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- Preprints Guide
- Creating a Preprint
- Managing Preprints
- Submitting to a Moderated Preprint Service
- Preprints FAQ`s
What are preprints?
A preprint is the manuscript copy of an article that is going to be sent to peer-reviewed journals for consideration and peer review. Preprints are generally shared through specialized preprint servers like CoP Preprints.
The advantages to submitting your paper to a pre-print server are:
- You get a permanent DOI for your work
- The DOI proves on what date you submitted your work so that in the future, you can show your priority in case peer review rejects your work or takes a long time to accept it
- Your DOI allows your work to be found and cited before it is peer-reviewed and published - usually many months before!
- Your work is searchable by Google and academic databases as a pre-print (non-peer reviewed) paper
- Most reputable peer-reviewed journals allow you to submit papers previously submitted to pre-print servers provided you supply the DOI as part of the submission process.
Have a more specific question? Find more information in our Preprint FAQs.
Our preprint help guides are split into 2 main sections.
- Create A Preprints: This section has help guides for the preparation, creation, uploading, finding, and submitting your preprints.
- Managing Preprints: This section has help guides for the discovery of other preprints, editing, withdrawing, downloading, endorsing, annotating, or citing a preprint.
Creating Preprints
Preprints offer a way to share your research quickly, receive feedback from the community, and gain a wider audience for your work. CoP Preprints and the community preprint services follow the same upload process. Please see our help guides below for more information on creating preprints.
How To Prepare Your Preprint
Follow these 7 steps in this article to prepare your preprint prior to submission.
Upload A Preprint
All prepared to submit your preprint? These are the steps you take to submit your preprint
Navigate To Your Preprints
After submitting a preprint, your preprint submissions will be aggregated in a central location for ease of access and navigation. This article helps you find them.
Managing Preprints
Now that you have uploaded your preprints, you can make manage them with the following help guides. Please see our help guides below and a sneak preview to help with your preprint goals.
Search And Discover Preprints
CoP Preprints allows for the search of content hosted on the CoP make discovering preprints easy. This article shows the ways you can search and browse preprints.
Edit Your Preprints
You can edit your preprint to update its title, version, subject, license, abstract, DOI, and authors
Download Previous Version Of Preprints
Version control tracks and preserves changes made to a file over time. Versioning is available on preprints uploaded to CoP Preprints or a community preprint provider, enabling you to download and compare versions of preprints over time
Endorse A Preprint
CoP Preprints and the community preprint services integrate with Plaudit - a third-party tool - to allow you to publicly endorse a work, giving the authors and readers insight into the work's potential value.
Cite Preprints
Learn how to cite a preprint by following this help guide!
Annotate A Preprint
CoP Preprints and the community preprint services integrate with Hypothes.Is - a third-party annotation tool - to allow you to annotate preprints and provide feedback to the authors.
Preprint Analytics
Each preprint is equipped with a download, and view counter.
Submitting to a Moderated Preprint Service
CoP Preprints service moderate the content submitted to them. CoP preprints using pre-moderation will accept or reject preprints upon submission
Pre-moderation
Submissions to a pre-moderated preprint service will be in a private, pending state until a moderator accepts or rejects them. Moderator may provide feedback. Moderators may be anonymous or may choose to share their identities.
Pending status
After you submit your preprint, a yellow banner will appear at the top of your preprint page with a "pending" status.
Your preprint will remain pending until a moderator has accepted or rejected your preprint.
To find your preprint when it's pending and private, sign in to COP Preprints or a community preprint service.
Then click the My Preprints tab in the navigation bar.
A list of your preprints will appear.
Select your pending preprint from the list.
Accepted status
If your preprint is accepted, you will receive an email notifying you of the decision.
There will be a green banner at the top of your preprint page with an "Accepted" status that is visible only to the authors.
If the moderator has provided feedback, you will see a "Moderator feedback" button on the right side of the banner. Click this button, and the moderator's feedback will appear. Moderators may choose to be anonymous, in which case their name will not be listed.
Your preprint will be made public upon acceptance.
Rejected status
If your preprint is rejected, you will receive an email notifying you of the decision.
There will be a red banner at the top of your preprint page with a "Rejected" status.
If the moderator has provided feedback, you will see a "Moderator feedback" button on the right side of the banner. Click this button, and the moderator's feedback will appear. Moderators may choose to be anonymous, in which case their name will not be listed.
Your preprint will be removed from the preprint service upon rejection.
Preprints FAQ`s
No, all preprints are public unless the preprint is in moderation by a Preprint service.
If your preprint is private, it is possible it has been flagged as SPAM. To have your preprint reviewed please fill out our evaluation form on this Support Page
Yes, review articles or literature reviews are allowed to be posted on CoP preprints.
A preprint is a complete manuscript shared with a public audience without peer review. Often, preprints are also submitted for peer review and publication in a traditional scholarly journal. Preprints uploaded to CoP Preprints or a community preprint server accelerate scholarly communication and public access.
New versions of a preprint can be uploaded to CoP Preprints so that authors and the public have access to the most current version and previous versions. Preprints have persistent URLs and can be cited. Supporting data and code can be shared alongside the manuscript. How to Update A Preprint.
Journal peer review can be a slow process. Rapid dissemination of research ideas and data benefits researchers, their funders, and the public. Preprints provide a mechanism for authors to receive more rapid feedback on their research.
Many communities support the sharing of preprints. For example, the physics community developed ArXiv over 20 years ago. BiorXiv and PeerJ are preprint servers primarily for the life sciences community. PsyArXiv, SocArXiv, and numerous other emerging groups have partnered with CoP Preprints to support preprint sharing in psychology, the social sciences, and engineering, respectively. You can access these community preprint servers through the CoP Preprints landing page or by going to their individual preprint repositories. Finally,CoP Preprintsis designed for any researcher in any field to share their work.
Preprint communities can be either Premoderation or Post moderation workflow. Premoderation communities will review all preprint submissions prior to making them public on their site. Post Moderation communities will allow all preprints to be posted publicly immediately upon submission and the moderation team will review and remove any rejected preprints at a later date. Preprint community moderation teams often work on a volunteer basis, so please allow at least 2 weeks for the moderation teams to review the submission.
Our Source Code is free and open to the public to contribute to and use. Open source code has many advantages, including sustainability. The code base for the CoP and CoP Preprints is entirely open source, allowing other groups to contribute to and expand the platform.
The Center for Open Science complies with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. If you feel your copyright has been infringed, please send notice to our designated agent, as laid out in Section 20 of our Terms Of Use.
Preprints are not generally considered as publications. Most journals will accept articles that have been shared as preprints; however, some journals will not. We recommend you check the journal’s policies on this matter prior to submitting an article that you have previously shared as a preprint. You can find information about most journal policies at SHERPA/RoMEO.
Yes, you can add a publication DOI to your preprint on OSF. Use This Guide to edit your preprint metadata and include a publication DOI.
Open, non-restrictive licenses are available for you to apply to your preprint upon submission. Licencing is not mandatory, however, it is encouraged as it communicates to others how you want them to use and share your work. No license implies that you as the author hold full copyright - meaning no one can use or adapt your work without your permission.
Choosealicense.Com will help you decide which license to choose, depending on how you want others to use and share your work. You can further read the terms and conditions of licenses on Creative Commons. If submitting to a journal, you can look up the journal on SHERPA/RoMEO to see which license they recommend you use. If the journal isn’t listed, you can consult the journal editors to seek their advice.