Preprint

[3] 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.

[10] 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.

The need to quickly circulate current results within a scholarly community has led researchers to distribute documents known as preprints, which are manuscripts that have yet to undergo peer review.

The immediate distribution of preprints allows authors to receive early feedback from their peers, which may be helpful in revising and preparing articles for submission.

A minority of publishers decide on a case-by-case basis or interpret the Ingelfinger Rule to disqualify from submission.

[19][20] After nearly a century of effort by mathematicians, Grigori Perelman published a series of preprint papers on the arXiv between 2002 and 2003, in which he presented a proof of the Poincaré conjecture.

[19] The advantages of preprints can be summarized as: prompt dissemination of outcomes, contributes to free flow of information, increase chances of early feedback and comments, increase number of citations, chances of academic collaborations, make authors enthusiastic, may reduce predatory publishing, increases transparency, may publish negative outcomes and controversies, may receive DOI, link to ORCID, plagiarism check, chance to receive grants and awards, promotion of young researchers, early credit, good place for hypothesis, and early detection of science misconduct.

[12] The disadvantages of preprints could be summarized as: lack of peer-review, absence of quality (in controversy), concerns about premature data, media coverage not properly presenting the inherent uncertainty of preprints,[24] risk of double citation (by publishing a peer-reviewed article, the preprint may also be cited), lack of ethical and statistical guidelines, lack of respect for COPE or ICMJE guidelines, breach of intellectual property regulations in some countries, possible harm to health in certain cases, information overload, breach of Ingelfinger rule (a strategy conducted to discourage dissemination of research reports before they are published in the journal), rush to post low-quality research.