Citability, exposure, stability (see this posting by Hillary Spencer), revisability, open access, community review and ease of use are some of the features of a good preprint system like Nature Precedings. Given the availability of such a system, what factors influence one’s drive to publish ideas and data in it?

Some such possible motivating and deterring factors, whose weightage will vary from person to person and case to case, are discussed here. Such analysis can help improve preprint systems as well as the value accorded to preprints.

MOTIVATING factors

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The only means of efficient publication

For items such as presentations at conferences, qualifying exam proposals, theses, and technical reports, preprinting may be the best and even the only way to publish.

Again, preprinting may be the only way to publish highly ‘radical’ work, aborted work that nonetheless yielded some findings, work communicated incoherently, and ‘uninteresting’ work, including those yielding largely negative findings.

The impetus to preprint will depend on the effort put in, the value one ascribes to his work, the career status of the author, etc.

This, unfortunately being as well a reason behind the dilution of the quality of preprints, implies that a good, community-based review/rating system should be deployed.

Publication just for the sake of publishing

Material deemed not worthy enough by most may be preprinted just to have them ‘published’ for various psychological reasons. Such material can include casual ideations, journal club presentations, etc. Again, recognizing that this factor leads to the dilution of the quality of preprints calls for a good, community-based rating system.

For accreditation

Preprinting establishes the provenance of ideas, especially if they have significance in the future (e.g., think of claims of discovery or patents).

How much this motivates one will clearly vary from case to case. As one of an extreme example, someone being deprived of first or co-authorship of a work, may rush to preprint the work with himself as an author. A simpler example would be the case of a post-doctoral fellow publishing a manuscript that her mentor has been ignoring for long.

Anti-social reasons like enmity

Extreme personal reasons like jealousy or professional enmity can prompt one to preprint material that may even not be theirs.

Solicitation of opinions

Preprinting is obviously the most efficient way to solicit the most opinions.

Regard for ethical values of quick communication

Many would like to disseminate their ideas and findings in the community for ethical reasons like scientific progress, and avoidance of waste of efforts and resources on duplicate work.

Regard for open access

Preprinting is an easy way to provide open access to the results of one’s work. Preprinting manuscripts before publication in journals can reduce the impact of restricted, subscription-based access enforced by most journals.

Storage and access for sharing

Preprinting provides a simple, single-step method to provide one’s manuscript to others to read and comment on (even if one is interested only in the opinions of specific persons).

DETERRING factors

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Anxiety about presented information

The work that is to be presented may appear short of quality to the author, for example in terms of completeness and definitiveness. After all, scientific work is almost always work in progress. One may want to do some more experiments, holding back any preprinting.

The deterrence would also depend on the expectations of others in the author’s group (e.g., a mentor)

Insufficient rewards

For example, if one has a manuscript ready for submission for publication in a journal, then preprinting it may not yield any benefit: the journal would be reviewing and publishing it anyway.

Also, if preprints are not accorded atleast a certain value (by recruiters, by other researchers, etc.), then the labor of preprinting may be deemed unworthy.

Anxiety of getting scooped

Until the scientific and academic community in general, and perhaps others too, like historians, acknowledge preprints and accredit their authors, fear of getting scooped may deter one strongly from publishing preprints.

The level of anxiety will depend on existing competitiveness in the field of work, the novelty and impact of the work, and the status of the submitter in the professional community.

Journals not accepting preprinted manuscripts

Though a majority of journals accept preprinted submissions, and more are likely to do so in future, specific journal(s), like ‘Cell’, that one would like to publish in may have policies that are not preprint-friendly.

Group affiliation

For work involving multiple people, others in the group may be against preprints for any reason, including those listed here.

For example, the professor mentoring the work of a graduate student may turn down the student’s proposal to preprint. For an established professor with multiple projects going, timely communication of one work may not be as important as it would be to a young scientist trying to establish a career.