2017 Charleston Library Conference

Since arXiv launched twenty five years ago, many have wondered why other disciplines have been slow to follow their lead. Now the landscape is changing with the opportunity for preprints to play a significant role in the scholarly publishing landscape.

Three significant changes in the last 12 months signal a tipping point for preprints and elevated their role in the scholarly publication lifecycle. 1) In November 2016, Crossref announced the decision to support registration of DOIs for preprints making the author’s work citable prior to publication. 2) In January and March 2017, four prominent funders in the US and UK (Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council of UK and the NIH announced policies allowing preprints to be cited in grant applications and reports. 3) In April 2017, CZI (Chan Zuckerberg Initiative) announced that they are investing in BioRxiv, the preprint server from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary, arXiv (physics) is being enhanced, the American Chemical Societies is planning to launch ChemRxiv (chemistry) and BioRxiv has funding to further develop its rapidly growing services for the life sciences. In addition, software developed by the Center for Open Science has enabled the launch of several new servers in the social sciences, agriculture and engineering.

What does the widespread adoption of preprints mean for the version of record? What are the implications for libraries and institutional repositories? What standards and best practices are necessary to optimize the value of preprint servers?

The perspectives of a scholar/publisher (BioRxiv), institutional repository librarian (TBD), and metadata provider (Crossref) will provide a coherent view of the current state and outlook for preprints.