[LIS-Forum] A guide to preprints

[Subbiah Arunachalam]

Friends,

There is growing acceptance among scientists and scholars around the world
for circulating new findings as preprints. Preprints have come to be
recognized as legitimate documents. Grigori Perelman, the Russian
mathematician was chosen for both the Fields Medal (considered to be the
Nobel for math) and the Clay Mathematics Institute's Millennium Prize (it
shouldn't really matter, but I will mention the Prize is US$ one million)
on the basis of three preprints in arXiv which he did not even bother to
send to a journal for publication. Of course, he declined to accept
both the awards.

Physicists were among the earliest to systematically gather preprints and
make them available to a worldwide audience through a central server. In
the past more than 30 years, *arXiv*, operating now out of Cornell
University, has made available more than 2 million preprints (not only in
high energy, condensed matter and astrophysics, but also in other areas
like mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative
finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and
economics. I must add that the preprints culture precedes *arXiv*.
Preprints help advance science faster. If we were to depend  solely on
research papers published in refereed journals, progress in science and
scholarship would be slowed down. Initially, there was some hesitancy in
accepting preprints as a convenient and legitimate means of communicating
new knowledge. Especially among medical researchers. Indeed, Franz Joseph
Ingelfinger, former editor of *The New England Journal of Medicine
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_England_Journal_of_Medicine>* (*NEJM*
) stipulated in 1969 that *NEJM* would not publish findings that had been
published elsewhere, in other media or in other journals. Many medical
journals continue to follow this rule to this day. Says Sanjay Pai, editor
of *Indian Journal of Medical Ethics*, "To my knowledge, it holds good for
all journals. It's the journal equivalent of an Exclusive, which the
newspapers and TV seek." Prof. Peush Sahni, Editor of *National Medical
Journal of India*, says, "most journals still follow it to some extent.
However, more journals will peer review papers put on preprint servers." Now
there are preprint servers to cater to researchers in almost all fields.
Please see
https://www.coar-repositories.org/news-updates/delving-deeper-into-preprints-in-institutional-and-generalist-repositories/
.

A new practical guide to preprints,
https://www.ouvrirlascience.fr/a-practical-guide-to-preprints-accelerating-scholarly-communication/
, would be useful to members of this list and all LIS professionals in
academia and research institutions. It may be of interest to doctoral
students and early career researchers. Please publicize it in your
institutions.

Subbiah Arunachalam
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4398-4658

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