Preprint
Encyclopedia
A preprint is a draft of a scientific paper that has not yet been published in a peer-review
Peer review
Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...

ed scientific journal
Scientific journal
In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research. There are thousands of scientific journals in publication, and many more have been published at various points in the past...

.

Role

Publication of manuscripts in a peer-reviewed journal often takes weeks, months or even years from the time of initial submission, because manuscripts must undergo extensive reviewer critique. The need to quickly circulate current results within a scientific community has led researchers to distribute documents known as preprints, which are manuscripts that have yet to undergo peer review
Peer review
Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...

. The immediate distribution of preprints allows authors to receive early feedback from their peers, which may be helpful in revising and preparing articles for submission.

Since 1991, preprints have increasingly been distributed electronically on the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

, rather than as paper copies. This has given rise to massive preprint databases such as arXiv.org and to institutional repositories
Institutional repository
An Institutional repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and disseminating - in digital form - the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution....

.

Stages of printing

While a preprint is an article that has not yet undergone peer review, a postprint is an article which has been peer reviewed in preparation for publication in a journal. Both the preprint and postprint may differ from the final published version of an article. Preprints and postprints together are referred to as e-prints or eprint
Eprint
An eprint is a digital version of a research document that is accessible online, whether from a local Institutional, or...

s.

The word reprint
Reprint
A reprint is a re-publishing of material that has already been previously published. The word reprint is used in many fields.-Academic publishing:...

 refers to hard copies of papers that have already been published; reprints can be produced by the journal publisher, but can also be generated from digital versions (for example, from an electronic database of peer-reviewed journals, such as EBSCOhost), or from eprints self-archived
Self-archiving
To self-archive is to deposit a free copy of a digital document on the World Wide Web in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles as well as theses, deposited in the author's own institutional...

 by their authors in their institutional repositories.

Tenure and promotion

In academia, preprints are not likely to be weighed heavily when a scholar is evaluated for tenure or promotion, unless the preprint becomes the basis for a peer-reviewed publication.

arXiv – physics

The e-print archive arXiv.org was created by Paul Ginsparg
Paul Ginsparg
Paul Ginsparg is a physicist widely known for his development of the ArXiv.org e-print archive and for contributions to theoretical physics.-Career in physics:...

 in 1991 at Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security , located in Los Alamos, New Mexico...

 for the purpose of distributing theoretical high-energy physics preprints. In 2001, arXiv.org moved to Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 and now encompasses the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, and quantitative biology. Within the field of high-energy physics, the posting of preprints on arXiv is so common that many peer-reviewed journals allow submission of papers
Electronic submission
An electronic submission refers to a manuscript submitted by electronic means: that is, via e-mail or a web form on the Internet, or on an electronic medium such as a compact disc, a hard disk or a USB flash drive. Traditionally, a manuscript referred to anything that was explicitly "written by hand"...

 from arXiv directly, using the arXiv e-print number.

In some branches of physics, the arXiv database may serve as a focal point for the many criticisms made of the peer review process and peer-reviewed journals. In his column in Physics Today, April 1992, David Mermin
David Mermin
Nathaniel David Mermin is a solid-state physicist at Cornell University best known for the eponymous Mermin-Wagner theorem and his application of the term "Boojum" to superfluidity, and for the quote "Shut up and calculate!"Together with Neil W...

 described Ginsparg's creation as potentially "string theory's greatest contribution to science".

Nature Precedings – biology, medicine, chemistry, earth science

Nature Precedings is a free electronic repository for preprints of scientific manuscripts, posters, and unpublished observations. It started in 2007 and is published by the Nature Publishing Group
Nature Publishing Group
Nature Publishing Group is an international publishing company that publishes academic journals, online databases, and services across the life, physical, chemical and applied sciences and clinical medicine...

.

Computer preprints

The ability to distribute manuscripts as preprints has had a great impact on computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

, particularly in the way that scientific research is disseminated in that field (see CiteSeer
CiteSeer
CiteSeer was a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers. It is often considered to be the first automated citation indexing system and was considered a predecessor of academic search tools such as Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search. It was replaced by...

). The open access movement has tended to focus on distributed institutional collections of research, global harvesting, and aggregation through search engines and gateway
Gateway (web page)
Gateway is a phrase used by webmasters and search engine optimizers to describe a webpage designed to attract visitors and search engines to a particular website. A typical gateway page is small, simple and highly optimized. Its primary goal is to attract visitors searching for relevant key words...

s such as OAIster
OAIster
OAIster was a project of the Digital Library Production Service of the University of Michigan University Library. Its goal is to create a collection of freely available, previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources that are easily searchable by anyone...

, rather than a global discipline base such as arXiv.
E-prints can now refer to any electronic form of a scholarly or scientific publication, including journal articles, conference papers, research theses or dissertations, because these usually are found in multidisciplinary collections, called open access repositories, or eprints archives.

See also

  • Cogprints
    CogPrints
    CogPrints is an electronic archive in which authors can self-archive papers in any area of Cognitive Science, including Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics, and many areas of Computer Science , Philosophy , Biology CogPrints is an electronic archive in which authors can self-archive papers in...

  • Cryptology ePrint Archive
    Cryptology ePrint Archive
    The Cryptology ePrint Archive is an electronic archive of new results in the field of cryptography, maintained by the International Association for Cryptologic Research. It contains articles covering many of the most recent advances in cryptography....

  • ScientificCommons
    ScientificCommons
    ScientificCommons is a project of the University of St. Gallen Institute for Media and Communications Management. The major aim of the project is to develop the world’s largest archive of scientific knowledge with fulltexts freely accessible to the public....

  • Self-archiving
    Self-archiving
    To self-archive is to deposit a free copy of a digital document on the World Wide Web in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles as well as theses, deposited in the author's own institutional...

  • Prepress
    Prepress
    Prepress is the term used in the printing and publishing industries for the processes and procedures that occur between the creation of a print layout and the final printing...


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK