a preprint server by authors before peer review and publication in a journal. The goals of preprints are to enable authors to obtain timely feedback and comments on research before submission to a peer-reviewed journal, to claim provenance of an idea, and to facilitate and expedite dissemination of and access to research. Preprints can be amended or updated, commented on by others, and remain on the preprint server even if subsequently published in a journal. They can be cited and indexed and increasingly are given attention in the news and social media. 1

In clinical medicine, the ultimate aim of research is to improve patient outcomes and public health. Whether preprint posting and rapid dissemination of non–peer-reviewed reports of medical research that could have important clinical implications and consequences help achieve the goal of improving health outcomes for patients without causing harm remains uncertain.

Preprint servers, which are increasing in number, host and archive preprint manuscripts. Considered the first preprint server, arXiv was launched in 1991 for physics researchers to share scientific reports with each other before journal publication. 2 Before that, in 1961, the US National Institutes of Health began a preprint program for sharing biological preprints, known as Information Exchange Groups, but this program was discontinued in 1967 after journals refused to consider submissions previously posted as preprints. 3 In 2013, bioRxiv was launched for preprints in biology and the life sciences, and in 2019, medRxiv , dedicated to health sciences, began. As of September 2020, there were at least 61 public preprint servers covering many disciplines; one-third (21) of these have been launched since 2018, and an increasing number permit the posting of preprints in medicine and health. 4 Preprint servers are managed and supported by a range of financial models, including support from professional societies, nongovernmental organizations, foundations, and funders, and more recently, large publishers, and some servers require a fee for preprint posting.

In this issue of JAMA , Malički and colleagues 5 report a cross-sectional analysis of 57 of the largest open (not funder-associated) preprint servers and identified 10 that have posted more than 500 preprints in the health sciences. The authors analyzed the policies of preprint servers that included screening before posting, submission requirements, and 18 recommendations on transparency in reporting and research integrity (eg, data sharing; addressing plagiarism, image manipulation, and correcting errors; reporting conflicts of interest, funding, and ethics approval; and guidance on authorship and reporting). Most preprint servers in the study (82%; n = 47) had some form of, albeit minimal, screening. Of the submission requirements, all servers required a specification of the scholarly scope of preprints and 54% (n = 31) required an indication of the type of study permitted. Regarding the assessment of transparency in reporting and research integrity recommendations, more servers that post preprints in the health sciences (40%-60%), compared with all servers (16%-39%), had recommendations about data sharing; plagiarism and correcting errors; and reporting conflicts of interest, funding, and ethics approval. However, very few of any preprint servers provided guidance on authorship (14%; n = 8), image manipulation (4%; n = 2), and reporting study statistics (n = 0) or study limitations (4%; n = 2) or following recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (9%; n = 5) or the Committee on Publication Ethics (4%; n = 2).

Also in this issue, Krumholz and coauthor-founders of the medRxiv preprint server 6 reviewed content on the server and trends 1 year after it was launched in June 2019. The founders of medRxiv met with several members of the JAMA editorial staff before launching the site to solicit feedback, and many of the issues raised in that meeting were ultimately addressed by medRxiv . Krumholz et al report the posting rate of submissions after passing screening criteria, which include the following: “the manuscript is a full scientific research report (not a narrative review, commentary, or case report); the absence of obscenity, plagiarism, or patient identifiers; and confirmation by an affiliate (a member of the scientific community who voluntary screens submissions) that posting would not pose potential risk to patients or public health.” 6

During its first year, medRxiv received 11 164 submissions, with large increases in recent months; 9967 (89%) of these submissions passed screening and were posted. The authors do not report the reasons that 11% were rejected for posting; however, they do report that only 18 (0.002%) of these preprints have been withdrawn after posting, and 13 of those withdrawals were related to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Krumholz et al also report on increasing numbers of posts, downloads, and views during the debut year, especially during recent months. They indicate that COVID-19 submissions comprised 73% of the total preprints posted between February and June 2020 and that 12% of COVID-19–related submissions did not meet the screening criteria and were not posted. 6

The authors also report that only 9% of medRxiv preprints have received comments and only 10% have been published in peer-reviewed journals. The time frame for some portion of these preprints may have been too short to capture eventual journal publication, but the low rate of on-site comments raises questions whether preprints are an effective mechanism for authors to obtain feedback prior to submission to a journal. The authors note that these low rates of on-site comments do not include comments on social media. One possible explanation is that the goal of speed to dissemination has become more paramount than scientific community engagement and review before journal peer review and publication. This may reflect the COVID-19 pandemic and may not be representative of preprints in general.

Benefits and Challenges of Medical and Health-Related Preprints

Clinicians have addressed the benefits and challenges of making preprints and early manuscript drafts of new research findings widely and publicly available before accuracy, reliability, and potential bias of studies have been vetted through the traditional editorial and peer review processes. 7 , 8 A convenience sample survey of 512 researchers, librarians, publisher representatives, and many other stakeholders (including relatively small numbers of students, government and nonprofit agency representatives, clinicians, industry researchers, journalists, preprint server providers, research administrators, and funders) was conducted in June and July 2020 by ASAPbio (Accelerating Science and Publication in Biology) to assess views about the benefits and risks of preprints. 9 The majority of respondents (66%) were researchers. More than 90% of respondents indicated the top benefits of preprints as “increasing the speed of research communication” and “being free to read.” 10 However, 79% indicated they were concerned about “premature media coverage of preprints,” and 63% reported they were concerned about the “public sharing of information before peer review.” 10

In addition to having a screening process that may be more stringent than that of other preprint servers, medRxiv includes a note of caution on its home page: “Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review. They should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.” 11  bioRxiv has added a similar note of caution, 12 and the arXiv physics server has added a warning specifically for its COVID-19 e-prints (ie, “they should not be relied upon without context to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information without consulting multiple experts in the field”). 13 In addition, each individual medRxiv preprint carries a cautionary note in the online version that it “reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.” 11 However, the caution for the news media included on the medRxiv homepage is missing from the online version of medRxiv preprints, and the PDF versions include none of these warnings. Given that many users will access preprints directly and share them with colleagues and not via server homepages, such cautionary warnings would be best displayed on all versions of preprints, and other preprint servers should consider adopting similar cautionary notices.

A recent study by Fraser et al, 14 released to date only as a preprint (caution advised), assessed the role of bioRxiv and medRxiv preprints during the first 4 months of the COVID-19 pandemic (January-April 2020). This study found substantially higher numbers of COVID-19–related preprints posted in the first 4 months of the pandemic compared with the total number of preprints posted about Zika virus or Ebola virus during the entire durations of those epidemics, 2015-2016 and 2014-2016, respectively. The study also found that COVID-19–related preprints received substantially higher attention in news and social media compared with non–COVID-19 preprints. Fraser et al observed that despite the warning messages provided by medRxiv and bioRxiv , “COVID-19 preprints have received unprecedented coverage on online media platforms” and suggested that “this represents a marked change in journalistic practice: pre-pandemic, bioRxiv received very little coverage in comparison to journal articles.” 14 These authors also found weak correlations between news and social media attention to preprints and citations and concluded that because most COVID-19 preprints had not yet been published, “concerns regarding quality will persist.” 14 Indeed, manuscripts posted on preprint servers during the COVID-19 pandemic have been widely noted and cited by various media outlets. Any notion that preprint servers are only for the scientific or medical community is incorrect.

There is a general assumption that more rapid access to information will improve patient outcomes—the ultimate goal of research in clinical medicine. However, it is quite clear that in some countries, information from social media and preprint servers has been used by politicians and physicians to advocate for specific treatments. In the US, early in the pandemic, both hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma were advocated by various individuals prior to any evidence suggesting benefit. This type of advocacy makes conducting randomized clinical trials more difficult and may lead to inappropriate use of some drugs and potential harm. For the majority of research in clinical medicine, posting manuscripts on preprint servers will not affect clinical care, but for studies that are likely to influence clinical care, specifically certain clinical trials and observational cohort studies, investigators should pause before posting early reports on a preprint server and consider the potential consequences.

Posting a manuscript on a preprint server before peer review and publication provides more information and is more helpful than press releases issued by investigators or companies citing a successful new treatment before peer review and publication. However, many journals have the capacity, on a limited basis, to conduct expedited editorial evaluation and peer review and to publish manuscripts in a matter of weeks. For example, recently JAMA published 3 clinical trials and a meta-analysis on the use of corticosteroids for patients with COVID-19 within 2 weeks after the last of the 4 manuscripts was submitted. 15 - 18 None of these reports had been posted as preprints. Although peer review is not without challenges and some limitations, the process does provide an important check and balance on the appropriate reporting of the conduct, analysis, interpretations, and conclusions of a study.

Journal Guidance for Authors and Journalists Regarding Preprints

A recent study of 100 top-ranked clinical journals found that 86% of journals allowed preprints and 13% had a case-by-case assessment policy. 19 Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, journal preprint policies and guidance for authors had been evolving. For example, in 2018 JAMA and the JAMA Network journals discouraged authors from submitting manuscripts that had been previously released to the public as preprints. In 2019, the JAMA Network journals changed the policy to a case-by-case determination: “Public dissemination of manuscripts prior to, simultaneous with, or following submission to this journal, such as posting the manuscript on preprint servers or other repositories, will necessitate making a determination of whether publication of the submitted manuscript will add meaningful new information to the medical literature or will be redundant with information already disseminated with the posting of the preprint.” 20

Accordingly, posting of a manuscript on a preprint server before submission to a JAMA Network journal does not preclude consideration of the manuscript for publication, although authors are advised and expected to provide information about any preprint postings, along with any other related manuscripts, at the time of submission of a manuscript to the journal. The journals also follow an embargo policy for submitted and accepted manuscripts that restricts news coverage until publication and advise authors to avoid promoting preprints of their submitted manuscripts in the news media and in social media before editorial evaluation and peer review and journal publication. 20 To help encourage transparency, the JAMA Network also recommends that authors who cite preprints in their manuscripts indicate “preprint” in the citation in reference lists. 21

Other major journals have also modified their policies regarding preprints. For example, the New England Journal of Medicine also permits submission of manuscripts previously posted as preprints provided that authors notify the journal of any such preprint. 22 In 2018, The Lancet began offering authors the option to simultaneously post preprints to its publisher-owned preprint server when submitting manuscripts. The Lancet editors report that about 30% of authors of research manuscripts submitted to the Lancet journals have opted to post preprints, but of those, “only two-thirds had all the required information (ethics approval if needed, declaration of interests, funding statement, and prospective registration for randomised controlled trials).” 23 The editors also note concern about widespread press attention to preprints and the need for caution when citing such research and note a plan to “apply a more obvious watermark stating that these are preprints and not peer reviewed.” 23

In 2019, the Nature journals, including Nature Medicine , announced a move from support to encouragement of preprints and advise that authors can engage with news media about their preprint studies provided they explain that the study has not been peer reviewed and that findings could change. 24 In 2020, PLOS journals amended their policy toward preprints and publication embargoes, in that manuscripts previously posted as preprints and accepted for publication remain under a news embargo. 25 In doing so, PLOS reversed its previous policy of not applying an embargo to articles previously posted as preprints, citing their analysis that found that manuscripts previously posted as preprints and released to the press without embargo received significantly less media attention than a comparison group of manuscripts previously posted as preprints that were embargoed until journal publication. PLOS journals made this change to avoid a disadvantage to authors of reports previously posted as preprints and acknowledged that press embargoes are the best tool to facilitate fair and equal access to journalists and allow them time to assess new research and consult experts before dissemination to the public. 25

Guidance from press officers at the University of Leuven in Belgium concedes that preprint servers are “a goldmine for journalists looking for their next big story” and offers useful tips to researchers in dealing with the complexities of studies reported in preprints and the news media. 26 Bollen and Nelissen 26 advise authors to not request promotion of preprints via press offices because “press officers are not peer reviewers, and one single press release about findings that don’t hold up can cause long-lasting damage.” They also urge authors to not send their preprints to journalists to draw their attention to their work, recognizing that preprints are intended to be read by fellow researchers and that journalists and the public may not understand the difference between an unvetted preprint and a peer-reviewed article and that premature coverage may contribute to disinformation. They also advise authors if a journalist contacts them to ask about a manuscript previously posted as a preprint that is under review with a journal to ask the journal about its policy on preprints and embargoes before responding to the journalist. This guidance has long been recommended by the JAMA Network journals 20 and many other medical and health journals. 27

In a recent JAMA Viewpoint, Saitz and Schwitzer 28 described concerns regarding the rapid public reporting on the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and remdesivir for treatment of patients with COVID-19 as examples of how misinformation can damage public trust in science and medicine. The authors urged caution, scrutiny, and clear and complete reporting of new study findings during the COVID-19 pandemic, including assessment of study limitations and presenting important caveats, and acknowledged that this applies to preprints and new releases as well as journal articles that are expedited to publication. Saitz and Schwitzer addressed common failures in this regard, including: “(1) a focus on single study results without the context of other studies or acknowledgment that single studies are rarely definitive; (2) overemphasis on results, particularly relative effects, without recognition of important limitations; and (3) communications based on incomplete reports of studies and reports of studies that have not been adequately reviewed.” 28

During the COVID-19 pandemic, and perhaps thereafter, investigators may continue to want their findings released and shared as rapidly as possible, but such speed to widespread public dissemination vs sharing within a community of specialists most likely to understand the complexities of the science and concerns to public health or without rigorous editorial evaluation and peer review before publication does not come without consequences and potential for harm. 29 , 30 For many investigators, preprints may be considered an initial step along the scientific dissemination and publication pathway, just as abstract, poster, and video research presentations at in-person and virtual scientific meetings have a role in the early sharing and discussion of studies among specialist communities before publication in a journal. While manuscripts previously posted as preprints may be improved following formal submission to a journal and undergoing editorial evaluation, peer review, revision, and editing, others may not be suitable for formal publication because of methodologic flaws, biases, and important limitations. Authors should share preprints during the processes of manuscript submission to journals, just as they do with study protocols and registration reports, to aid journal editors in the evaluation of the quality of the reporting of the study and prioritization for publication. Preprints and preprint servers are here to stay, but perhaps in the immediate future a more selective use of these sites may be warranted, with clinical investigators exercising caution when the focus of a study is on drugs, vaccines, or medical devices and the results of a study may directly affect treatment of patients.

Corresponding Author: Annette Flanagin, RN, MA, JAMA and the JAMA Network, 330 N Wabash Ave, Chicago, IL 60611 ( [email protected] ).

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported.

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Flanagin A , Fontanarosa PB , Bauchner H. Preprints Involving Medical Research—Do the Benefits Outweigh the Challenges? JAMA. 2020;324(18):1840–1843. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.20674

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Open Access

Ten simple rules to consider regarding preprint submission

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Office of the Director, The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America

Affiliation Whitehead Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America

Affiliation Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, California, United States of America

Affiliation Wellcome Library, The Wellcome Trust, London, United Kingdom

• Philip E. Bourne, 
• Jessica K. Polka, 
• Ronald D. Vale, 
• Robert Kiley

Published: May 4, 2017

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005473
• Reader Comments

Citation: Bourne PE, Polka JK, Vale RD, Kiley R (2017) Ten simple rules to consider regarding preprint submission. PLoS Comput Biol 13(5): e1005473. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005473

This is an open access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

For the purposes of these rules, a preprint is defined as a complete written description of a body of scientific work that has yet to be published in a journal. Typically, a preprint is a research article, editorial, review, etc. that is ready to be submitted to a journal for peer review or is under review. It could also be a commentary, a report of negative results, a large data set and its description, and more. Finally, it could also be a paper that has been peer reviewed and either is awaiting formal publication by a journal or was rejected, but the authors are willing to make the content public. In short, a preprint is a research output that has not completed a typical publication pipeline but is of value to the community and deserving of being easily discovered and accessed. We also note that the term preprint is an anomaly, since there may not be a print version at all. The rules that follow relate to all these preprint types unless otherwise noted.

In 1991, physics (and later, other disciplines, including mathematics, computer science, and quantitative biology) began a tradition of making preprints available through arXiv [ 1 ]. arXiv currently contains well over 1 million preprints. While late to the game [ 2 ], the availability of preprints in biomedicine has gained significant community attention recently [ 3 , 4 ] and led to the formation of a scientist-driven effort, ASAPbio [ 5 ], to promote their use. As a result of an ASAPbio meeting held in February of 2016, a paper was published [ 6 ] that describes the pros and cons of preprints from the perspective of the stakeholders—scientists, publishers, and funders. Here, we formulate the message specifically for scientists in the form of ten simple rules for considering using preprints as a communication mechanism.

Rule 1: Preprints speed up dissemination

A recent analysis highlighted that the median review time—the time between submission and acceptance of an article—is around 100 days, with a further 25 days or so spent preparing the work for publication [ 7 ]. However, these figures—slow as they are—do not include the time researchers spend “shopping around” for a journal to publish their findings, which can induce rounds of editorial rejection before or after peer review. Stephen Royle, a cell biologist at the University of Warwick, undertook an analysis of his published papers over the past dozen years and concluded that the average time from first submission to publication was around 9 months [ 8 ]. Royle’s is one example of a well-studied phenomenon [ 9 ]. In summary, at a time when technology allows research findings to be shared instantly, the time to access research output appears glacial and similar to the pre-internet era.

Rule 2: Preprints should be licensed and formatted to facilitate reuse

In principle, preprints can be text and data mined to better comprehend and utilize the knowledge presented. This assumes that copyright, licensing, and format permit such use. Maximizing accessibility and reuse is not necessarily the default currently offered by preprint services. Consequently, when posting a preprint, authors are encouraged to use licenses and formats that facilitate reuse while retaining copyright to their work. Details of copyright, licensing, and format are beyond the scope of this article, but licensing your work as CC-BY (reusable by all, provided attribution is given) and providing a text-accessible version covers most situations. Software tools that facilitate the comprehension of accessible content (for example, Content Mine) are in their infancy but are likely to become mainstream in the next 5–10 years. Better still is the promise that the traditional content of research articles can be integrated with the underlying data, analytics, and commentary to create a new learning experience. To the community, this represents an opportunity to accelerate discovery in ways that are not currently offered by traditional publishers to the contributing authors. Such an offering would presumably provide new opportunities for an author’s work to be used and cited.

Rule 3: Preprints provide a record of priority

There are a number of resources that provide preprint services to the biosciences (for example, bioRxiv [ 10 ], PeerJ Preprints [ 11 ], and the Quantitative Biology section within arXiv [ 12 ]). All include an uneditable timestamp indicating when the article appeared, which is usually within 24 hours of submission. This date, along with the preprint itself, is made open access (see Rule 2), and thus, anyone (using any internet search engine) can determine the order of priority relative to other published work or, indeed, other preprints. One of the original motivations for creating arXiv was to create a transparent public record of a scientist’s work. By contrast, while journals provide an important service of validation through peer review, establishment of priority can be significantly delayed because the work is not public during the process of peer review in most journals.

The complementary roles of preprints and journals in establishing priority and validation, respectively, are discussed in a commentary by Vale and Hyman [ 13 ]. Since preprints may extend beyond traditional published papers, they create an order of priority for these research products as well.

Rule 4: Preprints do not lead to being scooped

Many scientists wonder if they might be scooped if their work is made public ahead of the formal journal publication. Stepping back, perhaps we should ask: what is the definition of scooping? Here, we take it to mean that, either inadvertently or purposely, an author publishes a biomedical finding and does not provide attribution to the original author(s). The notion that preprints leads to scooping is covered in some detail by ASAPbio [ 14 ], and only a synopsis is given here. Again, the presence of arXiv provides a history of what has happened, at least in other disciplines. The short answer, according to Paul Ginsparg, the creator of arXiv, is that intentional scooping is virtually absent in physics because these scientists are aware of the arXiv communication and do not tolerate such behavior. Then, the question becomes whether the biomedical community is somehow different in its ethics or behavior. We believe not, and there is no evidence that this is happening with current preprints. Furthermore, as preprints become more visible and commonplace (like arXiv), scooping will be become increasingly difficult. By contrast, with a nonpublic publication process, it is hard for authors to prove originality during this period if nothing about the work is registered in the public domain. Posters and oral presentations might prove originality, but they are often not publicly and persistently available or detailed enough to support the originality of a body of work. Preprints address this issue, as described in Rule 3, and they can and should be fairly cited.

Rule 5: Preprints provide access to scholarly content that would otherwise be lost

In addition to our formal publications, as scientists, we have scholarly outputs that we are willing to stand behind but may not have an outlet: a graduate student leaves, gets tied up in a new position, and the paper never gets that final polish yet contains meaningful results and conclusions; a project yields negative data or data that simply does not come together into a coherent story yet has value to the community; replication of a study (or not) represents a useful outcome but is not innovative enough for journal publication. In summary, preprints offer a way of sharing important scholarly output that would otherwise disappear after much time and expense.

Some might argue that work that has not passed peer review should be disregarded. To those, we say, “How much useful information do you get from discussions of unpublished data at meetings, in blogs, and via other forms of non-peer-reviewed content?” We would argue that this type of useful information is growing in both volume and importance. The same naysayers will then likely say, “There is too much misinformation as well as useful information on the internet.” We agree that filters are needed. Human filters will not be able to cope with the volume, hence the need for software tools as described in Rule 2.

Rule 6: Preprints do not imply low quality

Given that preprints have not been peer reviewed, does that imply low quality? Certainly, the peer review process can add significant value to the work, pointing out errors or areas for improvement. Nevertheless, authors must stand behind their submitted preprint, because it is a public disclosure (and hence a citable entity), albeit a non-peer-reviewed one. Even without peer review, their scientific colleagues will be reading and judging the work, and the authors’ reputations are at stake. Thus, scientists will be careful to disclose their best work that reflects their scientific abilities and expertise, so work of low quality would not be expected. This has been true of arXiv over the years, and the high-quality factor also seems to apply to bioRxiv [ 10 ]. To illustrate this, we know a high-profile biomedical research laboratory that now conducts their journal clubs exclusively on preprints [ 15 ].

Rule 7: Preprints support the rapid evaluation of controversial results

Science is, by its nature, iterative and self-correcting. Through preprints, the time to correction can be much reduced. Experience with arXiv has shown that claims concerning, for example, superluminal neutrinos [ 16 ] or bicep2 primordial gravitational waves [ 17 ] could be discredited before they reached the published literature. In biomedicine, a case in point was the publication of information in May of 2016 [ 18 ] that indicated cell phone radiation boosts cancer rates in animals. Given the controversy around such a statement, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) felt an obligation to release all the data, including internal reviews, as quickly as possible so that others could review the findings. This would not be possible through conventional publishing, since neither the form of the manuscript nor the inclusion of an internal review would be suitable for most journals, but a preprint [ 19 ] was posted within 24 hours. In a little over 5 months since the preprint was posted, it has been downloaded 148,000 times, providing a more complete picture of the controversial result. It could be argued that the preprint furthered the controversy, but it could also be argued that the authors were under an obligation to provide all available data to describe the research. You could take this further and argue that the science should have been open as it progressed, but that is still not within the comfort zone of most scientists.

Rule 8: Preprints do not typically preclude publication

Sherpa/Romeo [ 20 ] tracks the preprint policies of publishers and their associated academic journals. As can be seen there (and further outlined by [ 9 ]), very few journals consider preprints as a “prior form of publication” and reject such manuscripts on the grounds that they had been posted to a preprint server. This is in contrast to the Ingelfinger Rule, enunciated in 1969 by Franz J. Ingelfinger on behalf of the New England Journal of Medicine [ 21 ] and followed by many other journals, that would not publish material made available in other media or in other journals. Today, journals publishing papers that have appeared as preprints either speaks to a relaxation of the so-called Ingelfinger Rule or to the idea that preprints are not considered prior publication. In any case, in recent months, more life science journals are developing preprint-friendly policies—and a number have mechanisms to accept journal submissions directly from bioRxiv [ 16 ]. We expect this trend to continue as publishers grow to appreciate the value of preprints and how community input can help the author to improve their work and manuscript, leading to a better publication of record.

Rule 9: Preprints can further inform grant review and academic advancement

The lack of a substantive body of work in support of a particular grant application or academic promotion can be a substantial obstacle to career advancement, particularly for young scientists.

First, consider grant applications to funding bodies. Papers submitted (or even accepted) but not yet published do not help, since the grant reviewer cannot judge the work. By contrast, the availability of preprints can provide a reviewer with the evidence they need to substantiate recent productivity, as well as support the work being proposed in the grant application. It can be argued that this creates more work for the reviewer, but this work results in the ability to perform a more informed review. How individual funders currently treat preprints is variable, and thus, their value to scientists in the way described is also variable. NIH has recently encouraged the inclusion of preprints in grant applications and reports [ 22 ]. The Wellcome Trust supports the inclusion of preprints in grant applications and end-of-grant reports [ 23 ], the Simons Foundation encourages scientists to post preprints [ 24 ], and the Human Frontiers Science Program will allow them to be listed on applications and reports starting in 2017 [ 25 ]. Likewise, the Medical Research Council (MRC UK) [ 26 ], the Helmsley Charitable Trust [ 27 ], and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research [ 28 ] are actively encouraging preprints. Currently, many funding agencies are reevaluating their policies (or lack of policies) regarding preprints, so we expect many new pro-preprint policies to emerge in the coming year. Progress of funders in this regard can be tracked from the ASAPbio website [ 29 ].

Now consider academic advancement. At the time of academic promotion, a significant body of a scientist’s work could be tied up in the journal review and publication pipeline. Certainly, submitted papers can usually form part of a promotion file, but this carries less weight and credibility than a preprint, which is an acknowledgment by the author that the work is worthy of public viewing and dissemination to the entire scientific community. Moreover, if a knowledgeable reader has significant thoughts on the preprint, those could be posted as commentary, at least on some preprint services. This has wider ramifications, since commentary on preprints may provide the opportunity to improve the final published paper.

Rule 10: Preprints—one shoe does not fit all

bioRxiv, which is the fastest-growing preprint repository for the life sciences, does not accept preprints that, if posted, could have a damaging effect on human health. This makes sense. Since submissions to bioRxiv only undergo a cursory human review before being posted, there is the possibility that potentially harmful information (e.g., unverified claims about the side effects of vaccines, etc.) or perhaps private and personal information may be revealed. This has ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI). Such arguments flow into issues of intellectual property (IP) associated with the content of a preprint (noting that IP runs counter to Rule 2), wherein there is the risk of undesirable public release of information. It should be noted that this is not an issue restricted to preprints but one that can apply to talks, posters, etc. too. For research articles, professional editors and reviewers provide additional layers to safeguard from sensitive content being inadvertently released. Currently, preprints have only cursory safeguards, though a future preprint service could enable more rigorous review.

With open content from preprint services available through application program interfaces (APIs), there is the exciting opportunity for researchers to develop tools to better automatically or semi-automatically flag potential ELSI and IP issues. If those tools were open, they would benefit the publishing industry as well.

What should be apparent from these ten simple rules is that the provision and use of preprints in the biomedical sciences is still evolving, but there are clear benefits to the individual and the community. ASAPbio is in the process of developing a governance structure that includes all stakeholders to recommend how best to move forward with the further use of preprints. We invite you to contribute your next paper as a preprint and join the movement.

The original version of this article, prior to peer review, can be found as a preprint here [ 30 ].

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• Published: 19 December 2023

Post a preprint of your next research paper

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Fewer than one in ten research articles are posted as preprints. Yet sharing research on public repositories comes with many advantages and few caveats. At Nature Human Behaviour , we encourage researchers to embrace preprints to jumpstart the communication of research findings.

We — along with all other Nature Portfolio journals — encourage the posting of preprints for research articles, as we believe that they have a functional role in the science ecosystem and can benefit both researchers and the public. Yet, fewer than 10% of the research articles published in Nature Human Behaviour in 2022 had a preprint associated with them.

Preprints are preliminary versions of manuscripts that are posted on public servers before peer review and publication in academic journals. They are freely available to the scientific community and part of a permanent record, being citable with their own unique digital object identifier (DOI) and indexed by Google Scholar and Altmetric. The practice of sharing research findings via preprints began in 1991 with arXiv , gained popularity in the 2010s with the introduction of new digital archives (for example, bioRxiv in 2013, and PsyArXiv in 2016) and surged during the COVID-19 pandemic 1 . However, a 2021 study (posted as a preprint) found that — despite an exponential rise over the past 30 years — preprints across disciplines and preprint servers accounted for only 4% of research papers 2 .

Preprints bring substantial value to the scientific enterprise. According to two opinion pieces from a recent multi-author feature article on the future of academic publishing, published in our pages, preprints alleviate many of the current systemic issues in academic publishing (including publication delay and bias, access inequality and predatory journals), and in some laboratories they already constitute the substance of day-to-day academic discourse 3 .

From the perspective of the researcher, preprints present several opportunities and benefits — especially for early-career researchers (ECRs) 4 . They increase the speed of research dissemination (a marker of academic productivity). They also enable researchers to gain early feedback on their work, create a more equitable and diverse forum for open discussion , and promote collaboration among early-career researchers 5 .

Most importantly, preprints increase the visibility (including to editors and journals) and accessibility of the research. According to a recent meta-analysis 6 , published papers that are first posted as preprints have higher Altmetric scores and receive more citations for at least three years after journal publication 7 . From the perspective of the editor, scouting on preprint servers can be a way of keeping up with the most recent trends and cutting-edge research, and discovering new potential authors from underrepresented countries or backgrounds. This is something we regularly do as a journal team.

We recognize that the use (or misuse) of preprints can have potentially serious downsides, which include the spread of misinformation (poor-quality, premature work being taken as conclusive evidence), ‘ scooping ’, and increased stress and anxiety for researchers (for example, based on the fear of receiving negative comments publicly without the benefit of confidential peer review). Although concerns around these downsides are understandable, there are mechanisms to mitigate them. For example, many preprint servers include a disclaimer about the fact that preprints have not been peer reviewed, and more and more authors include the disclaimer in their preprints. And public commenting by experts can inform readers about the level of scrutiny that the posted research has received 8 . Additionally, posting a preprint does not appear to lead to widespread scooping 9 . Overall, we feel that in the current landscape, these potential concerns do not outweigh the benefits that preprints can bring.

Yet, perhaps partly because of these concerns, preprints have become more popular in certain fields than in others 10 . This is also our experience as editors: we see more preprints in areas such as genetics, neuroscience and psychology than we do in public health and political science. Regardless of the specific discipline, it is clear that there is potential for a substantial increase in the number of preprints, as popularity grows and new preprint servers continue to appear.

In fact, if funders answer calls to mandate preprint posting before peer review 11 , it is likely that preprints will have an increasingly prominent role in scientific publishing. Preprints are not a threat to peer-reviewed journals, but rather serve a complementary function. Where preprint servers provide an accessible way to share and highlight findings quickly, journals provide much needed quality control through the editorial and peer-review process. Preprints and journals can work in synergy to complement and support each other . At Nature Human Behaviour , we welcome and encourage researchers across all the fields that we cover to take advantage of this opportunity.

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Preprints: Finding and Using Preprints

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Preprints and Overlay Journals

What is an overlay journal? An overlay journal is an open access journal that does not produce it's own content, but rather uses information that is already freely available. 

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• 2019 Novel Coronavirus Research Compendium (NCRC) Assessments of emerging research on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. Includes coverage of both preprints and peer-reviewed articles.
• Rxivist "Rxivist combines preprints from bioRxiv with data from Twitter to help you find the papers being discussed in your field."
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• AMA Manual of Style: 3.11.4.1 Preprints and Publication of Unedited Manuscripts.

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Expert Commentary

How different are preprints from their published versions? 2 studies have some answers

Both studies find that most COVID-19 research papers don’t drastically change between the time they are posted on a preprint server and when they're published in an academic journal.

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by Naseem S. Miller, The Journalist's Resource February 2, 2022

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/media/two-studies-examine-preprints/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

Two new papers, published on Feb. 1 in PLOS Biology, add to the growing body of research that’s attempting to measure how much research papers change between the time they’re posted by authors on preprint servers to when they’re peer reviewed and published in an academic journal.

Both studies find that most COVID-19 research papers don’t drastically change, but one of the studies also shows that about 1 in 5 COVID-19 preprints do have major changes in their conclusions by the time they’re published, a reminder for journalists to be careful and critical when covering scientific studies.

One study , led by Liam Brierley , an epidemiologist and statistician at the University of Liverpool, manually compares 184 life science preprints with their published versions. It finds that for most preprints only minor changes were made to the conclusions in the abstracts of their published version. But it also finds that 17% of COVID-19 preprints had major changes in the conclusion of their abstracts when published. That’s compared with 7% studies that were not about COVID-19.

The other study , led by David Nicholson , a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, uses machine learning and text analysis to explore the relationships between nearly 18,000 life science preprints and their published versions. It shows that most differences between the two versions were due to changes in typesetting and the mention of supplementary materials or additional files.

Neither study explores the percentage of preprints that are never published or are retracted.

Preprints and peer review explained

Covering biomedical research preprints amid the coronavirus: 6 things to know

Preprints are research papers that are posted by authors to a server before the formal peer review process and publication in an academic journal.

Many life science and biomedical studies, including those related to the pandemic, are posted to the health sciences server  medRxiv  (pronounced med-archive) and the biological sciences server  bioRxiv (pronounced bio-archive). arXiv is another open-access server for papers on physics, math, computer science and economics. Overall, there are more than 60 preprint servers.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, preprints were mostly used and discussed by scientists. But since early 2020, the number of preprints posted on servers has exponentially grown and preprint studies have been discussed on social media, covered by traditional media and have influenced public opinion and policy.

Peer review is a process that research papers, including preprints, go through in order to be published in an academic journal. The journals’ editors take advice from experts, also called referees, who assess the study. The articles are typically published only after the authors have addressed referees’ concerns and the journal editors are satisfied, according to an explainer on medRxiv.

The peer review process usually takes months, and sometimes more than a year. During the pandemic, many researchers needed to communicate their findings quickly. So they turned to preprint servers, where they can upload their papers and reach a wide audience.

Many preprints are eventually peer reviewed and published. According to some estimates about two-thirds to three-quarters of biomedical preprints are eventually published in academic journals. But with the rapid growth of preprints, there are more discussions around the peer-review process and its role . Researchers are also exploring questions about the reliability of preprints because their conclusions might change after the peer-review process.

What’s peer review? 5 things you should know before covering research

There’s no simple answer to the ongoing discussion, but the bottom line for journalists stays the same: take a pause and scrutinize any study you plan on reporting.

“Before covering a preprint, or any unreviewed or preliminary research, ask yourself: ‘Do the benefits for my audience outweigh the potential risks?'” advised Alice Fleerackers , a researcher at Simon Fraser University’s Scholarly Communications Lab who has been studying the preprint landscape , in an email interview. She was not involved in the studies discussed in this piece.

And remember that “the peer review is not a silver bullet quality control mechanism,” Fleerackers added. “Journalists should be careful and critical when covering  any  scientific research, peer reviewed or not.”

What the two studies show

Tracking changes between preprint posting and journal publication during a pandemic liam brierley ; et al. plos biology, february 2022..

The study’s aim : Researchers wanted to find out whether preprints withstand the scrutiny of the peer review process and whether their conclusions change by the time they’re published.

How they did it : The team identified 105 COVID-19 preprints that were posted on bioRxiv and medRxiv servers between January and April 2020, as well as 105 non-COVID-19 preprints posted between September 2019 and April 2020, and that were eventually published in a peer-reviewed journal. After excluding several studies for various reasons such as lacking an abstract in the published version, they narrowed down the total to 184 preprint-published study pairs. They then used a computer program and the Microsoft Word Track Changes feature to compare the text of the abstract in the preprint and corresponding published version.

Researchers didn’t analyze the entire text of the article and used the abstracts instead. Abstracts are considered the first port of call for most readers. They often contain the summary of the key findings and main conclusions of the study and are freely accessible, even for journals that have paywalls.

What they found : Overall, the study shows that preprints were most often published with only minor changes to the conclusions in their abstracts. This suggests that the publication process has a minimal but beneficial effect on preprints by increasing sample sizes or statistics or by making author language more conservative, the authors write. The study also shows:

• Overall, most abstracts are comparable between the preprinted and published article, but COVID-19 articles underwent greater textual changes in their abstracts compared with non-COVID-19 articles. Specifically, 17.2% of COVID-19 abstracts had major changes in their conclusions compared with 7.2% of non-COVID-19 abstracts.
• More than 85% of preprints didn’t have any changes in authorship when published. However, COVID-19 preprints were almost three times as likely to have additional authors when published, compared with non-COVID-19 preprints (17.2% versus 6.2%).
• On average there was no difference in the total number of figures and tables when comparing preprints with their published version. The authors also find that in more than two-thirds of published studies, the content of the figures didn’t change. But in 23%, there was significant content added or removed.
• The team also investigated the impact of public discourse on preprints — such as discussion on Twitter — and changes to the abstract or figures in the published version. Overall, they didn’t find a strong correlation between the number of comments or tweets and amount of change in publication.
• Also of note, they report COVID-19 preprints don’t always share their data publicly and many authors provide data only upon request. Also, many published articles had faulty hyperlinks to the supporting information. “The biggest surprise was how difficult it was to access supplemental data in published papers — many of the links on journal websites were broken or looped back to the main paper,” wrote Jonathon Alexis Coates , one of the study’s seven co-authors, in an email interview.

Findings apply to more recent preprints. Coates, a post-doctoral researcher at Queen Mary University of London, started a podcast in 2021 called Preprints in Motion , where he discusses preprints with the authors. “Through this, and my observations of using preprints, it definitely appears that our data holds up and that there would probably not be significant differences if we analyzed pairs from 2021,” Coates said in his email. “More, scientifically, we included a control data set of non-COVID preprints that were posted and published during the same time period (or as close as we could get). This data showed a similar pattern to the COVID preprints, suggesting that the results are applicable beyond pandemic-related work.”

The bigger picture : The pandemic has had some impact on the scientific community’s view of preprints, Coates wrote in his email. “Preprints are much more accepted and scientists within the biosciences have a greater awareness and understanding of preprints generally,” he wrote. “Many had positive experiences posting pandemic-related preprints and have, anecdotally stated they will preprint again in the future. I have also noticed that more scientists appear to be actively thinking about the publication process and how it needs to change which I think is a big positive.” He added that the study is not a direct comment on the peer review process.

What other experts say about the study : Fleerackers said it was “shocking” to see that 17.2% of COVID-19 preprints underwent major changes in their conclusions. “This is a scary finding, considering how much preprints have been used in pandemic reporting and policy decisions,” she wrote in her email. “This has major implications for journalists who rely on these preprints in their reporting, and for audiences who try to make health decisions based on this unreviewed evidence. It’s also important for researchers who cite and build on these results in their research.”

Advice to journalists : “For journalists covering preprints, I would consider focusing on big picture findings rather than specific statistics, contextualizing any results within a larger body of evidence, and emphasizing that these findings could change in future — as is the case with all science,” wrote Fleerackers. “[Do] your homework as a journalist: read the methods and limitations critically and seek opinions from independent researchers, particularly on those parts of the manuscript that you don’t have the expertise to vet yourself. This is true for all research, but the results of this study suggest it may be even more important when covering preprints, particularly those about COVID-19.”

Study limitations : Because researchers didn’t compare the entire content of the studies, it’s not clear whether changes in the abstract reflect changes throughout the manuscript. Researchers also add:

• They looked at a small sample of studies that were published in academic journals shortly after they were posted on preprint servers, so they study excludes preprints that may have been published more slowly.
• Because of its short time frame, the study doesn’t use unpublished preprints as a control. This comparison would provide a stronger and more direct findings on the role of journal peer review and the reliability of preprints, the authors note.
• In addition, the study doesn’t measure how much of the changes were introduced by the peer-review process since it is difficult to determine when the preprint was posted relative to submission to the journal. Some preprints are revised and posted on servers several times before they are published.
• Researchers also note that it is difficult to objectively compare two versions of a research paper. For example, abstracts that had many changes in the text, such as rearrangements of words, didn’t have a meaningful change in their conclusion.

Conflicts of Interest : The researchers report that one of the authors is the executive director of ASAPbio , a non-profit organization promoting the productive use of preprints in the life sciences. Another is a bioRxiv affiliate, part of a volunteer group of scientists that screen preprints deposited on the bioRxiv server.

Examining Linguistic Shifts Between Preprints and Publications David Nicholson ; et al. PLOS Biology, February 2022.

The study’s goal: The team wanted to compare the text of preprints in bioRxiv and their corresponding published studies to examine how peer review changes the documents. They used computer programs to analyze and compare the texts. Researchers also used the programs to identify similar papers and journals. It’s important to note that the study doesn’t investigate similarities in results and conclusions.

How they did it : They downloaded a snapshot of PubMed Central , which is an open access digital archive of full text peer-reviewed biomedical and life science research and is part of the U.S. National Library of Medicine on Jan. 31, 2020. They also downloaded a snapshot of the content of bioRxiv on Feb. 3, 2020. In addition, they downloaded a snapshot of New York Times Article Archives on July 7, 2020 as a representative of general English text and to identify bioRxiv preprints linked to a published article. They linked 17,952 preprints with a published version in PubMed.

What they found : Over 77% of bioRxiv preprints had a corresponding published version. “This suggests that most work from groups participating in the preprint ecosystem is now available in final form for literature mining and other applications,” Nicholson and co-authors write. They also find:

• A subset of preprints posted in the first four months of the pandemic were published faster than the broader set of bioRxiv preprints, showing that peer review was accelerated.
• The most common change between a preprint and published version was typesetting and the mention of supporting information or additional materials.
• Preprints that had more versions posted on the servers and more changes in text took longer to publish. Every additional preprint version was associated with an increase of 51 days before a preprint was published. This suggests that authors may be updating their preprints in response to peer reviews or other external feedback.
• The team also created the Preprint Similarity Search website that sifts through 1.7 million  PubMed Central open access documents  and lets users to find 10 papers and journals that are most similar to the textual content of a  bioRxiv  or  medRxiv  preprint.

What other experts say about the study : “I am surprised that more than three-quarters (77%) of the preprints they analyzed are now available in a peer reviewed journal,” wrote Fleerackers in an email. “This is higher than what was found in previous studies, and is likely an underestimate of the true number of preprints that are eventually published. For journalists, this is a really important takeaway as it answers another key question that could influence their decision to cover preprints: ‘How often do preprints actually get published in peer reviewed journals?'”

Fleerackers added that the Nicholson study adds more context to the study by the Brierley team because it looks at a much larger number of preprints and their corresponding published versions.

Advice to journalists : “Treat preprints with a grain of salt, but treat peer-reviewed publications that way too,” said Casey Greene , who’s one of Nicholson’s five co-authors, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics and the founding director of the Center for Health AI in the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “Ultimately, both are simply steps along our path to better understanding the world around us.”

Conflicts of Interest : Researchers report that one author receives a salary from Elsevier, a Netherlands-based publishing company specializing in scientific, technical and medical content.

What other studies show

In “ Comparing published scientific journal articles to their pre-print versions ,” published in the International Journal on Digital Libraries in February 2018, researchers compared the text of title, abstract and body of preprints posted on arXiv and bioRxiv servers with their published version. They ended up with 12,202 preprints posted between 2003 and 2015 on arXiv and 2,516 posted between 2013 and 2016 on bioRxiv that had a final published version. Their analysis shows that “the text contents of the scientific papers generally changed very little from their pre-print to final published versions.”

News media outlets vary widely in how they cover preprint studies, new research finds

In “ Cross-sectional study of preprints and final journal publications from COVID-19 studies: discrepancies in results reporting and spin in interpretation ,” published in BMJ Open in July 2021, researchers compare preprints and final journal publications for 67 COVID-19 studies and find that one-third had no discrepancies in results. About a quarter had at least one outcome that was included in the journal publication but not in the preprint.

In 12% of the studies, at least one outcome was reported in the preprint only.

They also evaluated the studies for spin, which refers to specific reporting practices that distort the interpretation of results so that results are viewed more favorably.

“The COVID-19 preprints and their subsequent journal publications were largely similar in reporting of study characteristics, outcomes and spin,” the authors write. “All COVID-19 studies published as preprints and journal publications should be critically evaluated for discrepancies and spin.”

Meanwhile, in “ COVID-19 randomized controlled trials in medRxiv and PubMed ,” a small study published in the European Journal of Medicine in November 2020, researchers compare the full text of 13 preprint studies posted on medRxiv with 16 published studies in PubMed, all of which were about COVID-19 and were randomized controlled trials. The preprint studies were not related to the published studies.

Their analysis shows an increased rate of spin — positive terms used in the title or abstract section — in preprints compared with published studies. “Readers should pay attention to the overstatements in preprints of [randomized controlled trials],” the authors write.

Additional reading

Rise of the preprint: how rapid data sharing during COVID-19 has changed science forever , Nature Medicine, January 2022

About The Author

Naseem S. Miller

Educational resources and simple solutions for your research journey

What are Preprints and How They Impact Researchers

What are preprints? Preprints can be defined as scientific manuscripts posted freely on public servers for views and comments before they are published through the traditional route in journals. Paper preprints also allow authors to gather valuable pre-publication feedback from experts in their field of study. But since preprints do not undergo conventional peer review processes, they may not all be authentic, scientifically rigorous, and trustworthy. Let’s look at the benefits of preprints as well as the challenges associated with them to understand whether they pose a risk to scientific research.

What are the benefits of preprints and why are they gaining importance?

Listed below are four reasons why research paper preprints have emerged as a popular form of scientific dissemination.

1. Paper preprints can speed up dissemination of research

Publishing a manuscript in a peer-reviewed journal is a lengthy process involving multiple checks and reviews of your manuscript and, often, numerous revision requests before it is accepted or rejected. This process takes several weeks to months. As a result, you may lose time, and your research may become outdated by the time it is thoroughly reviewed, or someone else may publish similar research before you do. The benefits of preprints are especially visible amid a pandemic, when traditional publishing models are unable to meet the urgent demand for rapid dissemination of new knowledge and insights into managing the crisis.

Paper preprints are a great way of accelerating the dissemination of your results. Once you upload your manuscript on a preprint server, it undergoes certain essential checks and is assigned a DOI within days. Your paper is then ready for the world to view and comment on, ensuring timely credit for your work. One big benefit of preprints on servers like medRxiv are that once uploaded, an article is screened within just 4-5 days, making it a preferable option for authors, especially during a global health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. 1

2. Preprints increase accessibility and impact of research

Did you know that the world cannot access 65% of the 100 most cited papers because they are behind paywalls? 2 Costly journal subscriptions and restricted access to a lot of important research can be frustrating. Moreover, limited accessibility impacts the pace of research dissemination.

Among the various benefits of preprints, one is that they tackle this problem by making research freely accessible. A key benefit of preprints is that you can post your article online for free. A considerable proportion of the audience, including independent researchers and academics, non-governmental organizations, educators, and the media, can access and benefit from learning about the latest research through preprints. A paper preprint is bound to get more views than a paywalled article and, therefore, be shared and cited more extensively.

3. Potentially fast-tracking career opportunities and avenues for collaboration

Paper preprints ensure that you don’t have to wait for an article to be published in a journal in order to showcase your work to job committees or funding bodies. Preprints can also help you attract invitations to present at conferences and seminars or to collaborate with researchers from the same field on high-impact research projects. Essentially, the benefits of preprints are similar to that of traditional journal articles, only they are visible much sooner.

4. Paper preprints attract reviews by a group of peers before the journal peer review

Posting a preprint allows you to gain valuable feedback on your research from multiple experts in your field. This can help you improve the quality of your paper preprint before the traditional journal peer review, thus potentially enhancing the chances of acceptance for your paper and increasing publication speed. James Fraser, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), views preprint publishing as an instrument for better science. He says, ‘Posting preprints offers people the chance to be more thoroughly evaluated, which is especially beneficial for younger scientists.’ 3

This point is supported by the fact that 71% of bioRxiv users reported receiving feedback on their research paper preprints. 4 Readers can use the author’s contact information on the server to share feedback with the author through social media platforms, emails or conferences. Some preprint servers also allow readers to post comments on the server itself.

  What are the challenges related to preprints?

While there are several benefits of preprints for authors, academic audiences, and the general population, they also come with a set of challenges. The largest one is that they are unrefereed since they do not undergo the conventional peer-review process before being posted on preprint servers. This lack of a thorough review can pose a major risk to scientific progress and undermine researchers’ work. Eric Topol, a member of bioRxiv’s advisory board, warned in an article in  The New York Times  that ‘anyone who reads a research paper preprint will embrace it almost in a blind fashion’ and process information selectively such that it aligns with their worldview. 5

Often, preprints showcase eye-catching research that receives a lot of popularity through instant sharing. The risks of low-quality research receiving unwarranted attention, especially by non-experts, is high. In addition to that, there are risks of misleading information being spread because of an incomplete or inaccurate understanding of even high-quality research. A paper preprint posted early last year erroneously claimed that the structure of SARS-CoV-2 was similar to that of HIV. 6 This paper preprint was shared widely across social media platforms and news channels, sparking rumors and conspiracy theories.

Many non-experts may not be able to identify academically rigorous research from among a sea of preprints of unverified quality. How can this challenge be overcome?

Focus on the dissemination of quality science

Preprint repositories are aware of the risks of misinformation. Hence, they have been proactive in warning the audience that the content is not peer-reviewed and is thus unverified. Several advise readers to use or interpret the content with caution, direct them to the latest versions of a paper preprint, and, if a preprint is withdrawn, state the reasons why.

bioRxiv and medRxiv are going a step ahead to address these challenges by implementing basic quality control checks. 7 New manuscripts are subjected to plagiarism checks, and their basic scientific value is assessed by principal investigators (PIs) (on bioRxiv) and healthcare professionals (on medRxiv). The paper preprint is also scanned for ethics committee approval, trial registration, informed consent, and conflict of interests. medRxiv has been approving papers that are ready for peer review. Also, medRxiv does not accept individual case reports, manuscripts with small sample sizes, and those proposing COVID-19 treatments based only on computational modelling.

Researchers who read research paper preprints are trying to reduce misinformation risks by sharing feedback on newly uploaded preprints through different forums, including social media. Authors putting up their work on preprint servers need to serve as their own critics and shoulder the responsibility of ensuring that the manuscripts they post meet basic standards of academic work. Erroneous information or potentially misleading statements in a research paper preprint can undermine the work of the scientific community and damage an author’s credibility. So, as an author, how can you ensure error-free submissions and attract the attention of publishers and journals to your preprints? The answer is in smart manuscript submission check by Researcher.Life that helps determine if a manuscript is submission-ready.

  How can Researcher.Life benefit preprint authors?

Researcher.Life is a subscription-based platform that brings together tools and services that help authors at every stage, including a robust AI-powered submission readiness checker. Comprehensive and secure, this one-stop evaluation identifies critical errors that could cause rejection and helps you ensure that your paper is error-free. For preprint authors, this is a great way to check for language, structure, references and other criteria that most journals use in their editorial screening processes. It also helps you prepare and refine your paper preprint so that it needs less work at the journal peer review stage, which allows for faster publishing success.

Preprint servers have been putting several key checks in place to improve the quality of manuscripts they host. Consequently, they have reduced the effort needed at the editorial screening and peer-review stages once journals eventually process paper preprints. However, the primacy of peer-reviewed journals over preprints remains unquestioned in academic publishing. Despite the many benefits of preprints, these have a long way to go until they can be considered a source of trusted science. Until then, the  submission readiness checker by Researcher.Life  can help researchers ensure that their paper preprints are as ready for dissemination as possible.

  References

• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), medRxiv. Retrieved from https://www.medrxiv.org/about/FAQ#:~:text=How%20long%20does%20it%20take,the%20paper%20is%20within%20scope
• Nicholson, J., Pepe, J. 65 out of the 100 most cited papers are paywalled. Retrieved from https://www.authorea.com/users/8850/articles/125400-65-out-of-the-100-most-cited-papers-are-paywalled
• Socholastica, Authorea. Open Access + Preprints: Journals and scholars take action, 2016. Retrieved from https://asapbio.org/junior-faculty
• Coudert, F. The rise of preprints in chemistry, 2020. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-020-0477-5
• The New York Times – Coronavirus Tests Science’s Need for Speed Limits. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/science/coronavirus-disinformation.html
• Prashant P. et al. Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag. bioRxiv https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1

Kwon, D. How swamped preprint servers are blocking bad coronavirus research. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01394-6

Related Posts

What is Independent Publishing in Academia?

Does Journal Impact Define Research Impact?

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Preprints: Accelerating Research – On Demand

What are preprints, and how are they changing how biomedical research results are shared?   

Should you use information from preprints? Should you share your own research results in a preprint?   

This one-hour, self-paced online course from the National Library of Medicine® explores the benefits and considerations of using and submitting preprints.

Resource URLs:   https://nnlm.gov/training/class-catalog/preprints-accelerating-research  and  http://www.nlm.nih.gov/oet/ed/pmc/preprints  

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After completing this course, you will be able to:  

• Define the relationship between the preprint and the final paper  
• Explain the roles of preprints in the research cycle  
• Name key distinction between a preprint and an accepted author manuscript / published article  
• List three other possible differences between a preprint and the final paper  
• List benefits of using preprints in your work  
• List challenges associated with using preprints in your work  
• Outline considerations for using preprint information  
• List the main preprint repositories relevant to you  
• Explain the preprint content in PMC relevant to you  
• Properly cite a preprint  
• List considerations in identifying an appropriate preprint repository to deposit your work  
• Explain the difference between a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) vs. public domain  

Four self-paced sections:   

• What is a Preprint?  
• Should I Use a Preprint?  
• Where can I Find Preprints?  
• How do I Submit a Preprint?  

MLA CE credits:  1.0

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Flawed Autopsy ‘Review’ Revives Unsupported Claims of COVID-19 Vaccine Harm, Censorship

By Jessica McDonald

Posted on July 5, 2024

SciCheck Digest

COVID-19 vaccination is generally very safe, and except for extremely rare cases, there is no evidence that it contributes to death. Social media posts about a now-published, but faulty review of autopsy reports, however, are repeating an unfounded claim from last summer that “74% of sudden deaths are shown to be due to the COVID-19 vaccine.”

More than  half a billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have now been administered in the U.S. and only a few, very rare, safety concerns have emerged. The vast majority of people experience only minor, temporary side effects such as pain at the injection site, fatigue, headache, or muscle pain — or no side effects at all. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said , these vaccines “have undergone and will continue to undergo the most intensive safety monitoring in U.S. history.”

A small number of severe allergic reactions known as anaphylaxis, which are expected with any vaccine, have occurred with the authorized and approved COVID-19 vaccines. Fortunately, these reactions are rare, typically occur within minutes of inoculation and can be treated. Approximately 5 per million people vaccinated have experienced anaphylaxis after a COVID-19 vaccine, according  to the CDC.

To make sure serious allergic reactions can be identified and treated, all people receiving a vaccine should be observed for 15 minutes after getting a shot, and anyone who has experienced anaphylaxis or had any kind of immediate allergic reaction to any vaccine or injection in the past should be monitored for a half hour. People who have had a serious allergic reaction to a previous dose or one of the vaccine ingredients should not be immunized. Also, those who shouldn’t receive one type of COVID-19 vaccine should be monitored for 30 minutes after receiving a different type of vaccine.

There is evidence that the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines may rarely cause inflammation of the heart muscle (myocarditis) or of the surrounding lining (pericarditis), particularly in male adolescents and young adults .

Based on data collected through August 2021, the reporting rates of either condition in the U.S. are highest in males 16 to 17 years old after the second dose (105.9 cases per million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine), followed by 12- to 15-year-old males (70.7 cases per million). The rate for 18- to 24-year-old males was 52.4 cases and 56.3 cases per million doses of Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, respectively.

Health officials have emphasized that vaccine-related myocarditis and pericarditis cases are rare and the benefits of vaccination still outweigh the risks. Early evidence suggests these myocarditis cases are less severe than typical ones. The CDC has also noted that most patients who were treated “responded well to medicine and rest and felt better quickly.”

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been linked to an  increased risk of rare blood clots combined with low levels of blood platelets, especially in women ages 30 to 49 . Early symptoms of the condition, which is known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, or TTS, can appear as late as three weeks after vaccination and  include  severe or persistent headaches or blurred vision, leg swelling, and easy bruising or tiny blood spots under the skin outside of the injection site.

According to the CDC, TTS has occurred in around 4 people per million doses administered. As of early April ,  the syndrome has been confirmed in 60 cases, including nine deaths, after more than 18.6 million doses of the J&J vaccine. Although TTS remains rare, because of the availability of mRNA vaccines, which are not associated with this serious side effect, the FDA on May 5 limited authorized use of the J&J vaccine to adults who either couldn’t get one of the other authorized or approved COVID-19 vaccines because of medical or access reasons, or only wanted a J&J vaccine for protection against the disease. Several months earlier, on Dec. 16, 2021 ,  the CDC had recommended the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna shots over J&J’s.

The J&J vaccine has also been linked to an increased risk of Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a rare disorder in which the immune system attacks nerve cells.  Most people  who develop GBS fully recover, although some have permanent nerve damage and the condition can be fatal.

Safety surveillance data suggest that compared with the mRNA vaccines, which have not been linked to GBS, the J&J vaccine is associated with 15.5 additional GBS cases per million doses of vaccine in the three weeks following vaccination. Most reported cases following J&J vaccination have occurred in men 50 years old and older.

Link to this

Last July, an unpublished paper  authored  by several physicians known for spreading COVID-19 misinformation  briefly   appeared  on a preprint server hosted by the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet. 

The paper  claimed  to have reviewed autopsy reports and found — in the opinion of three of its authors — that 73.9% of the selected deaths were “directly due to or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination.” Those conclusions, however, were  often contrary  to the original scientists’ determinations. Moreover, abundant evidence contradicts the suggestion that the COVID-19 vaccines are frequently killing people.

The preprint repository quickly  removed  the manuscript because, it said, “the study’s conclusions are not supported by the study methodology,” and indicated that the preprint had violated its screening criteria. 

Social media soon flooded with posts highlighting the purported findings and alleging censorship, with many falsely stating that the paper had been published in the Lancet.

Multiple   scientists  and  fact   checkers   detailed  numerous problems with the preprint and the resulting social media posts. As Dr. Jonathan Laxton, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Manitoba who frequently debunks misinformation online,  wrote at the time  on Twitter, “this is not a conspiracy, the paper was literally biased hot garbage and the Lancet was right to remove it.”

Despite these efforts, the same claims are back this summer after the paper was  published  in the journal Forensic Science International on June 21. Capitalizing on the paper’s now-published status,  numerous   posts   are   once   again  spreading the review’s supposed findings and realleging censorship.

“Largest autopsy series in the world. Censored by what was the most reputable peer reviewed journal,” reads  one  popular Instagram post. “74% of the 325 Suddenly Died Autopsies point the cause to the dart,” it added, using coded language to refer to the COVID-19 vaccines.

Another  post , from Dr.  Sherri Tenpenny , an osteopathic physician in Ohio known for her opposition to vaccines and her false claim that the COVID-19 vaccines magnetize people, also repeated the falsehood that the paper had been previously published in the Lancet.

“Bottom line results: 74% of sudden deaths are shown to be due to the COVID-19 vaccine,” the post went on to say. “This paper is a game changer. Sadly, it was censored for ONE YEAR. Just think of all the lives that could have been saved.”

As we’ve explained  before , publication in a peer reviewed journal does not necessarily mean a paper is accurate or trustworthy, although the process can improve manuscripts and weed out bad science. In this case, the published paper is highly similar to the previously criticized manuscript. Experts say its conclusions are unreliable and misleading.

“The vast majority of these cases do not show a causal, but coincidental, effect,” wrote Marc Veldhoen, an immunologist at the Instituto de Medicina Molecular João Lobo Antunes in Portugal, in a thread on X, addressing the paper’s central claim. “This certainly does not apply to the general population!”

When asked about the published paper, Dr. Cristina Cattaneo,  co-editor-in-chief  of Forensic Science International, told us the journal was “currently looking into the matter.”

Problematic ‘Review’

For their “ review ,” the authors searched the medical literature for published autopsy studies related to any kind of COVID-19 vaccination. After excluding duplicates and studies without deaths, autopsies, or vaccination status information, the authors were left with 44 studies comprising 325 autopsies. Three of the authors then reviewed the described cases and decided for themselves if the deaths were vaccine-related; if at least two agreed, the death was counted as being attributable to COVID-19 vaccination.

In the end, the authors thought 240, or nearly 74%, of the reviewed autopsies were vaccine-related (rounded to one decimal, 240 out of 325 is actually 73.8%, not 73.9% as reported in the paper). Among these deaths, 46.3% occurred after a Sinovac vaccine, 30.1% after a Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, 14.6% after an AstraZeneca vaccine, 7.5% after a Moderna vaccine and 1.3% after a Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

As others have  pointed out  before, there’s reason to suspect that the authors may have been biased in their determinations. All three adjudicators, including Dr.  Peter McCullough , are well known for spreading COVID-19 misinformation. Dr. William Makis, a Canadian radiologist, has  previously claimed , without evidence, that 80 Canadian doctors died from COVID-19 vaccines. The only pathologist, Dr. Roger Hodkinson, incorrectly  claimed  in 2020 that COVID-19 was a “hoax” and “just a bad flu.”

Hodkinson and McCullough, along with five other authors, are also affiliated with and have a financial interest in The Wellness Company, a supplement and telehealth company that  sells unproven treatments , including for purported protection against vaccines.

Perhaps most tellingly, the scientists who conducted many of the autopsy studies came to opposite conclusions than the review authors. Of the 240 cases, for example, 105 come from a single  paper  in Colombia, whose authors found “[n]o relation between the cause of death and vaccination.”

Similarly, the review authors counted 24 of 28 autopsies from a  study  from Singapore as vaccine-related, even though the original authors identified “no definite causative relationship” to mRNA vaccines.

The authors of a German  study  also attributed 13 of 18 autopsy deaths to preexisting diseases, but the review authors decided 16 cases were vaccine-related.

In a  LinkedIn post  debunking the preprint, Dr.  Mathijs Binkhorst , a Dutch pediatrician, went back to each cited paper, and found that of the 325 autopsies and one heart necropsy the review authors said were vaccine-related, only 31, or 9.5%, were likely related and 28, or 8.6%, were possibly related. The rest — 267, or 81.9% — were unlikely, uncertainly, or not related to vaccination.

In other words, even among a set of studies that is more likely to identify some vaccine involvement, less than a fifth of deaths were possibly or likely vaccine-related.

Even if the authors aren’t biased, this type of study is not able to provide information on how frequently COVID-19 vaccination leads to death, and whether the risks outweigh the benefits.

“They only looked at ‘published autopsy and necropsy reports relating to COVID-19 vaccination,’” Veldhoen  said  of the published study on X. “If you look only at autopsies of those related (in time) with drugX: X-involvement is then a high proportion of all cases.”

Indeed, as Binkhorst noted, the autopsy reports come from 14 countries that collectively administered some 2.2 billion vaccine doses. If the COVID-19 vaccines truly were as dangerous as the review authors contend, this would be evident in other data sources — but it’s not.

Vaccine safety surveillance systems and other studies from across the globe have found that serious side effects can occur, but they are rare. 

The Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines, for example, can in very rare cases cause a dangerous and sometimes fatal blood clotting condition combined with low blood platelets. 

Rarely, the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech have caused inflammation of the heart muscle or surrounding tissue, known as myocarditis or pericarditis. In almost all cases, however, those conditions are not deadly.

There is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccination increases the risk of death and has led to excess deaths or a large number of deaths. Instead, a wealth of data supports the notion that COVID-19 vaccines protect against severe disease and death from COVID-19. The flawed autopsy “review” doesn’t change this.

Roley, Gwen. “ Misinformation swirls around unpublished paper on Covid-19 vaccine risks .” AFP. 14 Jul 2023.

Hulscher, Nicolas et al. “ A Systematic REVIEW of Autopsy findings in deaths after covid-19 vaccination .” Forensic Science International. Available online 21 Jun 2024.

Binkhorst, Mathijs. “ McCullough’s misinformation .” LinkedIn post. Archived 4 Sep 2023.

Laxton, Jonathan (@dr_jon_l). “ McCullough et al attempted upload a preprint to the Lancet server, and it was removed because it was hot garbage.  However, I feel going through this paper for you guys will help you spot dodgy science … ” X. 6 Jul 2023.

Payne, Ed. “ Fact Check: A ‘Lancet Study’ Does NOT Show COVID Vaccine Caused 74% Of Deaths In Sample — Lancet Rejected Paper And Its Methods .” Lead Stories. 7 Jul 2023.

Carballo-Carbajal, Iria. “ Flawed preprint based on autopsies inadequate to demonstrate that COVID-19 vaccines caused 74% of those deaths .” Health Feedback. 31 Jul 2023.

Jaramillo, Catalina. “ Review Article By Misinformation Spreaders Misleads About mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines  .” FactCheck.org. 16 Feb 2024.

Veldhoen, Marc (@Marc_Veld). “ Does ‘We found that 73.9% of deaths were directly due to or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination.’ Hold? No. The vast majority of these cases do not show a causal, but coincidental, effect. This certainly does not apply to the general population! ” X. 22 Jun 2024.

Cattaneo, Cristina. Co-Editor-in-Chief, Forensic Science International. Email to FactCheck.org. 26 Jun 2024.

“ No evidence that 80 Canadian doctors died from COVID vaccinations .” Reuters Fact Check. 22 Dec 2022.

Lajka, Arijeta. “ Pathologist falsely claims COVID-19 is a hoax, no worse than the flu .” AP. 2 Dec 2020.

Yandell, Kate. “ Posts Push Unproven ‘Spike Protein Detoxification’ Regimen .” FactCheck.org. 21 Sep 2023.

Chaves, Juan José et al. “ A postmortem study of patients vaccinated for SARS-CoV-2 in Colombia .” Revista Española de Patología. 31 Oct 2022.

Yeo, Audrey et al. “ Post COVID-19 vaccine deaths – Singapore’s early experience .” Forensic Science International. 19 Jan 2022.

Schneider, Julia et al. “ Postmortem investigation of fatalities following vaccination with COVID-19 vaccines .” International Journal of Legal Medicine. 30 Sep 2021.

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“ Selected Adverse Events Reported after COVID-19 Vaccination .” CDC. Accessed 5 Jul 2024.

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Robertson, Lori. “ A Guide to Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 Vaccine .” FactCheck.org. 27 Feb 2021.

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Yandell, Kate. “ No Evidence Excess Deaths Linked to Vaccines, Contrary to Claims Online .” FactCheck.org. 17 Apr 2023.

McDonald, Jessica. “ Flawed Analysis of New Zealand Data Doesn’t Show COVID-19 Vaccines Killed Millions .” FactCheck.org. 15 Dec 2023.

Mathematicians Are Edging Close to Solving One of the World's 7 Hardest Math Problems

And there’s $1 million at stake.

• In new research, mathematicians have narrowed down one of the biggest outstanding problems in math.
• Huge breakthroughs in math and science are usually the work of many people over many years.
• Seven math problems were given a $1 million bounty each in 2000, and just one has been solved so far.

The “Millennium Problems” are seven infamously intractable math problems laid out in the year 2000 by the prestigious Clay Institute, each with $1 million attached as payment for a solution. They span all areas of math , as the Clay Institute was founded in 1998 to push the entire field forward with financial support for researchers and important breakthroughs.

But the only solved Millennium Problem so far, the Poincare conjecture, illustrates one of the funny pitfalls inherent to offering a large cash prize for math. The winner, Grigori Perelman, refused the Clay prize as well as the prestigious Fields Medal. He withdrew from mathematics and public life in 2006, and even in 2010, he still insisted his contribution was the same as the mathematician whose work laid the foundation on which he built his proof, Richard Hamilton.

Math, all sciences, and arguably all human inquiries are filled with pairs or groups that circle the same finding at the same time until one officially makes the breakthrough. Think about Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, whose back-and-forth about calculus led to the combined version of the field we still study today. Rosalind Franklin is now mentioned in the same breath as her fellow discoverers of DNA, James Watson and Francis Crick. Even the Bechdel Test for women in media is sometimes called the Bechdel-Wallace Test, because humans are almost always in collaboration.

That’s what makes this new paper so important. Two mathematicians—Larry Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and James Maynard of the University of Oxford—collaborated on the new finding about how certain polynomials are formed and how they reach out into the number line. Maynard is just 37, and won the Fields Medal himself in 2022. Guth, a decade older, has won a number of important prizes with a little less name recognition.

The Riemann hypothesis is not directly related to prime numbers , but it has implications that ripple through number theory in different ways (including with prime numbers). Basically, it deals with where and how the graph of a certain function of complex numbers crosses back and forth across axes. The points where the function crosses an axis is called a “zero,” and the frequency with which those zeroes appear is called the zero density.

In the far reaches of the number line, prime numbers become less and less predictable (in the proverbial sense). They are not, so far, predictable in the literal sense—a fact that is an underpinning of modern encryption , where data is protected by enormous strings of integers made by multiplying enormous prime numbers together. The idea of a periodic table of primes, of any kind of template that could help mathematicians better understand where and how large primes cluster together or not, is a holy grail.

In the new paper, Maynard and Guth focus on a new limitation of Dirichlet polynomials. These are special series of complex numbers that many believe are of the same type as the function involved in the Riemann hypothesis involves. In the paper, they claim they’ve proven that these polynomials have a certain number of large values, or solutions , within a tighter range than before.

In other words, if we knew there might be an estimated three Dirichlet values between 50 and 100 before, now we may know that range to be between 60 and 90 instead. The eye exam just switched a blurry plate for a slightly less blurry one, but we still haven’t found the perfect prescription. “If one knows some more structure about the set of large values of a Dirichlet polynomial, then one can hope to have improved bound,” Maynard and Guth conclude.

No, this is not a final proof of the Riemann hypothesis. But no one is suggesting it is. In advanced math, narrowing things down is also vital. Indeed, even finding out that a promising idea turns out to be wrong can have a lot of value—as it has a number of times in the related Twin Primes Conjecture that still eludes mathematicians.

In a collaboration that has lasted 160 years and counting, mathematicians continue to take each step together and then, hopefully, compare notes.

Caroline Delbert is a writer, avid reader, and contributing editor at Pop Mech. She's also an enthusiast of just about everything. Her favorite topics include nuclear energy, cosmology, math of everyday things, and the philosophy of it all. 

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The History of Pi

Experts Discovered the Secret Geometry of Life

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Breaking the 1880s Silk Dress Cryptogram

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Call for High School Projects

Machine learning for social impact .

The Thirty-Eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024) is an interdisciplinary conference that brings together researchers in machine learning, neuroscience, statistics, optimization, computer vision, natural language processing, life sciences, natural sciences, social sciences, and other adjacent fields. 

This year, we invite high school students to submit research papers on the topic of machine learning for social impact.  A subset of finalists will be selected to present their projects virtually and will have their work spotlighted on the NeurIPS homepage.  In addition, the leading authors of up to five winning projects will be invited to attend an award ceremony at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver.  

Each submission must describe independent work wholly performed by the high school student authors.  We expect each submission to highlight either demonstrated positive social impact or the potential for positive social impact using machine learning. Application areas may include but are not limited to the following:

• Agriculture
• Climate change
• Homelessness
• Food security
• Mental health
• Water quality

Authors will be asked to confirm that their submissions accord with the NeurIPS code of conduct and the NeurIPS code of ethics .

Submission deadline: All submissions must be made by June 27th, 4pm EDT. The system will close after this time, and no further submissions will be possible.

We are using OpenReview to manage submissions. Papers should be submitted here . When registering for a new OpenReview profile, you can type in the name of your high school as the institution and “high school student” as the role. Submission will open June 1st.  Submissions under review will be visible only to their assigned program committee. We will not be soliciting comments from the general public during the reviewing process. Anyone who plans to submit a paper as an author or a co-author will need to create (or update) their OpenReview profile by the full paper submission deadline. 

Formatting instructions:   All submissions must be in PDF format. Submissions are limited to four content pages , including all figures and tables; additional pages containing only references are allowed. You must format your submission using the NeurIPS 2024 HighSchool style file using the “preprint” option for non-anonymous submission. The maximum file size for submissions is 50MB. Submissions that violate the NeurIPS style (e.g., by decreasing margins or font sizes) or page limits may be rejected without further review.  Papers may be rejected without consideration of their merits if they fail to meet the submission requirements, as described in this document. 

Mentorship and collaboration:  The submitted research can be a component of a larger research endeavor involving external collaborators, but the submission should describe only the authors’ contributions.  The authors can also have external mentors but must disclose the nature of the mentorship.  At the time of submission, the authors will be asked to describe the involvement of any mentors or external collaborators and to distinguish mentor and collaborator contributions from those of the authors.  In addition, the authors may (optionally) include an acknowledgements section acknowledging the contributions of others following the content sections of the submission. The acknowledgements section will not count toward the submission page limit.

Proof of high school attendance: Submitting authors will also be asked to upload a signed letter, on school letterhead, from each author’s high school confirming that the author was enrolled in high school during the 2023-2024 academic year.

Supplementary artifacts:   In their four content pages, authors may link  to supplementary artifacts including videos, working demonstrations, digital posters, websites, or source code.  For source code, this can be done by, for example, uploading the code to a free  https://github.com/  repository and then including a hyperlink to that repository in the submitted paper. Data files that are not too large can also be uploaded to a GitHub repository, and larger files can be uploaded to a free research data repository like  https://dataverse.harvard.edu/ . Please do not link to additional text. All such supplementary material should be wholly created by the authors and should directly support the submission content. 

Review process:   Each submission will be reviewed by anonymous referees. The authors, however, should not be anonymous. No written feedback will be provided to the authors.  

Use of Large Language Models (LLMs): We welcome authors to use any tool that is suitable for preparing high-quality papers and research. However, we ask authors to keep in mind two important criteria. First, we expect papers to fully describe their methodology.  Any tool that is important to that methodology, including the use of LLMs, should be described also. For example, authors should mention tools (including LLMs) that were used for data processing or filtering, visualization, facilitating or running experiments, or proving theorems. It may also be advisable to describe the use of LLMs in implementing the method (if this corresponds to an important, original, or non-standard component of the approach). Second, authors are responsible for the entire content of the paper, including all text and figures, so while authors are welcome to use any tool they wish for writing the paper, they must ensure that all text is correct and original.

Dual submissions:  Submissions that are substantially similar to papers that the authors have previously published or submitted in parallel to other peer-reviewed venues with proceedings or journals may not be submitted to NeurIPS. Papers previously presented at workshops or science fairs are permitted, so long as they did not appear in a conference proceedings (e.g., CVPRW proceedings), a journal, or a book.  However, submissions will not be published in formal proceedings, so work submitted to this call may be published elsewhere in the future. Plagiarism is prohibited by the NeurIPS Code of Conduct .

Contact:   [email protected]