Ever since its inception in 2000 by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), World Intellectual Property Day has been celebrated every year on April 26. Various events are held by countries and organizations worldwide to promote the awareness of intellectual property (IP) protection, expand its global influence, and encourage innovation and creativity in various countries and fields.
On World Intellectual Property Day 2026, Preprints.org takes this opportunity to highlight the role of intellectual property in the scientific publishing field, particularly in the context of preprint sharing. An organized and efficient IP framework allows the global research community to flourish and enables the innovation of open science that benefits society.
According to WIPO, intellectual property refers to creations of the mind and its ownership is protected by law through patents, copyright, etc., which enable people to earn recognition or financial benefit from what they invent or create. In the context of research sharing, such ownership is, in most cases, expressed through authorship. Defining a scholarly paper’s authorship is one of the main ways to ensure those responsible for the research are appropriately credited.
Recognizing authorship means recognizing those who contribute to a piece of research, and more importantly, those who take responsibility for the work. In the context of preprint sharing, where research is shared publicly before peer review, clear and ethical authorship practices are especially important. In preprints, authorship becomes visible to the public immediately, and the manuscripts are openly discoverable and citable prior to peer review. Clear authorship helps ensure that credit is assigned from the earliest stage of research dissemination, and that authors take responsibility for the work they share publicly.
As research practices evolve, authorship matters more than ever in the era of AI. In recent years, AI tools have played a growing role in supporting the research lifecycle, including topic development, literature review, data management, and refining drafts. This is how researchers benefit from technological development, achieving more efficient workflows. However, this has also led to various types of AI misuse in research, such as data fabrication and image manipulation. Such AI misuse is misleading and threatens the integrity of scientific publishing.
In this day and age, ensuring the integrity, accuracy, and originality of scholarly works remains the top priority of all preprint platforms, including Preprints.org. We follow the ICMJE recommendations about authorship, the CrediT taxonomy and the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). All those who meet the authorship criteria should be listed with the preprints when they become publicly available. More importantly, we ensure that intellectual ownership is meaningfully attributed to the authors and that accountability remains firmly grounded in real human contribution.
In addition to the effort made by preprint platforms, we also aim to raise awareness of intellectual property and ethical authorship among the broader researcher community on this occasion, reflecting that maintaining clear and trustworthy authorship is essential for everyone. Ultimately, researchers, inventors, businesses, designers, artists, and society benefit from it.
