Abstract
The exploratory analysis of the differences between preprints and the
corresponding peer reviewed journal articles for ten studies first
published on ChemRxiv and on Preprints suggests outcomes of relevance
for chemistry researchers and educators. The full transition to open
science requires to undertake new educational work of doctoral students
and young researchers on scholarly communication in the digital age.
Learning that preprints differ only slightly in comparison to peer
reviewed journal articles for all the basic sciences further supports
the widespread adoption of preprints amid research chemists.
Introduction
Publishing scientific articles in the form of “preprints” (though most
preprints will never have a print version [1]), namely of freely
accessible scientific documents posted on the internet before the peer
review process, is rapidly replacing the conventional publishing
process. For instance, the publication rate of arxiv.org (arXiv), a
website managed by the Library of Cornell University, in 2019 approached
13,000 preprints per month (12,989/month) [2]. Originally aim ed at
physics, mathematics and computer science scholars, the platform
currently hosts works also from quantitative biology, quantitative
finance, statistics, electrical engineering, systems science, and
economics scholars. Similarly, the number of papers published by
biorxiv.org (bioRxiv), a preprint repository for the life sciences
managed by Cold Springer Harbor Laboratory since late 2013, in October
2020 exceeded the 100,000 threshold, with a publication rate of 2,943
preprints/month in the first 8 months of 2020 [3].
In slightly more than three years since its debut in May 2016
preprints.org (Preprints), the multidisciplinary preprint platform owned
by the scientific publisher MDPI, reached the milestone of 10,000
preprints [4]. Yet, it took only 13 months to almost double the
number of preprints to 17,000 by late October 2020. Showing the global
impact of preprints, the latter studies at Preprints were co-authored by
over 64,000 authors, whereas those at bioRxiv from close to 424,000
scholars.
We briefly remind that, in general, prior to publication of the preprint
an editor working for the organisation owning the preprint server checks
the uploaded manuscripts for minimum quality and lack of plagiarism.
Eventually, the manuscript authored with no requirements on how to write
and structure the article is posted online as PDF (portable document
format) file.
Dubbed Chemistry Preprint Server (CPS), the first chemistry preprint
server was launched online in August 2000 at
http://preprint.chemweb.com. Two years later the CPS hosted already 500
preprints in numerous areas of chemistry, from biochemistry to
computational chemistry [
5], co-authored by scholars based in 51
different countries. Alas, the website chemweb.com was subsequently
closed because “changes in search algorithms resulted in a dramatic
decline in traffic and a corresponding drop in revenue” [
6]. Other
attempts to launch chemistry preprint servers from large publishing
companies were unsuccessful [
7]. Publishing in the most
oligopolistic sector of the highly profitable scientific publishing
industry [
8], chemistry scholars were recently found to be those
publishing with the lowest frequency in open access (OA) journals. In
detail, the analysis of 100,000 recent articles from all disciplines
found that less than 20% of the chemistry papers were freely accessible
[
9].
In August 2017 the American Chemical Society joined by the Royal Society
of Chemistry and the German Chemical Society launched a new chemistry
preprint server at chemrxiv.org (ChemRxiv, today partly owned also by
the Chemical Societies of Japan and of China). By late October 2020, the
platform hosted 6,422 preprints, with an average publication rate of 324
preprints/month recorded in the first 8 months of 2020 [10]. By the
same time, Preprints hosted close to 1,000 chemistry preprints.
Getting back to arXiv, a study published in 2016 comparing more than
12,000 preprints with the corresponding refereed journal, concluded that
little differences exist between the preprint and peer reviewed articles
when considering titles, abstracts and the body of the text (both on the
semantic and on the editorial level) [11]. Similarly, extending the
same statistical analysis to 2,500 preprints from bioRxiv revealed very
little changes between the final published scientific papers and their
preprint versions [12]. Focusing the analysis on a few (56)
preprints published by bioRxiv in 2016, the preprints were found to be
generally similar to the peer reviewed final published articles
[13]. The following exploratory analysis looks at the differences
between preprints and the corresponding peer reviewed journal articles
for 10 studies first published as preprints in ChemRxiv and in
Preprints. The outcomes are relevant for both chemistry researchers and
educators.
Methodology
Ten preprints which underwent subsequent publication as peer reviewed
articles in international scientific journals were selected, five from
ChemRxiv (Table 1) and five from Preprints (Table 2).
Table 1 . Selected ChemRxiv preprints and journal hosting the
peer reviewed article.