Rise of the Rxivs: How Preprint Servers are Changing the Publishing Process

Scientific publishing is a complex and time-consuming process. Submitting an article to a journal, waiting for review, and revising can take months or even years. Authors can speed up parts of this process by posting early versions their articles online to gather feedback and improve them prior to submission to a journal. These early versions are referred to as "preprints." Preprints have been common practice in some disciplines for decades, but are a relatively new phenomenon in biology and medicine. This column will provide a brief history of article preprints and their use in different scientific disciplines. It will also discuss the advantages of and problems with preprints. A list of popular preprint servers is also included.

The preprint debate: What are the issues?

The debate surrounding preprints is increasing. Preprint proponents claim that preprints are a way to shore up trust in academic publishing, that they provide an additional 'quality' screen prior to traditional peer review, that they can assist with the replication crisis plaguing science in part by making negative or contradictory results public, and that they speed up the publishing process because fundamental results can be presented early, serving as timely reports for the purposes of tenure or grant funding. Preprint skeptics and critics claim that preprints may represent a risk and a danger to quality-based academic publishing because they are documents that have not been carefully and thoroughly vetted prior to their release into the public domain. Thus, academics who cite invalid, poorly vetted, or false facts could cause harm, not unlike the unscholarly 'predatory' open access movement. Feedback on work from lesser-known groups, or on less glamorous topics, may be null or worse than from traditional peer review, annulling an initial key objective of preprints. Although there is no widespread empirical evidence or data yet regarding some of these issues, academics should be aware of the ideological, financial, and political tug-of-war taking place before deciding if they wish to publish their important findings as a preprint prior or simultaneous to submitting to a regular journal for peer review.

'Crackpots' and 'active researchers': The controversy over links between arXiv and the scientific blogosphere

Controversies over string theory (collectively termed the 'string wars') intensified in 2005. Also in that year, the open-access preprint publisher arXiv instituted a new feature called a 'trackback'. This new feature enabled authors of blog posts discussing a paper on arXiv to leave a trackback (a link) to the post on the paper's abstract page on arXiv. The determination of which specific bloggers would have access to the feature generated a public controversy that was played out in the blogosphere. Although the community was in almost unanimous agreement that so-called 'crackpots' should not have access to the trackback feature, it was unable to reach a consensus as to how to define a 'crackpot' or an 'active researcher'. Blogs may provide a window into science in the making, yet this study shows that blogs confound categorization as permanent or ephemeral scholarly communication. The trackback feature was originally conceived to develop certain blog discourse as an alternative or complementary form of peer review. However, the high-energy physics community as a whole questions the ongoing function of the blog.

Automating the Horae: Boundary-work in the age of computers

This article describes the intense software filtering that has allowed the arXiv e-print repository to sort and process large numbers of submissions with minimal human intervention, making it one of the most important and influential cases of open access repositories to date. This article narrates arXiv's transformation, using sophisticated sorting/filtering algorithms to decrease human workload, from a small mailing list used by a few hundred researchers to a site that processes thousands of papers per month. However, there are significant negative consequences for authors who have been filtered out of arXiv's main categories. There is thus a continued need to check and balance arXiv's boundaries, based on the essential tension between stability and innovation.

Accelerating scientific publication in biology

Scientific publications enable results and ideas to be transmitted throughout the scientific community. The number and type of journal publications also have become the primary criteria used in evaluating career advancement. Our analysis suggests that publication practices have changed considerably in the life sciences over the past 30 years. More experimental data are now required for publication, and the average time required for graduate students to publish their first paper has increased and is approaching the desirable duration of PhD training. Because publication is generally a requirement for career progression, schemes to reduce the time of graduate student and postdoctoral training may be difficult to implement without also considering new mechanisms for accelerating communication of their work. The increasing time to publication also delays potential catalytic effects that ensue when many scientists have access to new information. The time has come for life scientists, funding agencies, and publishers to discuss how to communicate new findings in a way that best serves the interests of the public and the scientific community.

Patterns of text reuse in a scientific corpus

We consider the incidence of text "reuse" by researchers via a systematic pairwise comparison of the text content of all articles deposited to arXiv.org from 1991 to 2012. We measure the global frequencies of three classes of text reuse and measure how chronic text reuse is distributed among authors in the dataset. We infer a baseline for accepted practice, perhaps surprisingly permissive compared with other societal contexts, and a clearly delineated set of aberrant authors. We find a negative correlation between the amount of reused text in an article and its influence, as measured by subsequent citations. Finally, we consider the distribution of countries of origin of articles containing large amounts of reused text.