Preprints won’t just publish themselves: Why we need centralized services for preprints – Collaborative Knowledge Foundation

"Several of the needed services include:

1. Consistent standards applied to preprints (identifiers, formats, metadata)
2. Reliable archiving for long term preservation
3. A record of all preprints in one place for further research purposes (text and data mining, informatics, etc)
4. Version recording and control
5. Best practices in preprint publishing applied across all services
6. Sustainability mechanisms for existing and new preprint services

Comparable services for journals have helped to make journal literature reliable and persistent. If we want preprints to turn into first class research artifacts in the life sciences and other fields outside of physics, we need to apply some degree of the same treatment for them – and at this early stage, now is the time to plan for these services.

A centralized set of services could ensure that, for preprint services that already exist, their efforts are tracked and a record is kept. If they don’t have DOIs they can get affordably get them. If they have DOIs, those DOIs are tracked and searchable through a central API. If the preprints are PDF-only, a version could be converted to structured data and held in a minable database."