Peer review and the future of preprints

“For those who don't know about them, a preprint is a draft of a scientific paper that has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Nature Precedings was an open access electronic preprint repository of scholarly work in the fields of biomedical sciences, chemistry, and earth sciences that released the following statement on their homepage this week: ‘As of April 3rd 2012, we will cease to accept submissions to Nature Precedings. Nature Precedings will then be archived, and the archive will be maintained by NPG, while all hosted content will remain freely accessible to all.’ Following this announcement, tweeters and bloggers began to suggest alternative solutions for this simple, open access format for immediate publication of research, including figshare... arXiv is enormously success[ful] in physics, and it currently receives nearly 7000 submissions/month. Even more interesting is the Google scholar independent h5 index that came out this week, which listed the top publications based on citation counts. Non peer-reviewed Arxiv came in at number 5, ahead of prestigious journals such as The Lancet, Cell, and PNAS. So what is different about this new measure from Google to the established Impact Factor from Thomson Reuters? Bjorn Brembs, a PI at the Freie Universitat Berlin has previously described some reasons why researchers should notbe relying on the impact factor. 1. The IF is negotiable and doesn't reflect actual citation counts (source) 2. The IF cannot be reproduced, even if it reflected actual citations (source) 3. The IF is not statistically sound, even if it were reproducible and reflected actual citations (source) It appears that google scholar must agree if they feel the need to develop a whole new metric to measure scholarly journals. So the future for preprints looks bright indeed. If you are looking for somewhere to put your preprint publications, you can upload them in seconds to figshare, where they are openly available to all for free.”