Rise of the preprints | Nature Cancer

"Nature Cancer encourages preprint sharing as a valuable means of research dissemination and scholarly communication....

Indeed, preprints are an indispensable tool for fostering scholarly discourse and accelerating scientific discovery. They permit early and free dissemination of findings to a wide audience, something that is proving particularly valuable in a year when rapid access to COVID-19-related work is of huge importance. Sharing of COVID-19-related preprints has surged — at the time of writing, 2,711 preprints had been posted on arXiv, 2,213 on bioRxiv, 8,099 on medRxiv, 5,472 on SSRN and 3,968 on Research Square — to name some of the most popular platforms. The immediate and broad availability of preprints allows the assessment and discussion of scientific findings on a worldwide level, which can be especially rich when combined with social media commentary. The ability to update preprint versions allows researchers to establish a dated and citable record of their work while they revise and improve it ahead of formal peer-reviewed publication. Importantly, major funders, including the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the European Research Council, the UK Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK and the Wellcome Trust, to name but a few, have also voiced their support for preprint sharing in recent years. Thus, a preprint can provide evidence of an investigator’s productivity and research progress before the peer-reviewed, published ‘version of record’ of their study is ready. Furthermore, the increased visibility provided by a preprint can help raise the professional profile of junior researchers, establish new collaborations and attract the interest of journal editors for formal peer-review and publication....

As yet, however, there is no unifying set of screening practices3 across preprint platforms. It should be noted that the ability of the wider scientific community to provide feedback can act as a real-time quality control filter for posted research. However, reversing the harm caused when incorrect and alarmist information reaches the general public can be hard....

A separate criticism is that the preprint literature can be hard to search. The proliferation of preprint platforms and the fact that major research databases do not index this type of non-peer-reviewed report meant that preprints were not easily discoverable....

A more substantial limitation of preprints is that they often do not provide a complete version of the scientific study, given that supplemental information, such as supporting data, and details on data and code availability, is frequently omitted....

The support of the Nature journals for preprints predates the launch of Nature Precedings by a decade, as demonstrated by a 1997 Nature Editorial1. Our preprint policies were updated in 2019 (ref. 2) to actively promote the use of preprints. Thus, as with all of the Nature journals, Nature Cancer encourages the posting of preprints. Having posted a preprint would not jeopardize consideration of the study at this journal. Moreover, the version that was originally submitted to the journal may be posted as a preprint at any time during the peer-review process. Preprints may also be cited in the reference lists of Nature Cancer papers; however, if this is to support key methodology or central findings in the manuscript, authors may be asked to provide peer-reviewed citations or experimental evidence as further validation. Since June of this year, we have also been offering In Review, a free opt-in service that enables journal-integrated deposition of research manuscripts that have been directly submitted to the journal as preprints on the Research Square platform...."