Summary
In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset version available free, before or after a paper is published in a journal. Since 1991, preprints have increasingly been distributed electronically on the Internet, rather than as paper copies. This has given rise to massive preprint databases such as arXiv and HAL (open archive) etc. to institutional repositories. The sharing of preprints goes back to at least the 1960s, when the National Institutes of Health circulated biological preprints. After six years the use of these Information Exchange Groups was stopped, partially because journals stopped accepting submissions shared via these channels. In 2017, the Medical Research Council started supporting citations of preprints in grant and fellowship applications, and Wellcome Trust started accepting preprints in grant applications. In February 2017, a coalition of scientists and biomedical funding bodies including the National Institutes of Health, the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust launched a proposal for a central site for life-sciences preprints. In February 2017, SciELO announced plans to set up a preprints server – SciELO Preprints. In March 2017, the National Institutes for Health issued a new policy encouraging research preprint submissions. In April 2017, Center for Open Science announced that it will be launching six new preprint archives. At the end of the 2010s, libraries and discovery tools increasingly integrate Unpaywall data, which indexes millions of preprints and other green open access sources and manages to serve over half of the requests by users without the need for subscriptions. During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for published research on the disease spurred a wave of research articles being released as preprints, bypassing the peer-review and publication process, which was proving too slow in the context of an active and novel pandemic.
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Open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. Under some models of open access publishing, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright. The main focus of the open access movement is "peer reviewed research literature". Historically, this has centered mainly on print-based academic journals.
Academic publishing
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication.
Scientific literature
Scientific literature comprises academic papers that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences. Within a field of research, relevant papers are often referred to as "the literature". Academic publishing is the process of contributing the results of one's research into the literature, which often requires a peer-review process. Original scientific research published for the first time in scientific journals is called the primary literature.
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