Editorial pubs.acs.org/jpr
Innovations in Publishing: Prepublication of Manuscripts on Preprint Servers
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ChemRxiv cannot be removed by the author and receive a DOI upon posting. The decision to adopt a chemistry preprint sever was not without controversy, and a lively debate at the Washington, DC ACS meeting followed the announcement. This debate was live-tweeted (http://acsmeetings.cenmag.org/ debate-chemistry-preprint-servers-chemarxiv-at-acsdc/). While I was not initially a strong supporter of preprint severs, I have come to support them. However, I believe they pose some peril for authors, and there are a couple of points to consider when using them. If you have a “hot”, potentially high-profile story to tell, then posting to a preprint server may take the “jolt” out of the story and, in the eyes of some editors, reduce its novelty. On the other hand, if you have competition for the story, then submitting to a preprint server will allow you to “stick a stake in the ground” to establish priority. An important point to remember about preprint servers is that people will see what is posted without the benefit of copyediting or review of the paper (beyond some rudimentary scans for plagiarism and nonsensical science), so for better or worse, what you post is what the world will see. In a traditional JPR manuscript submission process, the journal administrator does a thorough check of a submitted manuscript to make sure that all of the pages, figures, and tables are present, that the Supporting Information is present, and, basically, that the paper is generally suitable to be sent out for review. The review process and professional copyediting performed by journal staff provide a lot of added value to your manuscript, which will be missing from those posted on preprint servers. When you submit to a preprint server you will be putting your reputation on the line, and it may not reflect well on you if a paper is an early draft with multiple mistakes or missing figures and tables. In my opinion, you will want to be cautious and make sure submissions to a preprint server are in “publication ready” condition. By being careful with your submissions you present the work in the best possible light without any distractions. If you have submitted your paper to a preprint server prior to submission to JPR, please let us know in the cover letter. Preprint servers are the latest innovation to speed the process of disseminating new science, but they will not be the last.
he publishing industry has been undergoing significant changes over the last two decades. In just the time I’ve worked at ACS Publications as an Associate Editor and EIC, I’ve gone from communicating papers with reviewers via US mail to assigning papers and communicating with reviewers and authors completely electronically. The advent of electronic submission, review, and publication has eliminated many traditional hurdles for publishing and has resulted in the genesis of many new journals. During this period of rapid growth, the “open access” journal emerged. Open access journals, where the author, rather than the subscriber, pays for the publication process, dramatically altered the traditional publication model and have been so successful that many traditional publishers have created their own fully open access journals. ACS Omega is a fully open access general chemical sciences journal from the ACS with an author fee, and ACS Central Science is an open access journal of the ACS that does not require authors to pay. Authors who submit papers to JPR may get an offer to transfer a paper to ACS Omega if the paper is rejected. Open access enthusiasts also pushed the US Congress to require release of prepublication versions of accepted manuscripts. US government-funded scientists are now required to deposit accepted manuscripts in the NIH’s PubMed Central archive, and many other countries and private foundations have followed suit with their own requirements for their funded scientists. Preprint servers go further, allowing you to post a manuscript in front of your peers before it has undergone the sometimes lengthy review/revision/publication process. These servers allow comments and discussions on submitted papers, thus providing some measure of “crowd-sourced” peer review that may help in preparing or revising a manuscript. They have been popular in the physics field for many years, and in the past few years a biology preprint server was created (http://www.biorxiv.org). Following this trend, the American Chemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the German Chemical Society, and a few others have joined efforts to create ChemRxiv (https://chemrxiv.org), a site where chemists can deposit preprints of manuscripts. Plagiarism of work submitted to preprint servers is certainly a concern, but iThenticate, a plagiarism detection and prevention system, is now cataloging the preprint servers. ACS Publications has been using iThenticate for several years to screen manuscripts for plagiarism, and all reputable journals will implement similar screening measures in the future. At the Journal of Proteome Research, I changed the policy on preprint servers when the ACS was discussing the creation of a preprint server, but I waited until the ACS introduced ChemRxiv before making this public announcement. Unless you are an avid reader of the journal’s policies and instructions to the authors, you may have missed this change. If you are planning to submit a paper to JPR but want to post to a preprint server in advance of submission, you may do so using ChemRxiv or BioRxiv as a preprint server. The ChemRxiv server will specifically target the field of chemistry and in the future may have some features to better integrate with ACS journals. Papers submitted to © XXXX American Chemical Society
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John R. Yates, III, Editor-in-Chief AUTHOR INFORMATION
Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.jproteome.7b00674 J. Proteome Res. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX
