Meh. Preprints are (yawn) just part of the science publishing process (see OSI-Infographic-2.0.pdf), where early research goes to get feedback before ending up as peer-reviewed articles (see for example Meta-Research: Tracking the popularity and outcomes of all bioRxiv preprints | eLife). They’re the rough drafts for a ton of science (although arXiv has been the end-state of a lot of physics and astronomy research since 1991). And they also provide an important avenue for quickly sharing findings during emergencies (see also COVID, even though a flood of bad information came in with the good), and for providing a way to ensure that cost is not a terminal barrier to sharing.

 

Like every part of the science publishing process, though, there’s plenty to fix—like the part where the media confuses preprints with peer-reviewed work; the part where publishers need to improve processes for keeping out bad actors and bad papers (hint: peer review isn’t the answer here---it’s just a sanity check, not a fact check); or the part where we still haven’t figured out how to enable more equitable participation in the publishing process, or more affordable access to journals, or make data reusable, or make sure we aren’t just researching first-world issues, and so on (see also every post in The Scholarly Kitchen).

 

But none of this means preprints are the root of our problem. They’re just another piece of a messy system still learning how to work. To the extent they’ve been misused by people with an anti-science agenda, well, let’s figure out how to fix that problem---hammers don’t make very good fly-swatters.

 

Best regards,

 

Glenn

 

Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
Science Communication Institute (SCI)

 

 

Fellow Café-ers –

 

By now, many of you have likely seen today’s guest post in the Scholarly Kitchen, by David Green of Stacks Journal. I’d be interested to hear people’s takes on it:

 

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/04/17/guest-post-preprints-serve-the-anti-science-agenda-this-is-why-we-need-peer-review/  

 

 

 

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