
What bioRxiv’s first 30,000 preprints reveal about biologists - digital55
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00199-6
======
mindcrime
Fascinating stuff. I found this bit particularly interesting:

 _Preprint websites also help researchers to communicate ideas that might not
be picked up by peer-reviewed journals, says Marina Picciotto, a
neuroscientist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and editor-in-
chief of The Journal of Neuroscience, one of the top 20 journals in terms of
the number of preprints published. These include baseline but otherwise
uninteresting data, she says, and negative results, which are rarely published
in journals. “Preprint servers have a complementary role to play with
traditional journals,” she says._

It would be interesting to see similar analyses for
[https://chemrxiv.org/](https://chemrxiv.org/) and
[https://psyarxiv.com/](https://psyarxiv.com/) as well.

------
lenticular
Note that there are 'xivs available for many scientific disciplines (it's a
publisher restriction that a single repo can't accept work from disparate
fields). If you have any preprints, published or not, _please_ upload them to
one of these services. If people can't read your work, then you did it for
nothing.

A list of repositories can be found here:

[https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/learning/sharing-
preprints/...](https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/learning/sharing-
preprints/#/id/5ac23bbcdd1827131b90e79d)

~~~
jessriedel
> it's a publisher restriction that a single repo can't accept work from
> disparate fields

What do you mean by this?

~~~
lenticular
For example, you can't have a repo that does both astronomy and psychology.
It's a restriction with many publishers, but note that their policies are
usually very gray.

~~~
tofof
Still unclear, to the point of being simply wrong.

One feature of preprint repositories is to decouple the science from the
control of publishers.

How do publishers have a say over what can and cannot be posted to these
repositories? Particularly when, as the article notes, many preprint articles
will never even be published. Please provide a citation if possible, even a
single example.

 _" a single repo can't accept work from disparate fields"_

ArXiv is a single repository that itself hosts papers in mathematics, physics,
astronomy, electrical engineering, computer science, quantitative biology,
statistics, quantitative finance, and economics. [1] All are named repeatedly
and featured with their own sections on the landing page. Are economics &
astronomy considered the same field?

How do aggregators (like BASE and CORE) factor in? Why are they not somehow
publisher-forbidden?

Note also that the arXiv.org FAQ on how they expanded to cover new fields
makes no mention whatsoever of publisher restrictions. [2] Instead, it names
difficulties like finding qualified moderators for the topics as a barrier,
and mentions feasability/desirability as reasons they don't attempt to cover
all disciplines.

[1]: [https://arxiv.org/](https://arxiv.org/) [2]:
[https://arxiv.org/help/support/faq#1E](https://arxiv.org/help/support/faq#1E)

~~~
Vinnl
> How do publishers have a say over what can and cannot be posted to these
> repositories?

Publishers can and do add restrictions on submitted papers, such as "can not
have been made public before". Indeed, this does not applies to papers that
would never have been published, but it does apply to papers that will later
be submitted to a journal.

ArXiv never had this problem, because it became widespread before the
publishers gained much of their influence. It's been a major hurdle for
preprint servers in other disciplines, however.

It is a lot better nowadays, where many publishers explicitly allow posting
preprints. That said, they do still impose some restrictions, and I can
imagine having to post works to preprint servers specific to that discipline
being one of them. A server like biorXiv wouldn't want to miss out on those
preprints, so they'd have to accommodate that - and biorXiv in particular is
very apprehensive about not ruffling any publisher feathers. (Likely a factor
in its success.)

