Preprints and Society
06 May 2025
The Importance of Supporting Open Science
Open science is a broad movement aiming to make scientific research accessible to all. In today’s information-driven world, it’s important that the foundations are in place that allow this global dissemination to happen.
One key component is preprints. Because they are published as open access and without peer review, they accelerate research dissemination and access and thus support the principles of open science.
In this article, we’ll explain what open science is, the importance of supporting this global movement, and how preprints complement its mission.
What is open science?
Open science facilitates free access to scientific research publications as well as data, methods, educational resources, and all elements of a research process. As a movement, open science promotes transparency, collaboration, and reproducibility in scientific research, with the intention of advancing the knowledge base and deepening trust in research.
The advent of the internet and the subsequent open access movement at the end of the 20th century signified a new age of widespread information exchange. It develops the important groundwork set out by open access, ensuring that key findings and data are free to be accessed and built upon in the public domain.
The importance of supporting open science
So, why is it important that we support the development of open science?
Open science is perhaps our greatest gateway to a more equitable future. The easier it is for beneficial information to be accessed, the more good that can be done for society on a larger scale. Freely accessible scientific research can go on to inform real-world policy implementation and help develop pioneering treatments.
By supporting open science, we support its principles. Some of the movement’s main principles include:
- Accessibility
- Transparency
- Equality
It’s easy to see why we should actively support these principles. They are in favor of the greater good, orientated toward the ethics of openness and fairness, and therefore having a positive impact on global politics.
Open science believes that knowledge should not come with a price nor be gatekept, especially when it has the potential to improve the livelihoods of others. It’s therefore necessary for us to support open science by ensuring that these principles are upheld from within the publishing landscape we operate in.
Support through preprints
One important way of supporting open science is by facilitating access to and the development of pioneering scientific research. That’s where preprints come in, a key component of the open science publishing landscape.
A preprint is essentially a work-in-progress, an insight into ongoing research. This may sound detrimental to the validity of the research by releasing it in an early form, but doing so has important benefits for both researchers and the public.
A big draw is the increase in research visibility and priority. This model increases the visibility of your preprint by making it openly available to a global audience, thus increasing citation impact and engagement. As for research priority, every researcher dreams of being the first to publish key findings on a particular topic. Preprints provide researchers with the opportunity to establish priority in their research field, protecting their intellectual ideas and improving academic reputation.
Transparency
Enhanced transparency and collaboration are further benefits of publishing a preprint under the open science model. By being published as open access, preprints encourage open discussion and collaboration among researchers. Although they do not undergo the typical peer review process, others may provide feedback on the preprint, providing helpful observations that can aid the work beyond its early stages.
The fact that research isn’t peer-reviewed should not deter an author from publishing a preprint. As well as the aforementioned benefits, there is often high reliability between the datasets used for the preprint and those in the final published version.
To summarize, the benefits of publishing a preprint under the open science model are:
- Increased visibility
- Research priority
- Enhanced transparency
- Early feedback
- Opportunities for collaboration
Although containing research that’s early in its development, the preprint and the process of publishing one grant the author the opportunity to observe the impact and future potential of their work.
Utilizing open science efficiently
Open science is a philosophy with its own principles. But it’s also a global infrastructure with tools in place to support authors and help communicate information to the world.
To utilize open science efficiently, it’s vital that certain practices aren’t just implemented but proactively supported through certain avenues. Preprints are a proven way to adopt these principles while ensuring that research advances at a fast pace.
By fostering an academic context wherein accessibility, transparency, collaboration, and equality all drive the research output, preprints help nurture the most positive aspects of open science. To find out more, read our previous article on why preprints benefit research.
19 Dec 2016
Response to NIH Request for Information about Preprints and Interim Research Products
Recently, the US National Institute of Health (NIH) put out a call for information about responses about preprints. Below is our response. We very much welcome the NIH’s willingness to open dialogue in this area: the potential role of preprints in funding applications and reports is an important area and one we hope similar agencies will also take seriously. Needless to say, we think preprints have a role to play and can bring benefits to funders and authors.
Please contact info@preprints.org if you have questions or comments on any of the points below.
Types of interim research products your or your organization create/and or host.
Preprints.org is website for the publication of preprints from any discipline. Started in May 2016, it is owned and operated on a non-profit basis by MDPI AG, a Swiss-based open access publisher. At the time of writing (December 2016), over 700 preprints have been announced.
Feedback on what are considered to be interim research products, and how they are used in your field.
Preprints.org accepts articles from all fields of research if the work presented is scientifically sound and can be considered part of academic literature. In other words, papers that could potentially be published as a research article or comprehensive review. We exclude work that has previously been peer-reviewed and published, and opinion articles. A general definition of interim research products could be broader, including editorial material, opinions, comments, data and single sections of articles (e.g. a description of a protocol).
Insight on how particular types of interim research products might impact the advancement of science
One of the primary purposes of Preprints.org is to make the dissemination of research more rapid. Preprints appear online within 24 hours of submission, compared to months typically experienced for a research paper. We believe this provides a significant advancement for author recognition and allows others to quickly incorporate new knowledge into their own projects.
Feedback on potential citation standards
Digital object identifiers (DOIs) from CrossRef are a standard method for providing citations to work published online. All preprints at Preprints.org are assigned a DOI and can thus be uniquely cited. The development of a schema specifically for preprints by CrossRef is both a recognition of the importance of interim products in the scholarly literature, and an ideal mechanism by which to standardize citation. Unique citation of preprints should be a priority for any preprint server, whether via DOIs or another mechanism.
Where a preprint offers unique information, data or conclusions that authors deem reasonable and relevant, it should be cited. However, unless the preprint contains unique information distinct from a peer-reviewed version, the peer-reviewed version should be cited where it exists. In other words, preprints should be considered by authors compiling a bibliography, but peer-reviewed work should take precedence. Preprints should also be considered in grant applications and project reports.
Insight on the possible need and potential impact of citing interim products on peer review of NIH applications
Preprints and other interim products assigned a unique identifier provide a useful mechanism for reporting preliminary and proof-of-principle results and should be considered in NIH applications. They should be treated in the same way as any other non-peer-reviewed material.
Advice on how NIH reviewers might evaluate citations of interim research products in applications
The lack of standardization in the presentation of interim products can cause problems in evaluation. For example, ArXiv needs approval of both authors and papers before they appear online, Preprints.org performs a preliminary editorial check before posting papers, other services do not perform any checks. Best practice guidelines may be helpful and we would recommend that the NIH considers this aspect along with other interested stakeholders.
On the other hand, citations to interim products should be given due consideration. We expect that experienced reviewers will be used to handling non-peer-reviewed material and will be able to exercise due caution in dealing with preliminary data.
Any other relevant information
We have entered a long-term commitment to operate Preprints as a not-for-profit platform. We may explore cooperation options with institutions/universities in the future to ensure a separation from MDPI’s publishing business.
02 Sep 2016
Crossref and Preprints
Crossref is the organisation that issues persistent identifiers for academic digital content, known as digital object identifiers (DOIs). They do a great job at creating a unique link to content including journal articles and related files.
As announced earlier this year, Crossref are in the process of developing a schema specifically for preprints. That means that it will be much easier to differentiate a peer reviewed journal article from a preprint, especially while data mining. Preprints.org is looking forward to helping Crossref test the new service later this month, and implementing it for all our content (including papers already posted online) as soon as possible.
Preprints allows authors to update their articles after some time, and the Crossref schema will enable each version of a preprint to have a unique identifier containing all the relevant metadata, including the DOI of the published article when it becomes available.
DOIs are a great way to find and cite digital content and we are pleased that Crossref is welcoming preprints in to the Crossref family.
MDPI Initiatives
Important Links
© 2025 MDPI (Basel, Switzerland) unless otherwise stated
© 2025 MDPI (Basel, Switzerland) unless otherwise stated