Pandemic brings preprints into the spotlight | Research Information

"In July 2021, the open-access biomedical and life sciences publisher, eLife, began a new approach to article submissions: now it will only review manuscripts that have already been published as preprints. Alongside this, the focus of the publisher’s editorial process has shifted to producing public reviews that are posted alongside the preprints.

Such a move is an indication of how preprints – the versions of papers before they have been externally peer reviewed or edited – have become more central to the whole scholarly communication process over the past few years.

As Damian Pattinson, executive director of eLife, explained: ‘[Preprints] play a very central role in our entire review process and we’re keen to make them more central. To us, they are an amazing opportunity to change the system and to bring the way in which research is communicated into a fully digital age. The role that we see eLife playing in the long term is one where we essentially are just a reviewing organisation for already published research.’

Researchers in many mathematics, computer science and physics fields have enjoyed a close relationship with preprints for several decades and processes like eLife has recently adopted are not new to them (see box for some reflections from Australia-based astrophysicist, Richard de Grijs). However, it has been recent public health crises that have really propelled the practice of preprint sharing into the mainstream across other disciplines...."