In August 2016, the launch of a chemistry pre-print service ChemRxiv was announced. I was phoned a day or so later by a staff journalist at C&E News for my opinion. The only comment that was retained for their report was my instantaneous feeling that “the community needed a chemistry pre-print server like one needed a hole in the head“. I had been there before you see, recollecting a pre-print server launched by the ChemWeb service around 1996 or 1997 and which lasted only about two years before being withdrawn due to the low quality of the preprints. So what do I think of ChemRxiv now in 2019?
Let me set the scene first. Nowadays, many journals offer open access options, most upon payment of an APC (article processing charge). One can sometimes get a grant for this fee from institutional libraries. Mine for example has a policy that to apply for an APC, one has to deposit a “final author version” (FAV) of a manuscript in our local institutional repository (Spiral). Thus the final outcome is two versions of open access articles, one the FAV and then a version-of-record (VOR) held by the publisher. ChemRxiv can now add a third version to the process, since the expectation is that after some life as a pre-print, the manuscript can then be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. Because the pre-print is allocated a persistent identifier (a DOI), the expectation is that the pre-print will indeed be persistent, with no expiration. Three versions of any given article are therefore now likely to be around, in effect permanently (or what goes for permanence nowadays). Importantly, there is no clear protocol for indicating how these three versions might differ, if they do. Even the FAV and the VOR may contain differences such as errors found in galley-proofing which will appear in the VOR but may not be propagated to the FAV. The congruence between the pre-print and any VOR is even less obvious.
All this came to a head as a result of the pre-print I noted in my previous two posts.[1] Unlike the topic of an earlier post of mine, where the VOR article[2] (not a preprint) allows readers to comment (see e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1059-9#article-comments) I have not been able to identify a mechanism to post any comment about pre-prints. After all, that did seem to me to be a primary reason for exposing a pre-print, which is to invite insights from the community, perchance to improve the science or make suggestions related to it. What I have spotted however was an altmetric index. Hover over that and you get social media metrics. For this pre-print[1], these put it in the top 5% of all outputs, so it is clearly attracting much interest. This interest includes (currently) 1955 views, 539 downloads and commentary via two blog posts (www.altmetric.com/details/59250193/blogs) and 40 tweets (www.altmetric.com/details/59250193/twitter). You would have to work quite hard to visit all the blog posts and read all the tweets to assess overall how the community was responding to any specific pre-print.
So what is the purpose of posting (or should I use the term publishing?) a ChemRxiv pre-print? Is it primarily to gather commentary via social media such as blog and Twitter posts and to use this to improve the final VOR based on such feedback? A colleague I discussed this with suggested that in some very competitive areas of science/chemistry, it might also serve to acquire a date-stamp for the research (part of the metadata associated with a DOI) and hence to claim priority, a stamp which would thus pre-date that obtained from VOR publication by a few months. This might be perceived as making all the difference in a competitive area in terms of gathering evidence of esteem, inclusion in grant proposals etc, especially for early career researchers. There may be other reasons which I have not thought of and comments here for these are most welcome.
I will end with noting the following project: en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Science,[3] being part of the WikiVersity. Here, the APC is dispensed with (no publication costs, at least to the authors), a DOI is again allocated and each article is subjected to both public peer review (en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Science/Peer_reviewers) and can also carry post-publication review comments and even direct edits in the manner of Wikipedia. The other infra-structures of the Wiki ecosystem are available, including access to WikiData, which is high quality reference data.
So I think it is going to be an interesting debate about how the publication of primary research articles is going to evolve. Is a Triad of articles (the pre-print, the FAV and the VOR) the future? Or could it be e.g. the Wiki Journal of Science (extended perchance in the future to Wiki Journal of chemistry?) showing an interesting alternative way? Or is it all just getting too fragmented and confusing?
In an earlier post, I discussed a phenomenon known as the "anomeric effect" exhibited by…
In the mid to late 1990s as the Web developed, it was becoming more obvious…
I have written a few times about the so-called "anomeric effect", which relates to stereoelectronic…
The recent release of the DataCite Data Citation corpus, which has the stated aim of…
Following on from my template exploration of the Wilkinson hydrogenation catalyst, I now repeat this…
In the late 1980s, as I recollected here the equipment needed for real time molecular…
View Comments
Personally I do not (yet) see the need for preprints for my regular articles, but I appreciate the point of Emilio wo stated that: "My comment will remain preprint forever ... but I don’t care, I was able to expose my point of view and now it can be cited."
I have experienced cases where I found mistakes in the published literature, and where communication with authors and editors (informing them of the implausibility and insufficient experimental basis of the published claims) was leading nowhere.
In one case, we did some experiments (at non-negligible cost of chemical, time and infrastructure) to disprove the claims in a paper. We now know the reported chemistry is not working, but this alone does not provide sufficient substance to justify a regular paper.
Having read Emilios comment I now seriously consider submitting a short report on the repeat experiment to ChemRxiv. I wonder, however, what the general position on this would be, if people started to pre-publish work (some of it cranky, maybe) without having the intention to go through the peer-reviewing process.
Lukas,
Re: if people started to pre-publish work (some of it cranky, maybe) without having the intention to go through the peer-reviewing process.
I gather ChemRxiv do have a system to monitor whether a peer-reviewed version of the pre-print is detected at some future stage after the pre-print is posted. The DOI of the peer-reviewed version would then be added to the metadata for the pre-print (and ideally vice-versa). How reliable this procedure is has yet to be established (especially if eg either the title or authors change or increase), but it would be reasonable to say that a measure of greater confidence could be established in those pre-prints for which peer-reviewed versions are detected, and hence perhaps lesser confidence in those for which this is not detected after a given period has elapsed.
The issue then, when a peer-reviewed version does appear, is detecting if there are any substantive differences between the two. I am not sure this is easily automated and it is unreasonable I think to have to regularly read in detail two versions of a paper to detect this.
I discussed above that the introduction of a pre-print can result in three versions of any given scientific article.
Further discussions with a journal editor has apparently revealed a fourth possibility, namely an HTML version of a publisher VoR. Why might the HTML version differ from eg the PDF version? Because some journals allow the HTML version to have comments appended. These do not however propagate to the PDF version.
The status of such HTML comments is also uncertain. Thus are they presumed to inherit the DOI of the article? If not, can they be cited elsewhere, and if so how?
What level of recognition, if any, would a commentator receive?
Will comments persist for the same span of time as eg the PDF? A PDF is a purely stand alone entity and is still intact if separated from the journal environment, whereas a HTML comment depends very much on the journal infrastructures and cannot be easily relocated elsewhere.
How easily can the author of a comment be identified? They may provide only a pseudonym rather than for example a formal identifier such as ORCID.
What is the level of assessment by the journal as to whether a comment is relevant, appropriate, backed up by some form of evidence etc?
The publishing landscape continues to get more complex. It is rather unpredictable at this stage where it is all going!
Her is an interesting analysis of the reasons for using a pre-print server;
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/08/26/sociologist-says-journal-rejected-her-paper-because-shes-shared-it-elsewhere
The analysis ends with the quote But academics as a group remain “woefully ignorant about open access, scholarly communication and the way the landscape of knowledge production is changing in the digital era.”
Perhaps that in part is due to the increasing complexity of digital scholarly communications?