Clinical Chemistry Views and Policy on Preprints

Abstract

Recently, funders including the National Institutes of Health, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Wellcome Trust, Cancer Research UK, French National Alliance for Life Sciences and Health, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative have encouraged the practice of using preprints to speed up the dissemination of scientific findings, capitalize on the use of crowd sourcing to evaluate the merit of the presented work, and broaden the availability of reported findings to other than journal subscribers. This approach, however, has not been universally accepted by scientists, particularly in cases of potential commercial applications from the work or in very competitive disciplines. For example, the repository ChemRxiv for organic chemistry is poorly used because of the highly competitive nature of that field (1). Furthermore, only 11% of posted papers receive comments from the scientific community (1); thus, feedback appears to be minimal and certainly not equivalent or comparable to the peer-review process. The policies of journals for preprints fall into 4 categories4: 1. Outright rejection: If a paper is posted on either a commercial or noncommercial archival server, it will be considered as a duplicate publication and therefore rejected without evaluation. Currently, a majority of biology journals refuse to consider manuscripts posted as preprints (1) (e.g., New England Journal of Medicine ). 2. Rejection unless the …