Editorial Cite This: Chem. Mater. 2018, 30, 2859−2859
pubs.acs.org/cm
Chemists, It Is Time To Embrace Preprints
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carefully considered knowledge back to the larger community while helping improve it before peer review. By supporting a unified, central source for preprinting, the larger chemistry community can develop a communal spirit centred on research and shared involvement in improving and disseminating knowledge.
ith the opening of ChemRxiv, it has become straightforward to centralize chemistry manuscript preprints in an accessible and free-to-all location. Since preprints at ChemRxiv can be referenced, they can establish early recognition for work, even while that work is getting feedback. This greatly democratizes the availability of knowledge and lends a platform for improvement of manuscripts that might otherwise have a difficult time finding a journal for publication. And this is a good thing for science in general. The benefits to researchers are many: boosting visibility (particularly coupled to social media), improving manuscripts prior to submission by exposure to a larger community, and establishing precedence of research. In general, having a larger community than a researcher’s local department considering a manuscript might lead to important suggestions for additional experiments or alternate perspectives of results from researchers in a similar field. The benefits to society are equally important: making research available to everybody regardless of affiliation, enabling access to modern, novel research to all researchers worldwide, and improving the quality of available research data for education and general outreach. There is a main ethical concern with preprint archiving: are authors tacitly endorsing a “peer-review free” model of publication and opting for speed over accuracy when it comes to getting results out the door? This seems unlikely. The chemistry community is firmly rooted in trusting journals to have properly vetted papers and are likely to rely on this. Preprints will not supplant these sources of information, but rather offer a straightforward method of providing access to research. As the landscape of preprints in chemistry evolves, we can look to the physics community for a lesson: preprinting has been common in physics since the 1990s, but the field remains trustworthy, healthy, and full of innovation. With larger and more prestigious journals now accepting manuscripts that have been previously archived, preprinting has gained legitimacy and can easily be integrated into most labs’ output, and the decision can lead a researcher to submission in a journal that accepts preprinted articles. Importantly, the decision of whether to archive a manuscript lies directly where it should, with the authors of the manuscript. Of course, there are other options. Archiving at ResearchGate can make selected manuscripts accessible but requires slightly more monitoring and upkeep, and this is less likely to be done since it occurs after publication. Additionally, ResearchGate frequently delivers final published articles instead of earlier manuscript versions, which introduces copyright and legal considerations. Interested parties can communicate with authors directly to acquire a copy of the manuscript, passively the same effect as archiving, but with more effort required. Open Access publication is available but can be costly to researchers. Open Access publication is also a known path embraced by many funding agencies and institutions, but frequently has financial costs. As a community, we have an opportunity to help make knowledge accessible and (for publicly supported research) give © 2018 American Chemical Society
Seán Barry, Editorial Advisory Board Member, Chemistry of Materials, and Professor of Chemistry, Carleton University
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
ORCID
Seán Barry: 0000-0001-5515-4734 Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
Published: May 8, 2018 2859
DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.8b01360 Chem. Mater. 2018, 30, 2859−2859
