09/13/2021

Publishers Integrate Preprints Into Their Workflows

Preprint depositing has accelerated during the pandemic

Editor's note: Today's post is by Byron Russell, John Sack, Alison McGonagle-O'Connell, and Tony Alves. Byron is a publishing consultant with Woodstock Publishing Services. He brings over 30 years' expertise in the industry garnered at Ingenta, Pearson, Berlitz and Macmillan. John is the founding director of HighWire, which facilitates the digital dissemination of more than 3000 journals, books, reference works and proceedings. Alison is HighWire's senior director of marketing at HighWire. Tony has worked in scholarly communications since 1990 and leads a team of product managers at Highwire Press, ranging from online platforms and content management systems to analytics tools to access and entitlement software, to e-commerce and order fulfillment systems.

The number of preprint servers has increased substantially in the last five years and now stands at no less than 60. More than 30 new servers have appeared in the past five years. These servers are diverse, focusing on sub-disciplines, or specific geographies and specific languages, and have varying degrees of penetration and technical sophistication. Existing publishing services and workflows are now being reimagined to accommodate preprints. This essay examines how a publisher-centric approach simplifies workflows and speeds the process of peer review through preprint pre-assessment and the checks and balances being implemented by publishers and third-parties to build trust and confidence in preprints.

The depositing of preprints has accelerated even more during the COVID-19 pandemic. In medRxiv's first 6 months, June -December 2019, 900 preprints were posted; in its second, January – June 2020, the total was 6,700, a 750 percent increase.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.