Preprints: a game changer in scientific publications? | European Heart Journal | Oxford Academic

"The landscape of scientific publications has always been a moving field. Dissemination of medical and scientific information has been boosted in the digital era with the advent of Internet which has won the race for priority and exclusivity to traditional journals. Recently, preprints have gained grounds to conventional peer-reviewed journals as means to disseminate scientific advances. A preprint is a complete version of an original manuscript posted by the authors to an open-access server before formal peer-review process. This allows full manuscripts to be made public immediately to stimulate general and scientific discussion and obtain feedback before formal peer-review and final publication in a classical journal.1–7 This phenomenon has represented a major paradigm shift in the scientific process. Of note, the use of preprints has been boosted in the last 3 years because of the challenges generated by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

Preprints permit claiming provenance of an idea allowing scholars to obtain author’s rights. Preprints offer intellectual protection against scooping because a timestamp of the original manuscript can be demonstrated to claim priority.3 Preprints receive a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and are actively cited. Most large preprint servers do not permit the authors to remove preprints since they are part of the scholarly record. Standard practice is that when the final version of the paper is published the authors add the full reference of the published paper to the preprint.1–4 Of note, preprints on COVID-19 with US National Institutes of Health (NIH) support have been indexed in PubMed Central (PMC), as a pilot protocol launched by NIH...."