A guide to preprints
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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... . A new practical guide to preprints, https://www.ouvrirlascience.fr/a-practical-guide-to-preprints-accelerating-s... , 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 -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.
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Subbiah Arunachalam