Europe PMC Blog: Preprints in Europe PMC: reducing friction for discoverability

"From July 2018, the Europe PMC repository will start indexing preprints. Making preprints discoverable through Europe PMC will make the science reported in preprints more widely discoverable and support their inclusion into workflows such as grant reporting, article citing and credit and attribution. This blog post explains why we have done this, and discusses some of the opportunities and challenges that arise from this decision. In the life sciences, peer reviewed journal articles are the global currency by which we share research results, used also, in part, in funding and career decisions. But in the past few years the use of preprints - non-peer reviewed articles, posted to preprint servers - has become increasingly popular. According to Jordan Anaya of PrePubMed, over 2300 new life sciences preprints were published in June 2018 (see Fig.1), in large part driven by the use of bioRxiv...."