Moving from ‘personal communication’ to ‘available online at’: preprint servers enhance the timeliness of scientific exchange

With the rapid expansion of journals in the past three decades [11], particularly of open-access journals, it is hard to imagine that any particular niche of academia is unserved. However, with this immense diversification comes a challenge of choice and a diffusion of responsibility. Highly specialized journals may not be receptive to publications that fall slightly outside their areas of focus, resulting in the rejection of submissions not because of quality but because of an imperfect fit. This diversification and increased selectivity may mean that authors struggle to find an optimal place for their article, especially problematic for early career researchers who are still developing their academic identity and expertise. Although preprint archives can also be selective, they may be less so than specialized journals. Therefore, they may serve as a convenient temporary space for a manuscript that has yet to find a suitable journal, not by fault of its quality, but by virtue of its specialization.

Journals have sought to reduce as much as possible the lag between submission and dissemination, providing rapid editorial decisions and early access to proofs and electronic copies. But the review and publication process does take time, and some have argued for time-to-publication bias in the selection of articles [12]. Offering a timely avenue to public distribution is one of the main selling points of so-called ‘predatory journals’. Definition of that term remains somewhat nebulous, but in general denotes a periodical seeking to publish articles for a fee rather than for scientific merit [13]. But it should be noted that timeliness is likewise a virtue of preprint archives. Therefore, if time is of the essence and timeliness the main reason an author would consider a fee-for-service journal that boasts blistering processing times (at a potential cost of journal reputation), it may be more reasonable to seek to register the preprint while submitting to a suitable journal with its longer processing time. Indeed, moving from referring to an unpublished manuscripts as ‘personal communication’ to the more robust ‘available online at’ represents not just a less eyebrow-raising designation. It provides a direct way to access the material and to make it available for dialogue, critique and further refinement en route to publication. In this way, the preprint ‘developmental stage’ of a scientific manuscript represents an opportunity for the maturing of its scientific content, and allows investigators to make their material widely available during the often lengthy path through ‘in press’ and into final appearance in print and pixel.

Predatory journals have taken advantage of the growing popularity and demand for open-access publication. This puts academia at risk because it offers a compromised avenue to the literature. In the journal ecosystem and its overabundance of titles, an ill-informed consumer might be forgiven for massing reputable and disreputable journals together, taking information provided at face value and trusting the peer review process. One could argue that the ecological niche populated by predatory journals would not be as viable if authors were able to secure a legitimate place in the literature for their unreviewed work. Expanding free archiving services may help undercut the predatory journal business model.

A special area of medical and psychiatric research, particularly in child and adolescent psychiatry, is that cultural context can strongly influence the clinical practices, and even the effectiveness of treatment. This is especially true when considering non-pharmacological treatments. As most peer-reviewed scientific journals only consider papers written in English [14, 15], editors can also be reluctant to accept publications dealing with strong cultural or linguistic specificities. This is based on the idea that cultural specificity limits generalisability. Over time, there is a significant risk that effective treatments developed in remote, linguistically underrepresented, or impoverished [16, 17] cultures will not be recorded. Preprint archives provide a unique opportunity to preserve and expand cultural diversity in etiology and therapeutics, including of culture-bound conditions.

Access is the main issue that justifies devoting resources to preprint archives. Why bother at all? These archiving services are not heavily accessed and are not currently indexed on the main sources of academic literature. While Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are assigned to each archived manuscript, currently they are only retrievable by means of actively informed search strategies. Therefore, while a manuscript may be archived, it may not be as widely accessed as articles that appear in peer-reviewed indexed journals. But as the practice becomes more widely adopted—as has been the case in many other branches of science– we can anticipate that it will become as natural to search a centralized preprint archive as it is to search multiple sources of peer-reviewed articles today. Additionally, searching preprint archives will offer researchers a glimpse into ongoing research, something not easily accomplished without the proper connections. It therefore benefits researchers to adopt the habit of searching preprint archives, as they offer an idea of what is to come and consequently what remains unanswered.

The idea of registering intellectual property with a publicly accessible server is appealing, but without the scrutiny of an independent third party the degree of trustworthiness of the content may be called into question. Those supporting the practice can justifiably point to the number of articles appearing as preprints that then go on to be published in peer-reviewed journals: about 55% after 24 months [18]. This rate of transition indicates that the use of preprint services, at least currently, is not a repository of articles that are not up to the same standard of peer-reviewed articles, but simply that they have been placed in the registry to be disseminated as expeditiously as possible. It is possible that as the popularity of preprint archives grows the number of unscrupulous researchers seeking to disseminate unworthy content will grow as well. But if disciplines adopt preprint practices and integrate them into their publishing process, we can anticipate that the sophistication of the vetting process will improve, reducing the risks associated with simply accepting submissions with a low degree of scrutiny.