Scholarly Publishing and Open Access

Researchers can often openly share and/or retain rights to their preprints or postprints (also called the author's final manuscript or author's accepted manuscript). Some researchers post these versions online in repositories (known as green Open Access). PubMed Central, for example, allows researchers to post and search for author's final manuscripts.

SHERPA/RoMEO will walk researchers through their rights to archive specific versions of research.

Postprint

• A postprint or author's final manuscript is the peer-reviewed version of a manuscript that has not yet been copyedited.

Preprint

• “… a complete and public draft of a scientific document. Preprints are typically un-reviewed manuscripts written in the style of a peer-reviewed journal article. Scientists issue preprints to speed dissemination, establish priority, obtain feedback, and offset publication bias.” - NIH https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/not-od-17-050.html

Preprint Facts

• Though preprints do not fall under the NIH Public Access Policy, the NIH encourages investigators to use interim research products, including preprints and preregistered protocols.
• During the SARS outbreak, 93% of publications were disseminated after the outbreak had ended. During the COVID-19 pandemic, from January to July, over 6000 preprints were published in bioRxiv and medRxiv. The publication landscape is rapidly changing.

NIH Preprint Guidance: 

• Citing, reporting, and selecting a repository for preprints
• The NIH Preprint Pilot: a project of the National Library of Medicine (NLM). During the pilot, NLM will make preprints resulting from research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) available via PubMed Central (PMC) and, by extension, PubMed. The pilot aims to explore approaches to increasing the discoverability of early NIH research results posted to eligible preprint servers.

Preprint Policies by Journal Publisher:

List of Academic Journals by Preprint Policy

JScholarship is designed to gather, distribute, and preserve digital materials related to the Johns Hopkins research and instructional mission. Content is deposited directly by Johns Hopkins faculty and staff, and includes born-digital or digitized research and instructional materials.

More information can be found on the Sheridan Libraries Open Access Guide.