Douglas D. Schumann Library & Learning Commons: Preprint Resources for Science and Engineering: What Are Preprints?

What Are Preprints?

A Caution to Students

Please remember that preprint articles are writings that have NOT undergone peer review to ensure scientific quality. Although preprints play an important role in scholarly communication by alerting scientists and engineers to the latest research, they must be used with great caution. They are unsuitable for use in writing assignments that specify the use only of peer-reviewed research.

The Future of Academic Publishing
This article, published in Nature Human Behaviour, argues for a future in which preprints play a predominant role in academic publishing, dispensing with formal peer review and paywalls.

If You Plan to Submit a Preprint...

Ten Simple Rules to Consider Regarding Preprint Submission
Best practices for researchers considering preprint publication.

Archiving a preprint online could affect plans to seek publication some academic journals later. Mathematics and physics journals regularly allow preprints to go through the peer-review process and to be published in their journals, but some journals in other disciplines do not.

SHERPA/ROMEO gathers and analyzes the publication policies of academic journals from around the globe. For more information, see its A bout page.

Peer Community in (PCI)
"Following submission by authors, the thematic PCIs evaluate preprints in their scientific fields based on rigorous peer-review. After evaluation, the PCIs may recommend those preprints, to make them complete, reliable and citable articles, without the need for publication in ‘traditional’ journals."