Manuscript (publishing)

"Manuscript" is a broad concept in publishing, that can about one or both:

• the formatting of a short story manuscript,
• an accepted manuscript (by its merit not its format), not yet in a final format (but reviewed), published with non-final-format in ahead, as preprint.

A manuscript is the work that an author submits to a publisher, editor, or producer for publication. Even with the advent of desktop publishing, making it possible for anyone to prepare text that appears professionally typeset, many publishers still require authors to submit manuscripts within their respective guidelines.

Manuscript format

Although publishers guidelines for formatting are the most critical resource for authors,^[1] style guides are also key references for authors preparing manuscripts since "virtually all professional editors work closely with one of them in editing a manuscript for publication."^[2]

Manuscript formatting (also named standard manuscript format) depends greatly on the type of work that is being written, as well as the individual publisher, editor or producer. Writers who intend to submit a manuscript should determine what the relevant writing standards are, and follow them. Individual publishers' standards will take precedence over style guides.^[3]

Preprint

In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset version available free, before and/or after a paper is published in a journal.

Role

Publication of manuscripts in a peer-reviewed journal often takes weeks, months or even years from the time of initial submission, owing to the time required by editors and reviewers to evaluate and critique manuscripts, and the time required by authors to address critiques. The need to quickly circulate current results within a scholarly community has led researchers to distribute documents known as preprints, which are manuscripts that have yet to undergo peer review. They may be considered as grey literature. The immediate distribution of preprints allows authors to receive early feedback from their peers, which may be helpful in revising and preparing articles for submission.

Since 1991, preprints have increasingly been distributed electronically on the Internet, rather than as paper copies. This has given rise to massive preprint databases such as arXiv.org and to institutional repositories.

In some journals, posting preprints may disqualify the research from submission for publication due to the Ingelfinger Rule. The majority of publishers however do allow work to be published to preprint servers before submission while others do not and are evaluated on a case-by-case basis.^[4]

In 2016, several new preprint servers were proposed by Crossref, Centre for Open Science and ASAPbio.^[5][6][7]

In January 2017, the Medical Research Council announced that they will now be actively supporting preprints with effect from April 2017.^[8] Also in January 2017, Wellcome Trust stated that they will now accept preprints in grant applications.^[9] In February 2017, a coalition of scientists and biomedical funding bodies including the National Institutes of Health, the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust launched a proposal for a central site for life-sciences preprints.^[10][11][12] In February 2017, SciELO announced plans to set up a preprints server – SciELO Preprints.^[13] In March 2017, the National Institutes for Health issued a new policy encouraging research preprint submissions.^[14][15] In April 2017, Center for Open Science announced that it will be launching six new preprint archives.^[16]

Stages of printing

While a preprint is an article that has not yet undergone peer review, a postprint is an article which has been peer reviewed in preparation for publication in a journal. Both the preprint and postprint may differ from the final published version of an article. Preprints and postprints together are referred to as e-prints or eprints.^[17]

The word reprint refers to hard copies of papers that have already been published; reprints can be produced by the journal publisher, but can also be generated from digital versions (for example, from an electronic database of peer-reviewed journals, such as EBSCOhost), or from eprints self-archived by their authors in their institutional repositories.

Tenure and promotion

In academia, preprints are not likely to be weighed heavily when a scholar is evaluated for tenure or promotion, unless the preprint becomes the basis for a peer-reviewed publication.^[18]

Servers by field

General

Authorea was launched in 2012 as a collaborative writing platform used by researchers to write, cite, collaborate, host and post their articles. The site is the only preprint server that displays manuscripts as HTML with interactive figures and hosted data.^[19]

PeerJ PrePrints is a free preprint server operated by PeerJ. Articles submitted undergo a basic screening process but are not peer-reviewed. Commenting is allowed by any registered user, and download and pageview data are supplied. All articles are published with a CC-BY license. As of September 2016, 2,439 articles have been made available.^[20] Zenodo is a repository for research data that has been used also as preprint repository, because offers document preview and a DOI number for the submitted document. MDPI launched an additional preprint server in 2016.^[21][22]

Physical sciences

The e-print archive arXiv (pronounced "archive") is one of the best-known preprint servers. It was created by Paul Ginsparg in 1991 at Los Alamos National Laboratory for the purpose of distributing theoretical high-energy physics preprints.^[23] In 2001, arXiv.org moved to Cornell University and now encompasses the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics. Within the field of high-energy physics, the posting of preprints on arXiv is so common that many peer-reviewed journals allow submission of papers from arXiv directly, using the arXiv e-print number.

In some branches of physics, the arXiv database may serve as a focal point for the many criticisms made of the peer review process and peer-reviewed journals. In his column in Physics Today, April 1992, David Mermin described Ginsparg's creation as potentially "string theory's greatest contribution to science". About 8,000 preprints per month are uploaded to arXiv as of 2016.^[24]

An engineering preprint server, engrXiv, was launched in 2016 by the Center for Open Science and administrated by the University of Wisconsin–Stout.^[25] Whilst under development, it used a temporary email deposit system.^[26] As of April 2017, the official home for engrXiv went live after the web interface was launched in December 2016.^[27]

Computer science

The ability to distribute manuscripts as preprints has had a great impact on computer science, particularly in the way that scientific research is disseminated in that field (see CiteSeer). The open access movement has tended to focus on distributed institutional collections of research, global harvesting, and aggregation through search engines and gateways such as OAIster, rather than a global discipline base such as arXiv. E-prints can now refer to any electronic form of a scholarly or scientific publication, including journal articles, conference papers, research theses or dissertations, because these usually are found in multidisciplinary collections, called open access repositories, or eprints archives.

Biological and chemical sciences

The biological sciences have lagged behind the physical sciences in their use of preprints. Based on the success of arXiv, bioRxiv was introduced in 2013, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory,^[28][29] Therapoid Preprint was launched in 2017 by Open Therapeutics,^[30] and ChemRxiv was announced in 2016 hosted by the American Chemical Society.^[31] Articles undergo basic screening for offensive and/or non-scientific content but do not undergo a peer review process.^[32] Between 2007–2012 Nature Publishing Group ran their own preprint server, Nature Precedings. It hosted manuscripts, posters, and unpublished observations.

Social science and humanities

One of the earlier preprint servers is PhilSci-Archive, launched in 2001 for all subfields of Philosophy of Science, hosted by the University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh.^[33]

An open archive of the social sciences. SocArXiv was formed in July 2016 by a group of sociologists, members of the academic library community, and their technology partner, the Center for Open Science, using the Open Science Framework. It is administratively housed at the University of Maryland and directed by Philip Cohen.^[34] SocArXiv officially launched in December 2016.^[35][36] Frequently asked questions about SocArXiv.^[37]

PsyArXiv is a similar preprint service for the psychological sciences which launched in 2016 by the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science and the Center for Open Science.^[38][39][40]

The Social Science Research Network is a repository for both working papers and accepted papers, which shows download and citation data within the site for each stored paper. In May 2016, SSRN was acquired by Elsevier.^[41]

Agriculture and allied sciences

Under construction at the end of 2016 is an Agriculture preprint repository AgriXiv which will be launched with support from Open Science Framework.^[42][43] AgrXiv was pre-launched in early February 2017 on a staging server on GitHub ^[44][45] and then formally launched later that month on Open Science Framework by the Open Access India, community of practice advocating Open Access in India.^[46][47]

Paleontology

Under construction in December 2016 and due to launch in early 2017 is PaleorXiv which will be launched with support from Open Science Framework.^[48][49][50] As of May 2017, PaleorXiv is now open for submissions.^[51][52]

Sport

Under construction in April 2017 is SportRxiv, a preprint archiving service for the sport, exercise, and rehabilitation sciences which will be launched with support from Open Science Framework.^[53][54][55]

Law

The service LawArXiv 'Legal Scholarship in the Open' was announced in May 2017.^{[56][57][58][59]}

See also

• Draft document

See also

• Center for Open Science
• Cogprints
• Cryptology ePrint Archive
• Grey literature
• List of academic journals by preprint policy
• Preprint Explorers - curated Twitter List
• Prepress
• ScientificCommons
• Self-archiving

References

External links

• Eysenbach G. "The impact of preprint servers and electronic publishing on biomedical research". Curr Opin Immunol. 2000 Oct;12(5):499–503
• Eysenbach G. "Challenges and changing roles for medical journals in the cyberspace age: Electronic pre-prints and e-papers". J Med Internet Res 1999;1(2):e9
• Electronic Preprints and Postprints, in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science. Marcel Dekker.
• Inefuku, Harrison W. "Pre-Print, Post-Print or Offprint? A Guide to publication versions, permissions and the digital repository." Ames, IA: Digital Repository @ Iowa State University, 14 January 2013.
• Journal policies on preprints from Nature Precedings forum
• Pre-print, post-print, definitions and terms as defined by SHERPA (organisation)
• Preprint, Postprint as defined by Crossref
• Preprint FAQ by ASAPbio.