Duplicate preprint publication: policy
Santosh Patnaik
Friday, 21 March 2008 07:19 UTC
What is the policy of Nature Precedings regarding articles that are published as preprints elsewhere as well?
If an author declares during the article submission process that the article is preprinted elsewhere, would the manuscript be rejected by Nature Precedings?
And what is the policy for cases in which duplicate preprinting at another location is discovered post-acceptance?
Preprinting at multiple locations may be a good thing as it increases the visibility and accessibility of articles. However, it can complicate citation-tracking. Some might also deem it unethical, wasteful of resources, etc.
One factor to keep in mind when pondering this is the proportion of worthy preprints that nevertheless remain unpublished (in traditional journals).
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Replies
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One goal of Nature Precedings is to help authors to receive more feedback and visibility for their work. Many authors choose to post preprints on personal or lab webpages, on blogs, or in institutional repositories. We think these different venues fill different roles, and hope that Precedings allows authors to reach a wider or different audience than they may via a personal/lab webpage or blog. We also hope that Nature Precedings offers additional benefits for authors.
Nature Precedings has a very liberal policy regarding cross-posting of preprints, allowing (and in certain cases, encouraging) authors to post their preprints in multiple locations. For example, this document has been cross-posted to ArXiv as the authors felt it is relevant to both geneticists and computer scientists and this document was cross-posted on the author’s blog.
If an author does choose to post their preprint in multiple locations, we encourage them to submit a link to the other versions online in order to help readers and/or other automated services (see the two documents above as examples). Submitting a link to another version can be done using a form at the bottom of the document information page. This form can also be used to submit links to peer-reviewed, post-publication versions. While we encourage the author to submit a link to another version, anyone with a Precedings account can submit a link to another version online.
Discovery of a preprint in another location post-acceptance is not a problem for the reasons above. Please note that cross-posting and further dissemination of documents after posting on Nature Precedings is also explicitly allowed by the licensing terms (CC-BY) for Precedings documents. Again, if you discover another version posted elsewhere after the Nature Precedings version was posted, we encourage you to submit a link to that document.
In regard to citations, personal/lab webpages and blogs are generally not “citable”. In order for an online document to be considered “citable”, it needs to have a stable identifier and be permanently archived. Nature Precedings uses DOIs and Handles as identifiers, and we guarantee that documents will be permanently archived and available. (We are also looking into mirroring the site in order to provide duplicate archiving and guarantee availability.) The use of DOIs and Handles also means that citations to preprints should actually be easier to track.
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