PsyArXiv Returns to Normal Operations

Thanks to PsyArXiv’s amazing team of 100+ moderators, all preprints meeting PsyArXiv’s requirements have now been approved! Thank you to everyone who volunteered and worked tirelessly over the past 3 weeks to get the situation under control. This was a true community effort, and a testament to the value our community sees in PsyArXiv.

We have now resumed normal operations, which means you can expect any newly posted or edited preprint to be moderated within 24-72 hours of submission. If you post a new preprint (or create a new version of an existing preprint), please be sure to follow the policies to ensure a smooth moderation process.

If your existing preprint is still pending moderation, it is likely that a moderator found an issue which will require an update before it can be approved. The most common issues are a mismatch between the information listed on the paper (e.g., title, author names, author order) and the preprint metadata (the information that is entered into the PsyArXiv system). You can speed up the approval of any preprints with these issues by editing the preprint file and/or preprint metadata to comply with PsyArXiv’s requirements.

Update to PsyArXiv Policies

PsyArXiv is updating its policies to formalize the guidelines that had already been in place. These policies clarify what types of contributions are appropriate to submit to PsyArXiv, and spell out the requirements for submitted preprints so moderators can swiftly approve them.

Since its inception, PsyArXiv has operated in a post-moderation system with informal policies and guidelines to help authors improve their contributions to our server. However, the recent increase in the volume of low-quality and out-of-scope contributions to PsyArXiv has precipitated a need for changes to how PsyArXiv moderates its preprints. Since August 19, 2025, PsyArXiv has moved to a pre-moderation workflow, meaning that submitted preprints will not be publicly available until they have been approved by the moderation team. Once activities have normalized, we expect moderation to take 24-72 hours. 

You can find our updated policies here. 

Changes to Moderation at PsyArXiv Preprints

As you may be aware, a large number of previously-public preprints posted on PsyArXiv have become inaccessible in the past 24 hours. We know this is disruptive to many people and organizations who rely on PsyArXiv preprints, and that it is frustrating to have little information about what is happening. Please read on for further information on what happened and when you can expect the service to resume operating normally.

What happened?

As you may be aware, PsyArXiv has been receiving an influx of low-quality submissions, and the rate of these submissions has increased substantially in the last few weeks. This influx has made it necessary to transition PsyArXiv from a post-moderation system (where submitted preprints were immediately publicly available, but still marked as “pending” until moderation) to a pre-moderation system (where preprints are not available until after moderation). 

The publication of inappropriate submissions in PsyArXiv is problematic for a few reasons. First, once submissions are published, they receive a DOI, which means PsyArXiv and the related page remains accessible permanently. This is true even if the submission is subsequently withdrawn. Although withdrawn files are removed, a DOI will already have been minted (and paid for), and hosting the related webpage will continue to consume resources. When this was happening only occasionally, post-moderation was a reasonable alternative; now that the rate of problematic submissions has increased, it is no longer viable. Second, these submissions can take a while to be moderated, and while they stay up, they degrade the reputation of PsyArXiv. The move to pre-moderation has successfully contained these issues, and we’re beginning to see a decline in these types of submissions.

A consequence of the move to pre-moderation is that any existing but unmoderated submissions, which were previously publicly available, are now inaccessible to the public. Normally this would not be an issue, as moderation is supposed to take about 24-72 hours. However, because PsyArXiv was using post-moderation, not enough emphasis was placed in making moderation as speedy as would be required in a pre-moderation system. PsyArXiv (and moderation in particular) is run entirely by volunteers, and correctly allocating what few resources we have is sometimes a gamble. In this case, we were not able to anticipate that we would need to move to pre-moderation fast enough, and were not able to clear the significant backlog of unmoderated submissions before making this change, for which we apologize.

What happens next?

The PsyArXiv Team is working around the clock to get through the moderation backlog and return PsyArXiv to its full functionality. We are currently scaling up our moderation team to be able to clear the existing backlog as quickly as possible. Unmoderated preprints are being handled in a semi-random order by volunteers, and we expect the current backlog to be cleared in 3-4 weeks. Unfortunately, this means that your previously-public preprint may become accessible again tomorrow, or in 3-4 weeks, but most likely, at some point in between.

We understand how frustrating that can be – many people, if not everyone, in the PsyArXiv team have also had many of their preprints become inaccessible. We ask for your patience, and please know we all care deeply about keeping PsyArXiv functioning at its best. 

If you would like to sign up to become a PsyArXiv moderator, now or in the future, here is the link for that. 

If there is a specific preprint that you urgently need to be made available for a specific reason, please email psyarxiv@improvingpsych.org with the subject line “Urgent Moderation Request” and include the link, DOI, or the OSF identifier to your preprint (e.g., ab3de_v1) and a brief explanation for your request. Please remember that moderating specific preprints takes longer than just moving through the moderation queue, so we request that you only do this if it’s really necessary.

Thank you again for your patience,

The PsyArXiv Team

New to PsyArXiv: DOI Versioning

You might have noticed some changes in how your preprints are appearing on PsyArXiv, and wondered “what the hell is going on?” The big change is that the Center for Open Science/Open Science Framework has implemented DOI (Digital Object Identifier) versioning for all of their preprint communities, including PsyArXiv. This means that every time you upload a new version of your preprint manuscript, it will be given a new DOI. It also means that URLs for papers will have a suffix like _V1 or _V2 after the unique OSF preprint identifier. You will still be able to view current and previous versions in the same way that you have previously, and the system (via Crossref) knows that each of these versions are linked. 

In practice, what does this mean for you when you’re uploading a preprint? For PsyArXiv, it won’t make much of a difference at all. You’ll still be able to upload your preprints in the same way, and upload updated versions when you need to. The only difference is that any new manuscript versions will have a different DOI to the original version.  If you are only making a change to the manuscript metadata, that won’t lead to a new DOI being minted. 

Because PsyArXiv uses a post-moderation approach, any submitted preprints will still go live immediately, and will then later go through a moderation process by our moderation team. 

DOI versioning may have an impact on your current use if you need to withdraw a preprint from PsyArXiv. For example, you might find yourself submitting to a journal that does not permit preprinting (*I guess these still exist somewhere?). When you submit a withdrawal request, it will relate to a specific version. So, if you need to ensure that all versions of a preprint are removed, you’ll need to communicate this request to PsyArXiv (e.g., submitting a withdrawal request for each version) or COS support. 

If DOI versioning isn’t going to make things different for users, you might wonder why you’d want to have different DOIs for different versions of a preprint. Well, having DOI versioning has been recommended by Crossref’s Preprint Metadata Advisory Group (see here:, Section 5.2.2 in particular), and is seen as best practice that supports an open peer review model to track review feedback and changes to the paper over time. For example, you could have an overlay journal that could use DOI versioning to track original submissions, an updated version in response to reviewer comments, and a final version accepted for publication. Another advantage is that translations of articles can have their own DOI, and different translated versions can be linked using appropriate meta-data. So, all in all, DOI versioning allows for more flexibility and opens up new possibilities for communities in terms of open reviewing. 

If you’d like a little more detail on creating a new article version, take a look at the OSF’s help guide here, and here for some more information on how DOI versioning relates to new approaches to peer review. 

I hope the above information is useful – Happy preprinting!

Dermot Lynott is an Associate Professor at Maynooth University, and the current chair of the PsyArXiv Scientific Advisory Board.

When should I preprint my work?

People often come up to me and say, “Dermot, do you have the money now?”* But other times they will come up to me and ask “Dermot, when should I preprint my work?” This is a great question, and the general answer is, “whenever it suits you best”.  The important thing is that your work is out there, unpaywalled, and accessible to the world. So the specific timing might be more down to individual preferences, journal policies (like time-limited embargos), or some other factors.

But, by and large, there is nothing to stop you preprinting your own work, and at a time of your choosing.  There may be exceptions, but they will represent a tiny minority of cases. Here’s a nice introduction to preprinting – that covers motivations and advice for how to get started with preprinting your work.

So when and why do people decide to preprint? Let’s look briefly at different stages of the publication cycle and think why you might want to preprint your work at each point.

At the draft stage?

You can preprint your work before or after your first submission to a journal to get your fully-formed ideas out in the world as soon as possible, with a DOI, and time-stamped confirmation! It provides opportunities for early feedback, increased exposure, and let’s you claim precedence for your ideas.

After a round of reviews?

When you’ve revised a paper, you can preprint what is likely to be an almost final version that you know has had peer feedback. So, it’s still being released well before it appears “in print”, but with the knowledge that you’ve had input from your peers.

When it’s been accepted for publication?

Although later in the publication process, preprinting at this point can still be months before a journal version appears online, so it’s still really worthwhile doing it. And preprinting at this stage perhaps gives authors added confidence, knowing it’s been formally accepted and having gone through a full peer-review process.

Post-publication?

Even if your paper has been published, you can still “Preprint” (or postprint) your non-formatted manuscript version. This has the advantage that your work will remain freely accessible through “green open access”, even if the journal version is behind a paywall. An added bonus is that you don’t have to pay exorbitant fees to a publisher to make your work open access.

I think that more important than when you preprint, is that you do preprint, making your work open and accessible to all. If you’re looking for a place to preprint your work, there are lots of options from very general repositories like Zenodo or OSF Preprints, discipline-specific ones like the PsyArXiv, ArXiV, BodoArXiv, or AgriArXiv (see here for lots more preprint communities), or even region-specific repositories like AfricArXiv. So, if you haven’t preprinted before, make this the year that you do!

Dermot Lynott is an Associate Professor at Maynooth University, and the current chair of the PsyArXiv Scientific Advisory Board.

* I think I originally heard Dylan Moran make this joke, so thank you Dylan!

Member institutions = hero institutions

Look at this parade of hero institutions, members of PsyArXiv who make a financial contribution to keep our preprint server running, free to upload and download, for everyone, worldwide and forever:

So thank you:

  • Carnegie Mellon University
  • Max Planck Digital Libraries
  • Oregon State University
  • Rice University
  • University of Arizona
  • University of Bern
  • University of Leiden
  • University of Melbourne
  • University of Minnesota
  • University of Oregon
  • University of Sheffield
  • University of Victoria
  • Utrecht University
  • Tufts University

for all your support!

We list our members on the PsyArXiv landing page. If you think your institution could join them, please get in touch. Contact details and more at https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv

PsyArXiv has a new streamlined preprint submission workflow

We’re excited to announce a new workflow for submitting preprints to PsyArXiv. This revision brings a unified submission workflow across the OSF preprint services and hopefully makes it easier for users to submit and edit their preprints.
To get started head over to PsyArXiv and hit “Submit a preprint”.

This takes you to the new submission interface, introduced in more detail in this OSF support article (which also shows how to begin the workflow from the main OSF Preprints page). First, enter your manuscript’s Title and Abstract:

After this, clicking on “Next” (button above) will take you through the rest of the workflow, whose steps are indicated on the left, above.

Please see the OSF support article for a complete walkthrough of the submission workflow. As always, you’ll find a “Contact Us” button over there for any further questions and feedback you might have.

Receiving updates from the blog

This is just a note about receiving updates from the blog. WordPress allows subscribers, but for administrative reasons we need to turn this function off. If you subscribed to the blog several years ago and still rely on this function you’ll need to pick another way to receive updates (sorry!).

If you’re new, there are a few ways to receive updates:

Public Engagement and Outreach: Sept 2024

Today marked the inaugural meeting of the PsyArxix public engagement and outreach subcommittee. Together, myself (Tom Stafford, UK), Shruti Bora (IN) and Matti Vuorre (NL) met and discussed how to promote the awareness and use of PsyArxiv.

Two areas we discussed focusing on were:

  1. Possible overlays for PsyArxiv, to enhance discoverability and discussion of preprints
  2. Outreach in low-resource research environments in, e.g., India, where PsyArxiv has strong potential to add value.

Stay tuned for updates, and if you’d like to help with engagement and outreach around preprints, please get in touch

Financial support for PsyArXiv

Center for Open Science have secured a major funding commitment, until the end of 2025, which will support your favourite OSF preprint servers – including PsyArXiv. It’s a big win for keeping the lights on at PsyArXiv, and continuing the mission to bring about a new age for the dissemination and discovery of scholarship in psychological science.

The funding comes from the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation (IPLC), and since here at PsyArXiv we believe in full and proper credit, let’s list of the “13 sovereign academic libraries” which make up the IPLC partners: Brown University, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Stanford University, and Yale University.

Heroes!

Here’s a quote from the IPLC Directors which we fully endorse:

As representatives of some of the most well-resourced libraries in the country, we are committed to using our resources to promote public access to all research, not just the research our scholars produce&.Investing in infrastructure and services that are directly aligned with the research mission are critical to laying the foundation for a more open and equitable system of research that will result in better, faster answers to the problems of our time.

Read more in the original news item: 2024-03-18: “Support for OSF Preprint Infrastructure and Community Servers“