Preprints Editorial Office

05 August 2019

We are pleased to announce that Preprints has passed the milestone of 10,000 posted preprints. Having started in May 2016, this has taken a little over three years. In this post, we give some context on what has happened in that time and some details about our current status.



In reaching 10,000 preprints, our congratulations and thanks go to our authors and advisory board who have supported growth of the platform and been crucial to its operation. The current advisory board consists of 147 scholars from all research disciplines. They play a vital role in supporting editorial staff to assess submitted papers, and work alongside our team of volunteer screeners and editorial staff to check the suitability of preprints before they go online. Currently around 23% of submissions are found to be not suitable for publication, either because of missing information, not fitting with one of our accepted article types, or because they don’t meet our minimum scientific requirements. While we do not perform extensive peer review, we believe that it is important to maintain minimum standards in assessing and posting research to ensure that the work is useful to the community. Working with active researchers is vital to this work.

Preprints remains one of the only preprint servers to cover all research disciplines. By making use of MDPI’s extensive experience in publishing open access journals, we are able to provide a fast and fair service to authors. Fast publication of important research results has always been important to us: too much work spends too long in peer review. For this reason, we process most preprints within one working day. We also operate an author-centric model, and Preprints means that authors, not editors, are in control of when their work is made public. By assigning digital object identifiers DOIs and working with indexing services such as Google Scholar and EuropePMC, we ensure that the preprints we post are findable by scholars in the field. At the same time, we make sure that the work is prominently labelled as not peer reviewed, and seek to make links to published work wherever we can.

Current status

Below is a graph showing the distribution of preprints across fields.



Comment

The future for preprints looks bright. Along with other preprint servers, we are seeing broader acceptance and a growth of interest in making early versions of articles available. We will keep our processes simple and fast to ensure that authors can get the greatest benefits of posting their work on our platform.