Engage with the Information Community about Preprints

NISO Invites You to Join Us in Washington, DC!

Open Access: The Role and Impact of Preprint Services
An NFAIS Foresight Event, sponsored by NISO

We encourage all stakeholders to be in the room for this collaborative, cross-sector event! Engage with other participants in exploring the function of preprints and how best to support their integration in the scholarly information ecosystem. Registration is open.

Dates: Thursday, November 14 – Friday, November 15, 2019

Meeting Venue: American Geophysical Union, 2000 Florida Avenue, NW, Washington DC

The event showcases representatives with a variety of perspectives on the issue, including:

• Kent Anderson, Founder, Caldera Publishing Solutions
• Angela Cochran, Managing Director and Publisher, ASCE 
• Kathryn Funk, PubMed Central, and Jeff Beck, Literature Program, NCBI, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health
• Gerry Grenier, Senior Director, Content Management, IEEE
• Gregg Gordon, Managing Director, SSRN.
• Thomas Narock, Assistant Professor, Integrative Data Analytics, Goucher College
• Jessica Polka, Executive Director, ASAPBio
• Oya Rieger, Senior Advisor, Ithaka S & R
• Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, COAR
• Tyler Walters, Dean of Libraries, Virginia Tech
• Erini Wiringi, Director, Marketing Communications & Community Development, American Chemical Society

Here's What Some of Those Speakers Will Be Addressing:

Preprints, the Institutional Repository and the Impact on the Research Institution

The presentation will review the purpose and practices of preprint servers and institutional repositories, specifically looking at peer review support, content recruitment, notification services, content types, and issues of institutional alignment. The impact of preprint and preprint servers on research institutions will be discussed, with particular attention paid to tenure review, faculty time commitments, and university reputation. Other significant issues will be discussed such as the “unfunded mandate problem” and the reallocation of resources to steward scholarship within the institution.

Acceptance and Use of Preprints in Diverse Domains and Disciplines

A wide range of disciplines are building preprint services—web-based systems that enable publishing non peer-reviewed scholarly manuscripts before publication in a peer-reviewed journal. We have quantitatively surveyed nine of the largest English language preprint services offered by the Center for Open Science (COS) and available through an Application Programming Interface. Data indicates that all services are growing, but with submission rates below more mature services (e.g., bioRxiv). The trend of the preprint-to-postprint ratio for each service indicates that recent growth is a result of more preprint submissions. The nine domains we investigated host papers that appear in a range of peer-reviewed journals, and many of these publication venues are not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. When comparing the papers submitted to each service, we observe topic overlap measured by keywords self-assigned to each manuscript, indicating that search functionalities would benefit from cutting across the boundaries of a single service. Finally, we will discuss annotation capabilities, which appear to be rarely used by readers of preprints.

The Impact of Preprints on Scholarly Societies: Business Models and Workflows

Preprint servers have grown in popularity across multiple disciplines as a way for authors to share early versions of research outputs that may eventually become journal articles. Scholarly society publishers seem to have responded in one of three ways: Wait-and-see, Get-out-in-front, or quietly acquiesce. The session will briefly introduce the challenges to society publishers and review how some societies have accepted (or not) the use of preprints.

The Unfunded Mandate of Compliance

During the last decade, we’ve witnessed the emergence of public access policies by a range of governmental and private funding agencies to open up scholarly outputs that result from funded research projects. This presentation explores the potential role of preprint services in fulfilling such mandates, and discusses implications from the perspective of stakeholders such as authors, readers, funders, publishers, and libraries. Preprint services aim to ensure the rapid dissemination of research results and facilitate open access for broad and unlimited distribution. How does this vision intersect with emerging public access mandates and requirements? At a global level, funding agencies continue to be uneven in their approaches and policies in regard to publication repositories, technical and metadata standards, and other compliance and enforcement related specifications. Given the evolving nature of the landscape, what are the implications of preprint servers becoming a part of the compliance infrastructure? What are the consequences from a sustainability perspective?

Driving Use: Identifiers and Enhanced Metadata

NIH recognizes preprints as a way for authors to disseminate their work quickly, establish priority of their discoveries, and obtain timely feedback. To that end, NIH asks authors and repositories to ensure preprints are findable through DOIs and open metadata and encourages authors to adopt a license that supports liberal re-use (e.g. Creative Common Attribution licenses). The discoverability and use of preprints is dependent on the application and distribution of consistent metadata as well as the tracking and linking of subsequent versions through permanent identifiers. In this presentation, we will outline the key metadata elements that should be included for preprints to facilitate citation and re-use, best practices for version maintenance, and how to leverage these elements to ensure the integrity and transparency of the scholarly record.

Affordability of Attendance Is Key!

Registration is Open:  Fee includes a continental breakfast, a working lunch and three coffee breaks.  NISO Member Organization: $285.00; Non-NISO-Member: $335.00; Student: $110.00.

Want to register immediately using a credit card? Use this form.

Need a hotel? There is no hotel block associated with this event. Choose whichever location that best fits your budget!