Discussion documents

Preprint platforms have been common in physics and mathematics but the preprint landscape is changing rapidly with new platforms emerging across various disciplines. This raises opportunities for discussion across communities and for all those involved: preprint platforms, journals, authors, funders and institutions.

Version 1: March 2018

Background/Context

A preprint is a scholarly manuscript posted by the author(s) in an openly accessible platform, usually before or in parallel with the peer review process. While the sharing of manuscripts via preprint platforms has been common in some disciplines (such as physics and mathematics) for many years, uptake in other disciplines traditionally had been low, possibly influenced by differences in research culture and strong opposition by some journal publishers.

Why Use Preprints?

This paper aims to stimulate discussion about how editors should respond to emails from whistle blowers. We encourage journal editors and publishers to comment (whether or not they are COPE members), and also welcome comments from researchers/authors and academic institutions. Please send us comments.//m.lang0752.com/contact-us

Background

The topic for discussion at this Forum was ‘How should a journal deal with persistent complainers?’

Background

Data sharing is increasingly viewed as an essential step in improving research transparency and reproducibility (Taichman et al, 2016; Vickers, 2006). There has been a lot of discussion on the imperative for data sharing in the biomedical arena, particularly of publically funded research. As a result, there are many disciplines where proposals for data sharing are being discussed.

Preprints and working papers have been posted and shared for many years. They report research results that have not undergone peer review, although in many cases the authors also submit to a journal (before, after or at the same time as making a preprint available). In the past 5 years, the number of preprint servers and preprints has expanded and new disciplines, notably biology and life sciences, have seen rapid growth in the number of preprints.

Introduction

Traditionally, theses for higher degrees were published by universities in hard copy only. Now increasingly, these are also archived and may be made freely available via university repositories. They may or may not have associated licenses such as those from Creative Commons which also allow reuse.

Introduction

Competing interests (also known as conflicts of interests — COIs) are ubiquitous. One definition is as follows:

“A conflict of interest (COI) is a situation in which a person or organization is involved in multiple interests, financial interest, or otherwise, one of which could possibly corrupt the motivation of the individual or organization. The presence of a conflict of interest is independent of the occurrence of impropriety.”

Introduction