Tag: open access

Preprints: Where They Fit in Today’s Public Access Policy Landscape

Preprints are widely recognized as an important part of the open access publishing ecosystem, but how do they fit into rapidly evolving public access policies from funders?

Although preprints typically do not satisfy public access requirements from funders, they remain an important and effective way of publishing research openly. In the absence of policies that mandate or incentivize preprint publishing, their adoption is largely shaped by discipline-specific research culture and the practical advantages offered by this form of publishing.

Benefits of preprint publishing for researchers

  • Speed: Preprint publishing is fast, especially when compared with traditional journals.
  • Citable outputs: Preprint platforms, such as PsyArXiv, assign persistent identifiers like DOIs, making preprints fully citable.
  • Early credit: Preprints help researchers, especially those early in their career, demonstrate productivity and establish precedence.
  • Improving access: Posting a preprint increases accessibility by making an open access version of the work available.
  • Foundation for peer review: Preprints provide an opportunity for early feedback and can be peer-reviewed through platforms such as Review Commons and PREreview.
  • Documentation and verification: Versioning, timestamps, and persistent identifiers provide a transparent record of the publication.

Since disciplinary workflows and cultures play such an important role in preprints, it is important to have disciplinary preprint servers, such as PsyArXiv, that connect directly to their research communities and increase discoverability of the research.

Preprints and public access policies in the United States

In the United States, the 2022 Nelson memo from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy directed federal funding agencies to update their public access policies in order to improve the public’s access to taxpayer‑funded research. Over the past year, both the National Science Foundation and the NIH have updated their public access policies, and now require that peer‑reviewed publications be made freely and publicly available immediately upon publication, with no embargo, and in designated repositories. While posting a publicly accessible preprint on a server such as PsyArXiv does not satisfy these requirements, the policies do not prohibit researchers from publishing preprints. Private funders may have their own policies regarding preprint publishing.

Preprints in European Union policy

In the European Union (EU), the central funding framework programs play a major role in the development of open science. Starting with the Seventh Framework Program (FP7, 2007-2013) and continuing in the Horizon 2020 program (2014-2020), the rules governing the publication of research results have steadily expanded. The current funding program, Horizon Europe (2021-2027), requires open access publishing of findings from funded projects. However, this strict mandate (no embargos) only applies to the published version or the final peer-reviewed manuscript accepted for publication. This means that preprints that have not undergone peer-review do not, on their own, technically fulfill the requirements. However, preprints are explicitly mentioned and researchers are encouraged to openly publish them as a case of good scientific practice. 

The European Commission (EC) recommends “trusted repositories” for all forms of publication, and it’s interesting that arXiv is explicitly mentioned here as an example of such a platform. Those could either be explicitly certified or disciplinary-specific repositories commonly used and endorsed by the research communities. Such repositories should be recognised internationally. Not allowed in this context would be personal websites and databases, publisher websites, as well as cloud storage services. The EC also provides its own open access publishing venue where funded researchers across all disciplines can submit their publications with no author fees: Open Research Europe (ORE). Their terms of use expressly state that “articles previously posted on a preprint server, such as arXiv, SSRN, BioRxiv, MedRxiv can be submitted for publication in ORE.” 

Developments beyond the EU

From 2026 onwards, non-EU funding agencies are able to join ORE. Switzerland and Norway have taken this opportunity and their higher education institutions will be able to benefit from the diamond open access platform soon. Like the EU and the United States, Switzerland, the UK and Norway require articles from funded projects to be published open access without delay. Among these three countries, only the UK Research and Innovation open access policy mentions and explicitly encourages preprints while clarifying at the same time that preprints are not within the scope of the policy.  

Martin Boosen
Martin Boosen is Repository Manager for MPG.PuRe at Max Planck Information and Technology and Member of the PsyArXiv Member Advisory Board.

Melanie Gainey
Melanie Gainey is a STEM Librarian and Director of the Open Science Program at Carnegie Mellon University and Chair of the PsyArXiv Member Advisory Board.

Christine Krebs
Christine Krebs is Data Steward in the Open Science Team of the University Library of Bern and Member of the PsyArXiv Member Advisory Board.

Discovering research from PsyArXiv

When you share a preprint in PsyArXiv it becomes available for a worldwide audience to read, share, and cite. Readers may access your work via its DOI, by searching the PsyArXiv site, or by discovering it in one of the many other platforms that index content from PsyArXiv. 

Some of the major sources where readers can discover content from PsyArXiv include:

This list will likely grow in the future as preprints are increasingly incorporated into discovery tools. For example, Scopus began indexing preprints from selected sources in 2023, although it currently does not index content from PsyArXiv.

Andrea Schuler

Andrea Schuler is the Head of Open Scholarship & Research Data at Tisch Library, Tufts University, and a member of the PsyArXiv Member Advisory Board.

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!