preprint vs research paper

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Expert Commentary

White papers, working papers, preprints, journal articles: What’s the difference?

In this updated piece, we explain the most common types of research papers journalists will encounter, noting their strengths and weaknesses.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by Denise-Marie Ordway, The Journalist's Resource February 25, 2022

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/media/working-papers-research-articles/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

This tip sheet, originally published in May 2018, has been updated to include preprint research, a type of research featured often in news coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.

Journalists rely most often on four types of research in their work. White papers, working papers, preprints and peer-reviewed journal articles.

How are they different? And which is best?

Below, we explain each, pointing out its strengths and weaknesses. As always, we urge journalists to use care in selecting any research to ground their coverage and fact-check claims.

Peer-reviewed article

Peer-reviewed research — the kind that appears in academic journals and that we highlight here at The Journalist’s Resource — has undergone a detailed critique by scholars with expertise in the field. While peer-reviewed research is generally the most reliable, journalists should keep in mind that publication in a prestigious journal is no guarantee of quality and that no single university or research organization always does the best research on a given topic.

It is safe to assume, however, that articles published in top-tier journals have been reviewed and given a stamp of approval by a number of accomplished scholars. For journalists who are uncertain, we’ve put together a list of 13 questions  to ask to gauge the quality of a research article.

Keep in mind that not everything that appears in a scholarly journal has been peer reviewed. Journals publish various types of content, including book reviews, editorials, letters to the editor and, sometimes, even poetry.

Working paper

This broad category describes research papers that have not been peer reviewed or published in a journal. Working papers can be in various stages of completion. One might be ready for publication in a prestigious journal while another requires significant editing and other changes that could actually alter its main findings. Sometimes, working paper findings are so preliminary, authors will advise against citing their work .

Even so, working papers are a great way for journalists to gain access to new research quickly. The peer-review and publication process can take months to a year or longer, which means that by the time studies get published, their findings are sometimes not as useful or the data are old.

In choosing working papers, journalists should communicate with scholars about the progress of their research and how confident they are in their findings. It’s a good idea to seek corroboration from peer-reviewed research and to ask other researchers for help assessing a study.

A preprint is similar to a working paper in that it has not been vetted through a formal peer-review process. However, preprints tend to be more complete . Also, preprints submitted to public servers such as the Social Science Research Network and the health sciences server medRxiv get a cursory screening before they’re published online for public view.

Preprints, like academic journal articles, are assigned a Digital Object Identifier , or DOI, and become a permanent part of the scientific record.

White paper

A white paper is a report, often compiled by government agencies, businesses and nonprofit organizations, that outlines an issue and often explores possible solutions to a problem. For example, in November 2021, the federal Office of Community Oriented Policing Services released a white paper looking at factors that help or hinder law enforcement recruitment of Black Americans. Earlier in the year, the Advanced Technology Academic Research Center published a white paper on the American Rescue Plan ‘s widespread implications for government agencies.

In the business world, white papers also are used for marketing purposes — to describe a new product or approach, for instance, or diagnose a problem.

While a white paper can help journalists get up to speed quickly on an issue, it’s important to note some white papers advocate a specific position or policy change. Some rely on incomplete research or research that has not been peer reviewed.

Looking for more guidance on writing about research? Check out our tip sheets on covering biomedical research preprints amid the coronavirus and what journalists should know about peer review .

The Journalist’s Resource would like to thank Matthew Baum , the Marvin Kalb professor of global communications and professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, for his help preparing this tip sheet.

About The Author

Denise-Marie Ordway

The what, why, and how of preprints and peer review

Preprints: what they are how they can help improve your research skills..

Preprint servers have been around for almost three decades [ 1 ], so if you’re a researcher, chances are you’ve heard of these by now.

Preprint servers were created to speed up scholarly publishing and allow authors to receive peer feedback on their preprint manuscripts before they submit it to a journal [ 2 ]. Some journals don’t allow for this: they don’t want any version of a manuscript to have been printed elsewhere even as a preprint. Other journals, however, don’t mind or even welcome it [ 3 ].

We’re a big fan of preprints at Publons. We see these servers as a great way to advance research,  boost discoverability , and to improve the professional development of researchers and reviewers.

With that in mind, this blog post will demonstrate how you can use preprints to get ahead in job and funding applications, and to enhance your writing, research, and reviewing skills in our free online  Publons Academy .

Let’s start off by taking a look at the preprint landscape and seeing which servers are currently out there for you to benefit from.

What are the different preprint servers?

The most well-known preprint server is probably  arXiv  (pronounced like ‘archive’). It started as a server for preprints in physics and has since expanded out to various subjects, including mathematics, computer science, and economics. The arXiv server is now run by the Cornell University Library and contains 1.37 million preprints so far.

The  Open Science Framework  provides an open source framework to help researchers and institutions set up their own preprint servers. One such example is  SocArXiv  for the Social Sciences. On their website you can browse more than 2 million preprints, including preprints on arXiv, and many of them have their own preprint digital object identifier (DOI). In cases where the preprint has now been published it also links to the publication’s DOI.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory set up  bioaRxiv , a preprint server for Biology in 2013 to complement arXiv. The bioaRxiv server has a direct transfer service to several journals such as Science and PNAS [ 4 ,  5 ] and a bit over 60% of papers in bioaRxiv end up published in peer reviewed journals [ 6 ].

In more recent years a lot of new servers have popped up covering almost every field including the social sciences, arts, and humanities fields. Here’s a quick overview of some of the rest:

• EngrXiv  – Engineering
• ChemRxiv  – Chemical sciences
• PsyArXiv  – Psychological sciences
• SportaRxiv  – Sport and exercise science
• PaleoarXiv  – Paleontology
• LawArXiv  – Law
• AgriXiv  – Agricultural sciences
• NutriXiv  – Nutritional sciences
• MarXiv  – Ocean and marine-climate sciences
• EarthArXiv  – Earth sciences

What about the medical and health sciences?

The medical and health sciences is the only field lacking a dedicated preprint server at the moment. The reason behind this is in part due to the implications of sharing non-peer reviewed research with the general public [ 7 ].

Imagine a popular news outlet running a headline story based on research that has not yet been peer reviewed, or a patient wanting to try a new therapeutic drug they have read about without understanding the difference between something being screened for a preprint server and actually being peer reviewed?

Yale University are in talks with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who run bioaRxiv to set up a  MedaRxiv  server but the announcement has had mixed feedback [ 8 ]. One thing is for certain to garner a positive respose: it needs to be clear to the wider public what a preprint server is and why peer review is the recognized standard for maintaining the quality and integrity of research.

The benefits of preprints

Showcasing your expertise

Now we’ve learned a bit about which preprint servers are out there, it’s time to look at how they can benefit you.

Since 2017, the  Wellcome Trust  in the UK has allowed researchers to cite preprints in grant applications and end-of-grant review reports [ 9 ]. This means that they recognize preprints as a valid early form of publication.

That’s great news for researchers and reviewers!

That’s because it can help you:

• Bulk up your publications list:  if you’re applying for funding or a new job it might make a lot of sense to be able to add more items to your ‘published publications list’ rather than under ‘submitted’ or ‘in print’.
• Showcase your expertise:  following on from the point above, if you have not reviewed a whole lot yet you could link to open reviews you’ve written on preprints to highlight your skills.
• Make your research more discoverable:  you may want a larger readership and to release your research without the typical wait with a journal. If you publish a piece of research as a preprint you can start sharing it on social media and get traction and citations before it’s formally published in a journal.

There are a bunch more benefits we can add to this list, including using preprints to provide a timestamp for your ideas or method, and making a home for scholarly content that would otherwise be lost (particularly pertinent with replication studies and negative results). You can find more on these points  in this article .

Sharpening your research and review skills

Last year we launched the free, online  Publons Academy  because training in peer review was lacking. We heard as much from researchers across all career stages – especially reviewers new to the scene. Many told us they were not confident enough to accept those first review invitations, while others said they did not know how to get into reviewing and connect with journal editors.

This is a key reason why peer review training courses are essential to the health of the system – and central to the theme for this year’s  Peer Review Week  in September: diversity and inclusion in peer review.

Preprints help to bridge that gap in learning. We actively encourage researchers to benefit from this movement during the Publons Academy because they offer:

• New research to learn from and critique
• A way to showcase your skills and expertise in your field
• A chance to connect with researchers in your line of work
• Insight into how other researchers are looking at and learning from new research

To review a preprint on Publons:  simply go to your private dashboard and under Review Records select ‘Add review’. Preprints are considered published on Publons so click the post-publication review option, then simply add in the title and the DOI or arXiv ID, and then write your review. Publons also has an integration with preprints.org allowing any comments written on their site to be optionally added as a post-publication review on submission.

Top tips to critically review a preprint

Ready to start reviewing your first preprint? A little while back we asked Publons Academy Advisor,  Elisabeth Bik  for advice on how to read a manuscript critically. As her advice almost directly relates to preprints as well, we thought we’d share it here, too:

• Do you have a conflict of interest when reviewing this paper? Do you collaborate with these authors, are they your personal friends, or are they direct competitors? Have you reviewed (and rejected) this paper before? If so, you need to let the editors know.
• Do the title and abstract cover the main aspects of the work, would it spark interest to the right audience?
• Is the Introduction easy to follow for most readers of this particular journal? Does it cite the appropriate papers? Does it provide a hypothesis or aim of the study?
• Does the Methods section provide enough details for the general reader to repeat the experiments?
• If you skip the Methods, does the Results section give the right amount of detail to understand the basic details of the experiments?
• Do the Results refer to the figures in a logical order? Do the numbers in the tables add up correctly? Are any figures/tables mislabeled or unclear?
• Given the data that was obtained in this study, did the authors perform all the logical analyses? Did they include the proper controls?
• Does the Discussion address the main findings, and does it give proper recognition to similar work in this field?
• In general, is the paper easy to follow and does it have a logical flow? Are there any language issues?
• Did the authors make all their data (e.g. sequence reads, code, questionnaires used) available for the readers?
• Is this paper novel and an advancement of the field, or have other people done very similar work?
• Finally (and hopefully you will never have to answer yes to any of these questions): Does the paper raise any ethical concerns? Any suspicion of plagiarism (text or experiments), duplicated or tampered images, lack of IRB approval, unethical animal experiments, or “dual use of research concern”?

You can read our full blog post with Elisabeth,  here .

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Preprints: What is a Preprint?

What is a preprint.

• Posting and Reviewing Preprints
• Finding and Using Preprints

A preprint is version of a research manuscript that is disseminated prior to the peer review process. Preprints are frequently posted in an electronic format and often made available to the public on a preprint server such as bioRxiv  or medRxiv . Most preprints are assigned a digital object identifier (DOI) so that it is possible to cite them in other research papers. Preprints are often associated with a push towards Open Access (OA) as well as efforts to expedite the dissemination of scientific content.  While preprints have been around for several decades, the Covid-19 global pandemic has led to a dramatic increase in the number of publications archived in preprint servers. A 2020 Nature article entitled " Will the pandemic permanently alter scientific publishing " explores the potential impacts of preprints on the scholarly publications life cycle. 

Pros of archiving preprints include:

• fast dissemination/discussion of research results
• feedback from the research community prior to submission to a scientific journal
• earlier documentation of the originality of research based on DOI
• exposure of research to a potentially larger group
• availability of articles that might otherwise not be published
• availability to researchers without library access

Cons of archiving preprints include: 

• dissemination of inaccurate information
• misuse of preprints by media and news outlets
• contribution to "information overload"
• refusal of some publishers to publish items that have been archived as preprints
• What are preprints? (ASAPbio)

Preprints from ASAPBio

Preprints and Peer Review in a Pandemic: Video from JHU

Preprints, NLM, and PubMed

• Preprints: Accelerating Research NLM Tutorial that provides information about Preprints.
• NIH Preprint Pilot
• NIH Preprint Pilot FAQs
• NIH Preprint Pilot: A Librarian's Toolkit
• Next: Posting and Reviewing Preprints >>

• Last Updated: Feb 20, 2024 8:51 AM
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• v.11(7); 2022 Jul 15

A guide to preprinting for early-career researchers

Cassandra l. ettinger.

1 Department of Microbiology and Plant Pathology, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA

Madhumala K. Sadanandappa

2 Department of Molecular and Systems Biology, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Hanover, NH 03755, USA

Kıvanç Görgülü

3 Comprehensive Cancer Center Munich, Klinikum rechts der Isar, Technical University of Munich, 81675, Munich, Germany

Karen L. Coghlan

4 George C. Gordon Library, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA 01609, USA

Kenneth K. Hallenbeck

5 TerraPrime, Danvers, MA 01923, USA

Iratxe Puebla

6 ASAPbio, Cambridge, UK

Associated Data

The use of preprints, research manuscripts shared publicly before completing the traditional peer-review process, is becoming a more common practice among life science researchers. Early-career researchers (ECRs) benefit from posting preprints as they are shareable, citable, and prove productivity. However, preprinting a manuscript involves a discussion among all co-authors, and ECRs are often not the decision-makers. Therefore, ECRs may find themselves in situations where they are interested in depositing a preprint but are unsure how to approach their co-authors or advisor about preprinting. Leveraging our own experiences as ECRs, and feedback from the research community, we have constructed a guide for ECRs who are considering preprinting to enable them to take ownership over the process and to raise awareness about preprinting options. We hope that this guide helps ECRs to initiate conversations about preprinting with co-authors and encourage them to preprint their future research.

Summary: Are you an early-career researcher considering preprinting, but unsure how to approach conversations about the possibility? Here, we discuss preprinting and provide tips to enable you to take ownership over the process.

Introduction

Preprints have attracted the attention of life scientists due to their growth in recent years and their role in facilitating the prompt sharing of research findings related to the COVID-19 pandemic ( Fraser et al., 2021 ). Preprints support the rapid dissemination of research, accelerate scientific progress, and directly benefit individual researchers, particularly early-career researchers (ECRs) including undergraduate students, graduate students, postdocs, research associates, research scientists, junior group leaders, staff scientists, and other researchers. In addition to offering more control over how and when to share research work compared to publication at a journal, preprints enable researchers to present their research contributions to funding agencies and hiring committees while the manuscript is undergoing the editorial process at a journal.

Though ECRs are often interested in open science and preprints ( Sarabipour et al., 2019 ; Wolf et al., 2021 ), many find themselves in situations where the decision on how to publish their research does not lie solely with them. Whether to preprint a manuscript involves a discussion among co-authors, and the ECR's advisor, the group leader, or the corresponding author will often make the final decision. Therefore, ECRs may find themselves in a situation where they would like to preprint but are unsure how to approach their advisor about preprinting. Drawing on our own experiences as ECRs and feedback from the research community, we have constructed the following guide for ECRs interested in preprinting their research. In this guide, we focus on: (1) what preprints are and current trends in the life sciences, (2) how to approach conversations about preprints with co-authors and advisors, (3) common concerns about preprinting, (4) practical steps for depositing preprints, and (5) how to get involved with preprints more broadly. Besides raising awareness, we hope that the resources and suggestions in this article will be informative and helpful to ECRs in understanding the advantages of preprints.

Do your research: what is a preprint?

A preprint is defined as a full draft version of a research manuscript shared publicly prior to the peer-review process ( Tennant et al., 2018 preprint; Mudrack, 2020 ). Posting a preprint serves as a public, permanent disclosure of one's research. In patent terms it would serve as prior art, assigning a date in the scholarly record for any subsequent discussion of who found a particular result first. Preprints are assigned a persistent identifier, most commonly a digital object identifier number (DOI), which allows them to become a permanent part of the scholarly record ( International DOI Foundation, 2021 ). The DOI records metadata for ease of discoverability. Many funders, such as the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the US, the European Research Council, or the Australian Research Council, now allow preprint citations in grant applications or reports ( Kaiser, 2017 ; Watson, 2021 ). The preprint can be cited in subsequent papers furthering the scholarly record and making research results available in a timely manner.

Preprints can enhance the reachability and visibility of research findings, as they are not associated with access barriers ( Fraser et al., 2020 ). Thus, preprints enable open science as the servers are free-to-use and free-to-access, thereby facilitating early discovery and global public engagement ( Maggio et al., 2018 ; UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, 2021 ). Preprints also support an international and equitable scientific community: there is no paywall, which means that researchers can read and cite work they otherwise would not be able to access due to barriers caused by journal subscription fees.

Preprints are not new to the research community. In the 1960s, the NIH created the Information Exchange Groups (IEGs) to circulate copies of biological preprints. The IEGs ended up growing into seven different groups with a membership of more than 3600 participants and distributed over 2500 documents. However, by 1967 the IEGs were abandoned after several journal publishers refused to accept articles circulated as preprints ( Cobb, 2017 ). Physicists experimented with similar models, and in 1991, arXiv was founded as a repository for manuscripts in the physical sciences ( ArXiv, 2021 ). While physicists adopted preprints to disseminate work with colleagues, preprints in the life sciences did not take off until the 2010s, with the start of bioRxiv and initial signs of support by funders and publishers ( Puebla et al., 2022 ).

Preprint servers and landscape

Preprint adoption in the life sciences started with the launch of bioRxiv in November 2013. Currently, over 50 preprint servers cover a wide range of disciplines; for a list of preprint servers relevant to life sciences, biomedical, and clinical research, refer to the ASAPbio webpage ( https://asapbio.org/preprint-servers ; Kirkham et al., 2020 ). While these servers follow different governance models, they are operated by academic communities, academic institutions, or publishers. Similar to journal publications, searching for preprints is straightforward, as Google Scholar and Europe PMC index many preprint servers including bioRxiv, Research Square, and medRxiv. This means that many of the ways that one uses to keep up with published literature (for tips see Pain, 2016 ) can also alert you to the latest preprints.

The number of cumulative submissions to preprint servers over time demonstrates increased acceptance of preprinting among life science researchers ( Tennant et al., 2018 preprint); for the evolution of life science preprints in that time period, see the data indexed by Europe PMC ( Europe PMC, 2021 ). bioRxiv, the largest biology preprint server, had cumulatively published over 200,000 preprints by early 2022 ( Fig. 1 A; bioRxiv reporting, 2021 ). Their sister server medRxiv launched in June 2019 for health sciences, now hosts over 40,000 preprints ( Fig. 1 A). Researchers from over 170 countries have deposited preprints in bioRxiv, with the majority of preprints originating from the USA and the UK ( Fig. 1 B) ( Abdill et al., 2020 ). Previous studies looking at the country distribution of preprints before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, also highlight that the US, China and countries in Western Europe are the most represented in bioRxiv and medRxiv ( Abdill et al., 2020 ; Fraser et al., 2021 ). Disparities in preprint deposition across countries relative to their overall scientific output suggest that geographical barriers may exist to preprint adoption ( Abdill et al., 2020 ).

(A) Monthly new submissions to bioRxiv (orange - November 2013 to December 2021) and medRxiv (grey - June 2019 to December 2021). (B) A heat map showing the country-wise distribution of preprints in both bioRxiv and medRxiv based on the institutional affiliation of the corresponding author. The color coding uses a log scale. (Data curated from bioRxiv and medRxiv- from servers launch untill August 2021).

Consideration of preprint servers based on discipline, scope, policies, and readership is relevant to inform where to deposit your preprint, and in turn to maximize visibility for the work and opportunities for feedback from researchers in your specific field. Data suggests that the adoption of preprints varies from one discipline to another within the life sciences. Neuroscience, microbiology, bioinformatics, cell biology and evolutionary biology are among the fields most extensively represented in bioRxiv ( Abdill and Blekhman, 2019 ; bioRxiv reporting, 2021 ), whereas infectious diseases, epidemiology, and public and global health preprints are strongly represented in medRxiv ( bioRxiv reporting, 2021 ). The strongest disciplines in medRxiv closely overlap with those relevant to COVID-19 research, as many researchers shared their preliminary data related to COVID-19 in the form of preprints to help inform the response to the pandemic. During the initial months of the pandemic there was not only a surge in the deposition of preprints but also in public engagement with preprinted COVID-19-related research. COVID-19 preprints also received more citations, reactions on social media and coverage in the press compared to non-COVID-19 preprints ( Fraser et al., 2021 ).

Engagement with preprints can also vary according to the server and whether it is predominantly linked to a journal's submission process ( Kirkham et al., 2020 ). Researchers seeking to share their work with their communities before or in parallel to journal submission may post to community-operated servers such as bioRxiv, medRxiv or servers that serve regional communities such as AfricArxiv, RINarxiv or IndiaRxiv. On the other hand, some researchers post their preprint upon journal submission, by opting into services offered by journals to post at a preprint server their publisher runs or has a partnership with. Examples of this type of service include Cell Sneak Peak and Preprints with the Lancet (owned by Elsevier) offered by journals in the Cell and Lancet families, or journals in the Springer Nature portfolio, which offer authors the option to deposit at Research Square, a server partnered with the publisher.

I am thinking about preprinting my paper - how should I approach it with my advisors and co-authors?

Talking to your advisor, colleagues, and co-authors.

So, after considering all the above, you would like to preprint your paper; how to get started? As a first step, have a conversation with your advisor about preprinting your next paper. If you are unsure about where they stand regarding preprints, you can start by asking about their views on preprinting. If you have these discussions with your advisor or co-authors by email, we have provided some draft email structures to help you ( Fig. 2 ; Text S1 ). Here are a few important things to consider:

Draft email to one ’ s advisor. An email template to help with initiating conversations about preprinting with one's advisor. We have included the same template and a template for emailing co-authors in text format in the supplementary materials ( Text S1 ).

• Keep it simple.
• Familiarize yourself with your institution or funder policy for communicating the work. Do they encourage or require preprints?
• Find out your advisor's priorities for sharing the group's work.
• Provide examples of other researchers in your field who have preprinted.
• Offer additional resources or seek further input about using preprints.

If you are meeting with your advisor in person, even if you come prepared with all the answers, remember that your advisor may have questions that you did not anticipate or may still be unsure of what might be best for the work after your conversation. They may need time to mull over the options and get back to you; not everything needs to be settled in one conversation. You could offer to gather more information on preprinting or their specific concerns to share with them and then continue the conversation at the next meeting. All authors must be on board to preprint the manuscript, so having these meetings early on can leave time for you to address concerns.

In addition, consider the language and construction of the argument that you will use in your preprinting conversations. Try to use ‘I’ language when discussing your goals and motivations and remind all parties how this aligns with your values or will benefit your career. If someone has a different opinion on preprinting than you do, investigate this opinion further by asking them how they reached that conclusion. Come prepared with resources to share and be aware of common concerns (see below and Table 1 ), but do not pressure your advisor or colleagues to decide right away. Be ready to compromise and table the discussion to be followed up with in the future.

Table 1.

Examples of concerns or questions that may come up in conversation with your co-authors about preprints, along with information and considerations to raise in response when making a case for preprinting

Construct your argument - what concerns may come up in conversations about preprints?

Several concerns or issues may come up in conversations with co-authors, colleagues, advisors, or others in the community. These issues might be influenced by research field, career stage, or experience. For example, those working in medical fields may raise concerns about sharing findings that may affect patients before peer-review; the stakes in patient treatment and public health are higher than in other fields. Preprint opinion may also differ depending on the level of acceptance of preprints in a discipline. For instance, in research fields with strong preprint adoption, it is less likely to receive the response ‘I did not see your work!’ when you preprint. On the other hand, concerns about visibility or scooping may be more significant for fields with relatively lower adoption or acceptance of preprints.

We outline below ( Table 1 ) some of the concerns or questions that may arise during discussions about preprints. In addition, we explore two of the most common themes in greater detail: scooping and sharing the work before the journal peer-review process.

Concern #1: I'll get scooped

A common concern among researchers is the risk of scooping – that another competing group will see the preprint and rush to publish their results in a journal before the preprint authors can do so themselves, thereby depriving the preprint authors of the career benefits of publishing in their target journal ( Bourne et al., 2017 ). Interestingly, there is no evidence that the prevalence of scooping in preprints is higher than in the context of journal publications. For instance, in the 2019 bioRxiv survey, only 0.7% of respondents indicated that preprinting prevented them from publishing in their journal of choice ( Sever et al., 2019 preprint).

Most remarkably, researchers have used their preprints as an opportunity to initiate collaborations with other groups in the field or to coordinate the publication of their work together, thereby avoiding concerns about priority claims. For example, Dr Josh Hardy discussed how upon seeing a preprint from another group, they got in touch with the preprint authors. The two groups coordinated the journal publication of their respective papers, which ended up appearing in the same journal ( Hardy, 2021 ).

Preprinting allows researchers much more control of when they disseminate their work and is thus an opportunity to prevent being scooped while waiting for the paper to be published in a journal. In addition, preprints provide an avenue for researchers in rapidly moving fields to promptly share their work with their community, where the delay associated with peer review may come at the cost of priority. In the bioRxiv survey, 28% of respondents stated that preprints helped them stake a priority claim in their field ( Sever et al., 2019 , preprint).

Preprints enhance visibility

Visibility is an important element in the context of scooping concerns: preprints must be readily discoverable by researchers in the field, which in turn, allows attributing credit to the authors. Will the preprint be seen by colleagues in the field? Or is there a risk that the preprint may be overlooked, and competitors may not cite it?

In the bioRxiv survey, 74% of respondents stated that preprinting increased awareness of their research ( Sever et al., 2019 , preprint). Preprints are readily searchable online, as indexing services and literature search tools increasingly incorporate them (Scopus, Google Scholar, Europe PMC, and Crossref all index preprints). In addition, authors can quickly disseminate preprints on social media platforms. For example, Twitter plays an important role in increasing the visibility of preprints, with many research groups sharing their latest preprints via Twitter or commenting on colleagues’ latest preprinted work ( Chiarelli et al., 2019 ). Furthermore, social media platforms can allow scientists to immediately measure the community's reactions and engagement with the work by the number of tweets, re-tweets, and likes the preprint receives. Many authors now post Twitter threads highlighting the main findings of their preprints or journal articles. In fact, before writing this guide we used a Twitter thread with polls to gauge ECR interest in preprinting, with 92.5% of respondents recommending preprinting to ECRs ( n =40) ( Fig. S1 , Table S1 ). If you are new to social media, there are several existing guides for scientists that can help you get started ( Bik and Goldstein, 2013 ; Heemstra, 2020 ; Cheplygina et al., 2020 ).

In addition, studies have shown that posting preprints results in more attention on social media and a higher number of citations for the article once it appears in a journal ( Fu and Hughey, 2019 ). Altmetric scores are generally higher for articles deposited as preprints; journal publications that have associated bioRxiv preprints receive more mentions on blogs and Wikipedia than non-deposited articles, as well as more mentions in Twitter or Mendeley ( Abdill and Blekhman, 2019 ; Fraser et al., 2020 ). COVID-19 preprints have also been widely reported in the lay media ( Fleerackers et al., 2022 ). The early accrual of citations for the journal publication suggests that the community had already taken note of the preprint, which gave them a chance to consider the work as part of their own research between the preprint appearance and the journal publication.

Preprints establish priority

An important step in the research process is to disseminate your findings to the scientific community, and in turn, be able to claim credit for the work. Recognition for research productivity is essential to establishing a reputation in the field, acquiring grants, and career progress. A preprint provides a permanent time-stamped record for the research findings in a much shorter timeline than a journal publication. Thus, when time is critical (e.g. when completing your thesis or finishing a project before moving to another position), preprinting can greatly benefit ECRs.

In the coming years, life scientists might use preprints as a channel to establish priority, which has been established practice in the physics community for years ( Vale and Hyman, 2016 ). In support of this idea, several publishers such as EMBO Press, PLOS, and eLife have ‘ scoop protection’ policies that recognize the date of the preprint deposition as the date at which their policy applies. The scooping-protection policy stipulates that from the date of the preprint, if another publication appears reporting similar findings, that would not impact the consideration of the paper submitted to their journals.

Researchers often worry about the potential risk of scooping when they present their preliminary findings at conferences or symposiums. Attendees could use the information they heard at the conference and scoop the presenter. As the information would have been available only to the conference attendees, there is limited audience to vouch for who has priority over that work and it would not be easy to establish who did what and when. Depositing a preprint before the conference presentation records the priority claim with a time-stamp and provides protection from scooping.

Preprints are citable

A tangible benefit of preprints is that they are citable and can prove productivity for prospective funders. Many funding agencies now have policies that allow citing preprints as part of grant applications and reports (more information on funder policies at asapbio.org/funder-policies). We expect to see more funding agencies update their policies, recognizing the importance of preprints in the future. Besides funders, several research institutions have started to include preprints in their processes for hiring and promotion (see asapbio.org/university-policies).

Concern #2: My work hasn't been peer reviewed yet

Another common concern that may arise in conversations around preprints is sharing work before peer review. Some researchers worry about disseminating their findings before completing the traditional peer-review process, which provides feedback on the work and can also address any errors before the broader circulation of the manuscript. It is important to note that the preprint should be carefully prepared before depositing it to the server, similar to journal manuscript preparation. To this end, ensure that all co-authors check the paper before posting and consider receiving feedback from colleagues prior to submitting the paper to the preprint server.

Preprint feedback focuses on the science and not on journal fit

An advantage of posting a preprint is that feedback received from the scientific community can help to improve the manuscript and is independent of subjective evaluations about journal fit. Incorporating community feedback into the manuscript can even increase the chances of eventual publication. A preprint brings more eyes and a broader range of perspectives to the paper than the traditional two or three reviewers from the journal's peer-review. Thus, it can provide a robust mechanism to identify any issues before a manuscript enters the journal's editorial process and valuable input on specific aspects including the statistical analyses, methodology, or the interpretations of the data. Importantly, preprint servers allow authors to submit new versions of the preprint. It is straightforward for authors to post a revision as a new preprint version after incorporating additional work or correcting any oversights. The mechanisms for preprint versioning allow updates or corrections to the paper in a faster and simpler path compared to corrections to the article's version of record at a journal.

Preprints enable journal-independent peer-review

Several platforms offer feedback and evaluations on preprints, and in some of these the peer-review process runs similarly to the traditional journal peer review. For example, Review Commons, an initiative by EMBO Press and ASAPbio, allows researchers to submit their preprint for peer review prior to journal submission. Review Commons has partnered with 17 affiliate journals — the Company of Biologists’s journals, EMBO Press journals, PLOS, eLife , Journal of Cell Biology , and Molecular Biology of the Cell — that have agreed to use the reviews provided by Review Commons to inform their evaluation and editorial decision, thus avoiding multiple review rounds. Review Commons requires the authors to post a preprint before submitting the manuscript to an affiliate journal.

Services such as Review Commons and Peer Community In - which also completes evaluation of preprints - involve the review of preprints in a process coordinated by an editor or similar role. On the other hand, other platforms, such as PREreview and PubPeer, allow any community member to provide feedback on the preprint ( Table 2 ). In addition, many preprint servers offer commenting features that allow readers to contribute comments on preprints in a variety of formats; such comments may involve praise for the work, queries to the authors, comments on specific aspects of the study, summaries from journal club discussions or even copies of full reviews for the preprint ( Malički et al., 2021 ).

Table 2.

Preprint commentary and review platforms and their characteristics. Information for the different platforms is based on the records available at ReImagine Review.

Public comments posted on the preprint can also help inform and positively shape the editor's decision upon manuscript submission to a journal. Some journals such as Proceedings of the Royal Society B and Open Biology have appointed preprint editors who check the latest preprints to solicit submissions to their journals ( Neiman et al., 2021 ).

Preprints generally change little upon journal publication

A majority of the manuscripts posted as preprints go on to be published in a journal; a study of bioRxiv preprints found that two thirds of the preprints appeared at a journal within 2 years ( Abdill and Blekhman , 2019 ). Additional studies that have evaluated the content of preprints and their associated journal publications found that the reporting quality in preprints is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles ( Carneiro et al., 2020 ) and that the main content and conclusions changed little between the preprint and the journal publication for the same work ( Brierley et al., 2022 ; Nicholson et al., 2022 ; Zeraatkar et al., 2022 ). These studies suggest that there is no evidence to consider research findings reported via preprints as less trustworthy than journal publications. The peer-review process at journals provides a valuable mechanism to scrutinize research work and identify potential flaws or oversights, but it is important to remember that peer review is not infallible ( Schroter et al., 2008 ), and the ‘peer reviewed’ label does not imply that a particular published finding is reliable; all research works should be critically appraised, whether they appear at a journal, at a preprint server or in another format.

Next steps - how to preprint your paper?

Once you have your co-authors’ green light to preprint the work, here are a few actionable steps to complete the preprint deposition ( Fig. 3 ).

Preprint submission checklist. A suggested checklist to help with preprint submission after having a successful conversation and the green light from advisors and co-authors to preprint.

Preprint server

First, you need to choose a preprint server for your manuscript. Think carefully about your audience and what server will best reach the targeted audience (see above). If you plan to submit the manuscript to a journal, familiarize yourself with the journal's editorial policies about preprints. Check if the journal specifies any preprint servers they accept for preprint deposition, for example, some journals have policies only allowing preprints to be deposited on non-profit servers (e.g. bioRxiv, AfricaArXiv ).

Preprint license

It is also important to think about the license you will apply to the preprint. You have several options - from retaining all rights (i.e. meaning you do not give default permission to reuse the work) to a range of Creative Commons (CC) licenses, which standardize permissions for the type of use allowed for the work (asapbio.org/licensing-faq). A CC BY license allows any type of re-use without requiring permission from the author, providing credit is given to the original author(s). This type of credit is called attribution ( AboutCCLicenses, n.d. ). The CC BY license is the most common type and its designation has been shown to increase citation and visibility of monographs ( Snijder, 2015 ). There are additional license options that can be used to preserve copyright, the more licenses options chosen increases the restrictions on reuse: CC BY-NC (cannot be used for commercial purposes), CC BY-ND (non-derivative, must be shared in its original form) and CC BY-SA (share-alike, if re-used must be published under the same or a more restrictive license). These license options (BY, NC, ND, and SA) can be chosen in combination to retain rights and further specify reuse restrictions (e.g. CC BY-NC-SA, etc). While some preprint servers offer a range of license options (e.g. bioRxiv, medRxiv, OSF Preprints), others require a CC-BY license (e.g. Research Square, preprints.org, SciELO Preprints).

Preprint preparation

In general, preprint servers are format agnostic, meaning they accept a single file of your manuscript in any format (for example, a single PDF file in the formatting style of the journal of your choice!) and then authorship information. You can link the preprint-related data and additional resources deposited in public repositories to your preprint. This may be important if your target journal has an open-data policy (e.g. ASM journals, BMC-series journals) which requires all data and code to be publicly available.

Preprint submission

Now that you've chosen a preprint server, license type, and prepared your manuscript, decide who will submit the manuscript and when it will be submitted. In the bioRxiv survey, authors preferred preprinting either before journal submission (42%) or concurrent to journal submission (37%) ( Sever et al., 2019 preprint). Some journals work with preprint servers, like bioRxiv, to also allow for direct submission of your manuscript to a journal after posting to the preprint server. After the preprint submission, don't forget to share your new preprint on social media ( Heemstra, 2020 ; Cheplygina et al., 2020 )!

If your co-authors aren't interested in preprinting this time...

Irrespective of the field, many researchers are still wary of preprinting, and it is understandable that other authors may have concerns or may need additional time to consider your request. Almost half of the respondents in our Twitter survey who were unable to convince their co-authors to preprint, indicated that their co-authors might be open to preprinting in the future. Offer to continue the conversation another time and suggest to them that it's worth keeping an eye on the latest preprints coming out in your field. You may also suggest you revisit the option of preprinting for another paper where they may view the stakes as less high. If your co-authors are still uninterested, there are still many other ways to get involved with preprints even if you are unable to preprint your current work.

Other ways to get involved with preprints

Beyond providing an opportunity to promptly share your work and get credit for it, preprints also offer other benefits to your scientific career. For example, several communities with an interest in open science also support preprints. Getting involved with one or more of those groups can be a way to expand your professional network and connect with other researchers in your discipline.

ASAPbio has an international community of researchers and others in the science communication space, who drive initiatives to support preprints and interact and support each other. ASAPbio also runs a fellows program allowing participants to learn more about preprints and develop skills to drive discussions about the productive use of preprints in the life sciences. eLife coordinates an ambassadors program, which aims to bring together ECRs interested in promoting change in academic culture and science communication. preLights, an initiative of the Company of Biologists, provides a platform for ECRs to highlight preprints they find of interest and is another way to engage with preprints.

If you are interested in developing your review skills, several options are currently available. Preprint journal clubs are an excellent opportunity to keep up to date with the latest research in your field and connect with others. If you are part of a local journal club, you can suggest incorporating preprints, if they are not already covered. If you do not have a local journal club, you can explore online options, e.g. PREreview coordinates live-streamed preprint journal clubs.

We hope that this informational guide will be useful for readers, especially ECRs, interested in preprinting their research. In addition to exploring the current landscape of preprints in the life sciences, we have discussed common concerns around preprints that might come up in conversations with colleagues. The tips provided in this article are useful for having conversations with advisors and co-authors about preprinting, including email templates and practical steps needed to preprint your work.

In this piece, we may have missed many tips and suggestions, but as preprints continue to grow, so will our collective expertise as well as the evidence around the use of preprints for science communication. We are excited to watch the preprinting community continue to grow and look forward to seeing more preprint engagement from ECRs in the coming years.

Supplementary Material

Acknowledgements.

We thank ASAPbio for hosting the ASAPbio Fellows program and we are appreciative of the support received from the 2021 cohort of ASAPbio Fellows. We further thank bioRxiv and medRxiv for providing data on the country distribution of preprints at their servers. We are also grateful to Jessica Polka (ORCID: 0000-0001-6610-9293) and Samantha Hindle (ORCID: 0000-0002-3708-3546) for helpful suggestions on this manuscript. KG is supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (Project no: 492436553).

Competing interests

IP is an employee of ASAPbio, a non-profit organization promoting the productive use of preprints.

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• Course Home
• Preprints and the Stages of Printing
• Preprints Have Not Been Peer Reviewed
• Other Differences Between Preprints and Published Articles
• Preprint Repositories
• Journal Indexes
• Citing a Preprint
• Benefits of Using Preprints
• Challenges with Using Preprints
• Considerations for Using Preprints
• Selecting a Preprint Repository
• Copyrights and Preprints

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Preprints: Accelerating Research

(Image Source: iStock Photos, AndreyPopov©)

What are preprints, and how are they changing how biomedical research results are shared? Should you use information from preprints? Should you share your own research results in a preprint? This course from the National Library of Medicine ® explains the basics of preprints, and explores the benefits and considerations of using and submitting preprints.

This course includes:

Learning Objectives

After completing this course, you will be able to:

• Define the relationship between the preprint and the final paper
• Explain the roles of preprints in the research cycle
• Name key distinction between a preprint and an accepted author manuscript / published article
• List three other possible differences between a preprint and the final paper
• List benefits of using preprints in your work
• List challenges associated with using preprints in your work
• Outline considerations for using preprint information
• List the main preprint repositories relevant to you
• Explain the preprint content in PubMed Central ® (PMC) relevant to you
• Properly cite a preprint
• List considerations in identifying an appropriate preprint repository to deposit your work
• Explain the difference between a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) vs. public domain

Continuing Education Credits

If you are taking this course for Medical Library Association credits, please register and complete the class through the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) online registration system.

What are Preprints, and How Do They Benefit Authors?

• Research Process

Preprints are research papers shared before peer review. Here we discuss the benefits to authors including rapid credit, visibility & feedback.

Updated on March 29, 2018

Most researchers don't share their work until after it's been published in a journal. Due to lengthy publication times, this can result in delays of months, sometimes years. Authors are understandably frustrated by the amount of time it takes to share their research & reap the benefits of a published, citable research article.

But what if you could put post your manuscript online while it's going through peer review so that your peers and colleagues can see what you're working on? That's the idea behind preprints, and more and more researchers are using them for exactly this purpose.

Definition of a preprint

A preprint is a full draft research paper that is shared publicly before it has been peer reviewed. Most preprints are given a digital object identifier (DOI) so they can be cited in other research papers.

A preprint is a full draft of a research paper that is shared publicly before it has been peer reviewed.

Benefits of preprints

Preprints achieve many of the goals of journal publishing, but within a much shorter time frame. The biggest benefits fall into 3 areas: credit , feedback , and visibility .

When you post a preprint with your research results, you can firmly stake a claim to the work you've done. If there is any subsequent discussion of who found a particular result first, you can point to the preprint as a public, conclusive record of your data. Most preprints are assigned a digital object identifier (DOI), which allows your work to become a permanent part of the scholarly record - one that can be referenced in any dispute over who discovered something first.

For these reasons, the US National Institutes of Health and Wellcome Trust , among other funders, allow researchers to cite preprints in their grant applications.

For a complete list of funder policies see here .

In the traditional system, a submitted manuscript receives feedback from 2 or 3 peer reviewers before publication. With a preprint, other researchers can discover your work sooner, potentially pointing out critical flaws or errors, suggest new studies or data that strengthen your argument or even recommend a collaboration that could lead to publication in a more prestigious journal. The feedback can be provided publicly through commenting, or privately through email. Here is one scientist's story about the benefit of sharing his work as a preprint:

Last year I posted a preprint. Doing this set off a chain of events that convinced me I should post a preprint for ALL my manuscripts.Here's my story (1/17)— Dan Quintana (@dsquintana) February 10, 2018

Here's another author's journey from skepticism to loving preprints. By posting a preprint, this author was able to share their research 10 months earlier & it was viewed over 1,500 times in the first 2 months.

“To all researchers out there, I encourage you to stop worrying and love the preprint. Submit your manuscripts, but also read preprints and make comments.”

Visibility (and citations)

Preprints are not the final form of a research paper for most authors. Thankfully, preprints and infrastructure providers like Crossref link to the final published article whenever possible, meaning that your preprint can serve to bring new readers to your published paper. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association saw notable increases in citations and Altmetric scores when authors had posted their work first as a preprint.

Posting a preprint led to a significant increase in Altmetric attention scores and citations for the final published paper.

The citation effect is small, and more studies will be needed to confirm this finding, but the evidence for more attention in news and social media is strong (nearly a 3-fold increase in Altmetric attention scores). The more places you can be discovered by your peers and the public, the more attention your research is likely to get.

Conclusions

Preprints are a small but rapidly growing piece of scholarly communication. They present several strong advantages to improve the way research is shared - including credit for your work, early feedback & increased visibility - and we hope you will consider giving them a try.

A note to readers: AJE is a division of Research Square Company . Our colleagues built and operate the Research Square preprint platform. For more author resources on preprints we encourage you to browse the content on the Research Square Blog .

This article was updated by our team February 2020 .

Ben Mudrak, PhD

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Open Access Publishing

• Common Open Access Myths
• Supporting Open Access

What are Preprints?

A preprint is an early version of an academic article that has been made available by the author for others to read for free online before it has been peer reviewed or published in an academic journal.

What are the Benefits of Preprints?

Publishing an article as a preprint serves several important purposes:

• It allows the information contained in the article to be shared with the academic community more rapidly and openly than traditional publication. The formal journal publication process is often lengthy, and it can take many months for an article to be reviewed and published.
• Research has shown that publishing a journal article as a preprint can  increase citations  to the final peer reviewed article.
• By posting a freely accessible version of an article online, the author has the opportunity to receive comments and reviews by readers that might lead to changes and improvements in the final published draft.
• It can be used by researchers to provide evidence of productivity when applying for jobs or submitting grant proposals, and it can also generally help to establish priority of discovery and ideas.
• Posting an article as a preprint can also particularly  benefit early career researchers  by helping then to find research collaborators, and helping to improving their professional network, which can lead to more opportunities for these researchers.

Things to Keep in Mind About Preprints

• Preprints have not been peer reviewed : While preprints are scholarly articles, they have not yet been formally peer reviewed. Some preprint servers may do a rudimentary check to ensure that submitted content is legitimate scientific/academic research, but they are not checking the reliability and accuracy of information in the article. It is important that those reading and using preprints keep this in mind.
• Some journals might not accept article submissions that were published as preprints: While an increasing number of publishers and journals welcome the submissions of articles that have been released as a preprint, some journals might not accept them. It is important to check the policies of any journal you may wish to submit to before releasing a preprint. The Sherpa Romeo database can be used to learn if publishers and journal support preprinting, and the  Transpose  database provides even more details about journal policies toward preprints. 

Selected Preprint Servers

Below are a few selected preprint servers of relevance to the Longwood community. A comprehensive list of preprint servers (and one that compares server policies) can be found on the ASAPbio website .

Discipline-Specific

• bioRxiv : biology and life sciences (informative  article about bioRxiv , including statistics and a history of the preprint server)
• medRxiv : health sciences/clinical research
• arXiv : physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics ​
• NutriXiv : nutritional sciences (note: NutriXiv is no longer accepting new submissions) ​

Multidisciplinary

• Google Scholar : Indexes preprints from many popular servers, including some of the ones mentioned here.
• OSF Preprints : Supported by the Center for Open Science, OSF is a free and open platform that supports a variety of discipline-specific preprint servers. The OSF search aggregator allows users to search through its own preprint collections and those of other organizations.
• Preprints.org : Multidisciplinary preprint server.
• PrePubMed : An independent effort to index preprints from a variety of sources (including ones mentioned above) that fit the profile of articles which would appear in PubMed, once published.

Preprints and the NIH

The National Institutes of Health specifically  supports the use  and citation of preprints as "interim research projects" to "speed the dissemination and enhance the rigor" of an author's work. NIH notice NOT-OD-17-050 discusses the benefits of preprints and provides guidance for authors on selecting a reliable preprint server to post their articles to. This NIH  blog post also offers additional explanation related to this notice. In brief:

• Authors are encouraged by the NIH to include preprints in their "My Bibliography."
• Authors can then associate grant awards with those preprints by logging on through ERA Commons.
• Authors are asked by the NIH to choose a Creative Commons license to release their preprint under, so that it is easily identified as an openly accessible article. Learn more about different CC licenses from ASAPBio .

To learn about other funder's policies towards preprints, you can consult  https://asapbio.org/funder-policies

Common Questions About Preprints

• "These concerns are valid, but there is good reason to believe that they can be mitigated and managed...[with]...attention and inspection from our scientific community....preprints can be screened before posting to block attempts to propagate misinformation. Furthermore, some preprint servers display disclaimers on the top of each article to make clear that preprints are not validated through peer-review." ( ASAPBio )
• Preprint servers should include a "timestamp indicating when the article appeared, which is usually within 24 hours of submission. This date, along with the preprint itself, is made open access... and thus, anyone can determine the order of priority relative to other published work or, indeed, other preprints. While journals provide an important service of validation through peer review, establishment of priority can be significantly delayed because the work is not public during the process of peer review in most journals." ( Ten Simple Rules )
• "As jobs and grants become very competitive, there is increasing worry...about scooping, ie that their ideas/results will be published by others and that they will not receive proper attribution....Our argument is that this is unlikely, and indeed there is likely be to greater protection and overall fairness in establishing credit for work by submitting both to a preprint server (for fair and timely disclosure) and to a journal (for validation by peer review)." ( ASAPBio )
• "Certainly, the peer review process can add significant value to the work, pointing out errors or areas for improvement. Nevertheless, authors must stand behind their submitted preprint, because it is a public disclosure (and hence a citable entity), albeit a non-peer-reviewed one. Even without peer review, their scientific colleagues will be reading and judging the work, and the authors’ reputations are at stake." ( Ten Simple Rules )
• This will help the journal and preprint repositories connect your preprint to the final published article.
• Also, since plagiarism detection software will pick up preprints as a match, the journal will more easily be able to review those reports if they know you have published a preprint. 
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What are preprints ?

A preprint is a version of a scholarly paper that precedes publication in a peer-reviewed journal and acts as an early indication of research.

Preprints reside on preprint servers, which cover a set of domains and allow for dissemination, laying claim to an idea, and help collect feedback prior to submission. In some fields, preprints are the main communication vehicle. Preprints differ from Articles-in-Press in that preprints are not peer-reviewed and not accepted for publication in a journal.

To provide a more detailed view of the researchers and their scholarly output over the course of their careers, preprints are an early indication of research and allows for several use cases:

• To assess if other researchers are performing cutting edge, innovative research allowing other researchers to identify potential collaboration partners.
• To read or assess another researcher’s most recent work.
• To get a more comprehensive portfolio overview.
• To allow funding agencies to assess funding applications, monitor project progress, and demonstrate impact through early forms of scholarly output.

Preprints are only available for authors that already have a peer-reviewed publication history in Scopus and they are clearly separated from the curated published content. Neither citations to-and-from the preprints , nor links with the final version of the article are captured. Metrics on Scopus, such as publication and citation counts, h-index, and others exclude preprint content.

Scopus includes preprints from 2017 and onward from arXiv, bioRxiv, Social Sciences (SSRN), and ChemRxiv (>600k), which cover the domains where preprints are most relevant.

Preprints are deemed as a more valuable signal of research focus than meeting abstracts. Meeting abstracts are not a complete and unique record of research and can drive ambiguity or duplication. Furthermore, unlike preprints which represent a complete piece of work, the scientific content and substance of meeting abstracts is limited as they are typically written before the actual research is complete.

Preprints are not integrated into institution profiles or metrics and do not influence assessment.

Preprints are not integrated into any metrics in Scopus and do not influence assessment, including citation counts. The version-of-record (published, peer-reviewed articles) are the official representation of the research in Scopus.

You can request to add or remove preprints to an author profile using the Author Feedback Wizard. See How do I use the Author Feedback Wizard? for information about adding and removing preprints .

If the research work exists as both a preprint and as a publication, the preprint lives in parallel with the published article. Preprints and the published article are different entities where the contents are not identical. Preprints are not integrated into any metrics or statistics in Scopus, therefore only the published articles are counted and represent the body of research in the metrics and statistics. The possibility of linking preprints to the corresponding published version is being evaluated.

Preprints versioning is pro-actively managed to include only the latest version of a preprint in Scopus.

Any records that are included in Scopus are not deleted later to keep the scientific record and provide consistency. A preprint and published article may result from the same research, but these are considered two different, independent entities with their own metadata, content, and quality standards. Some preprints may never be published, but will remain in Scopus to keep the scientific record of the research described in the preprint .

The further back a preprint is posted, the less likely the author is currently performing reseach associated with the preprint . By focusing on more recent years, Scopus is able to more accurately provide an early indication of research. Most preprints that were posted before 2017 have become published articles or are not likely to be published.

Some preprints may get published later in journals covered in Scopus, some preprints may get published in non-CSAB journals, and some preprints may never get published.

Preprints in Scopus come from selected preprint servers. Preprints are not peer-reviewed and no endorsement of the methods, assumptions, conclusions, or scientific quality is implied by the preprint server or Scopus. Some preprint servers may have a basic screening process for offensive or non-scientific content, material that might pose a health or security risk, and for appropriateness to the scientific subject field of the preprint server.

Scopus will evaluate the needs for API based on customer feedback, then decide what features to add or modify for preprints .

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What is Preprints.org?

Preprints.org is a multidisciplinary preprint service that is dedicated to sharing your research from the very beginning and empowering your research journey. It is fully funded by MDPI, a pioneer in scholarly, open access publishing. It is run on a non-profit basis.

What are the benefits of posting a preprint?

Establish Precedence : Publicly share and record your research through a time-stamped preprint;

Fast Dissemination : Grant the scientific community free and early access to your research findings without the delays caused by the traditional publishing process;

Increased Visibility : Enhance the discoverability of your work and attract potential collaborators rapidly;

Early Feedback : Receive input from the scientific community before a formal peer review;

Credible and Citable : A permanent digital object identifier (DOI) will be allocated, making your paper instantly citable;

Grant Applications : Preprints can serve as early evidence for grant applications;

Demonstrate Productivity : Preprints can serve as endorsements for funding proposals or job applications, providing a record of your ongoing research activities;

• Support Open Science : Preprints promote transparency and open sharing of scientific knowledge with the global community.

Why should you choose Preprints.org?

• Free to post and read: Preprints.org is free for both authors and readers thus maximizing access to knowledge sharing within the scientific community globally;
• No membership: We welcome new users to directly submit without requiring any endorsement;
• All Disciplines : There are no restrictions in terms of research field. Preprints.org features research across all disciplines, allowing a diverse community of authors to share their work;
• Community Engagement : Preprints.org fosters community engagement through public discussion and screening by our Advisory Board and screeners, enabling authors to receive valuable feedback and engage in the latest scientific discourse;
• Web of Science Indexing : By posting your preprint with us, your research will be indexed in the “Web of Science - Preprint Citation Index”, and thus is discoverable by a wider readership;
• Easy Submission : Navigate a straightforward, user-friendly, and efficient submission process that takes only 3 minutes;
• Make Your Work Citable : Each preprint is registered with a unique digital object identifier (DOI) issued by  Crossref , making it permanently available and citable;
• Free Layout Editing Service : This service helps authors engage their readers with a professionally presented preprint, in addition to meeting the submission requirements of journals;
• Free Plagiarism Check : Preprints.org provides free reports that highlight any instances of text duplication, along with advice on where to modify the text, helping to increase the likelihood of passing initial checks when submitting to a peer-reviewed journal;
• Friendly Journals and MDPI Topics : We offer two services that provide a direct connection between journals and Preprints.org. Using these two channels, authors can save time by automatically transferring manuscript information to their journal of choice;
• Open Access : All preprints are posted with a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license , ensuring that authors retain the copyright and receive credit for their research, while allowing anyone to read and cite their work.

Do I need to pay any fees to post articles on Preprints.org?

How long does it take for a preprint to appear on the preprints.org website following submission, does preprints.org have an impact factor, where are our preprints indexed, are comments permitted on preprints.org.

We encourage scholars to leave comments on any paper they find interesting. Preprints.org is also collaborating with PREREVIEW to receive comments and feedback from the wider research community. You can provide general comments on the presented research, make suggestions for extensions or improvements, or draw attention to certain parts for other readers. Comments will be screened for any offensive language and off-topic discussions before they are posted. Readers who would like their comments to be counted as a review can receive credit from Publons by linking their accounts.

What type of content can be posted on Preprints.org?

How do i submit my paper to preprints.org what information is required for this process？.

Click the submit button on Preprints.org to submit your paper. You will be directed to the login page first if you have not logged in. If you have not yet registered an account on Preprints.org or any other MDPI platform, you will have to register and log in first to submit your paper. You will need to provide the following information to make a submission:

Manuscript title;

Names, affiliations, and email addresses for all authors (institutional email addresses or email addresses used in previously published papers are recommended);

A manuscript in a Microsoft Word or LaTeX format. For LaTeX files, please ensure that all the files (e.g., bib file, references) necessary to create a PDF are included in a .zip or similar format;

Supplementary materials (if applicable);

Copyright holder permission (if applicable);

Some types of content, such as research conducted on humans or experimental animals, have additional requirements, such as providing an ethical approval statement from a research ethics committee, informed consent of the research participants, and information regarding conflicts of interest and/or funding concerns.

How can I make minor/typographical changes to my preprint?

How can i submit a revised version of my preprint.

• If your paper has not been posted online yet, you can send your revised version to the assigned editor directly via email. The editors will check and post your revised version online as the first version of the paper.
• If your paper has already been posted online and you have found some minor typos or revisions that require correcting (for example, errors in the title, author names, author affiliations, or abstract), please contact the editor assigned to your paper with your updated version, highlighting the parts that require revisions. The editor will check and make the necessary revisions to the first version of the paper.
• If your paper has already been posted online and you wish to make substantial updates to the content (for example, include new findings/data, expand the discussion, update the analysis in a manner that may lead to new conclusions, etc.), you can click the “ Submit ” button and select the “submit a follow-up version” button, or find the paper under the “online” tab, and click the “submit a follow-up version” button on the right to submit your new version. Our editor will check the new version as soon as possible, and an email will be sent to you once it has been posted online.

How can I update the author list?

You can either directly contact the editor assigned to your paper or contact [email protected] with the necessary changes/corrections.

If you need to make authorship changes, such as adding or removing authors from the preprint paper, you will need to clarify the contributions of all authors whose authorship has changed and the reasons for this change. A form must then be signed and agreed upon by all current authors.

Can I post a paper that is not written in English on Preprints.org?

Can i submit an article to preprints.org after i have submitted it to a journal, can i submit my article to a mdpi journal directly from preprints.org, are the papers posted on preprints.org peer-reviewed.

No. The papers posted on Preprints.org are not peer-reviewed.

What does it mean to "link published article", and why is this recommended?

Preprints.org encourages all authors to link the peer-reviewed versions of their preprint papers for the benefit of both the authors and readers. After authors have linked the peer-reviewed version of their paper to the preprint paper, the citation format of the peer-reviewed journal article will be shown on the preprint page. Linking the peer-reviewed version of the paper to a posted preprint has the following benefits:

Readers of the preprint can stay up to date on the subsequent progress of the research.

It allows the peer-reviewed version to reach a wider audience and provide more reliable references for other researchers.

By providing a link to the peer-reviewed version, Preprints.org can display citation instructions on the preprint page, encouraging readers to cite the peer-reviewed version and thereby increasing its number of citations and impact.

My paper has been rejected by a journal after being posted as a preprint. What are the implications of this?

My paper has been published in a journal. what should i do next.

Normally, no action is required from your side. Preprints.org should automatically link your preprint paper to its peer-reviewed version within 14 days. The submitting author and the corresponding author will be notified by email. Due to technical difficulties, sometimes this linking process is unsuccessful. Therefore, we encourage authors to manually link the peer-reviewed versions to their preprint papers by following the steps below:

Log into Preprints.org ;

Go to your dashboard and find the preprint article under the “online” tab;

Click the “link published article” button to submit the request.

The Preprints.org editorial office will process your request as soon as possible.

Which journals allow the posting of preprints prior to submission?

In most cases, journal publication will not be affected by posting a preprint. However, there are a few publishers who do not accept papers that have been posted on  Preprints.org  or other preprint servers prior to submission. We strongly recommend that you clarify this with all journals that you plan to submit to in advance. The preprint policies of many journals and publishers are available in the  Sherpa Romeo  database. 

Can I post an article on Preprints.org and other preprint servers at the same time?

Can i withdraw an article before it is posted on preprints.org, can i remove my article after it has been posted on preprints.org.

No. Papers posted on Preprints.org with a registered DOI cannot be removed. They are indexed by services such as Google Scholar and Crossref, creating a permanent digital presence outside of our records. In some cases, papers may be “withdrawn” at the discretion of our editors and Advisory Board for the following reasons: 

Misconduct by authors, including plagiarism and data fabrication;

Egregious scientific errors that cannot be corrected by updating the paper;

When leaving a paper online would constitute an illegal act, including copyright violation.

Please check the withdrawal policy carefully before posting your work.

What are the publishing ethics policies for Preprints.org?

Preprints.org adheres to the Committee on Publication Ethics(COPE) Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines. Note that COPE does not currently cover preprints specifically, but many of the same principles apply, including the following:

Authors must accurately present their research findings and include an objective discussion on the significance of such findings.

Plagiarism, data fabrication, image manipulation, knowingly providing incorrect information, copyright infringement, inaccurate author attributions, attempts to inappropriately manipulate the screening process, failures to declare conflicts of interest, fraud, and libel are not permitted.

The posting of the submitted materials must not be illegal.

Manuscripts containing research conducted on humans or experimental animals must follow the Declaration of Helsinki and contain details of approval from a research ethics committee. The project identification code, date of approval, and name of the ethics committee or institutional review board must be cited in the “Methods” section.

The informed consent of research participants must be obtained if necessary. Authors must be able to provide a (redacted) copy of the consent form.

What are the copyright and intellectual property policies for Preprints.org?

Preprints.org respects the intellectual property rights of researchers, scientists, publishers, and others and requests mutual respect among the academic community in this regard. To ensure that you have the right to upload or reproduce any published material (figures, schemes, tables, or any extract of a text), you should request permission from the copyright holder prior to posting on Preprints.org .

Permission is required for the following:

Your own research published by other publishers and for which you do not retain the copyright.

Substantial extracts from research by any authors.

The use of tables, graphs, charts, schemes, and artworks if they are unaltered or altered with minor changes.

Photographs for which you do not hold the copyright.

Permission is not required for the following:

The reconstruction of your own table with data already published elsewhere. Please note that, in this case, you must cite the source of the data in the form of either “Data from...” or “Adapted from...”.

Short quotes that are considered fair use, and thus do not require permission, must also be properly cited.

Graphs, charts, schemes, and artwork that have been completely redrawn by the authors and are altered beyond recognition.

What license is used for Preprints.org and what are its implications?

All authors must agree to the following:

I grant Preprints.org a perpetual, non-exclusive license to distribute this article.

I certify that I have the right to grant this license.

I understand that submissions cannot be completely removed once accepted by Preprints.org and may appear on websites other than Preprints.org .

What is the policy on conflicts of interest for Preprints.org?

Preprints.org applies the following ICMJE definition of a conflict of interest: “A conflict of interest exists when professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patients’ welfare or the validity of research) may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain). Perceptions of conflict of interest are as important as actual conflicts of interest.” All authors must disclose all relationships or interests that could inappropriately influence or bias their work. Examples of potential conflicts of interest include, but are not limited to, financial interests (such as membership, employment, consultancies, ownership of stocks/shares, honoraria, grants or other funding, paid expert testimonies, and patent licensing arrangements) and non-financial interests (such as personal or professional relationships, affiliations, and personal beliefs). Authors can disclose potential conflicts of interest via the online submission system during the submission process. Declarations regarding conflicts of interest can also be documented in the MDPI disclosure form . The corresponding author must include a summary statement in the manuscript in a separate section, entitled “Conflicts of Interest”, placed just before the reference list. The statement should reflect all potential conflicts of interest disclosed in the form. See below for examples of disclosures: Conflicts of Interest : Author A has received research grants from Company A. Author B has received a speaker honorarium from Company X and owns stocks in Company Y. Author C has been involved as a consultant and expert witness in Company Z. Author D is the inventor of patent X. If there are no conflicts of interest, the authors should state the following: Conflicts of Interest : The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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“To preprint or not to preprint?” What’s the opportunity cost of early, non-peer-reviewed publicly available research?

Note: this post was written by Sara Rouhi, Director of Strategic Partnerships for PLOS, and was originally published on  NISO’s Homepage .

NISO recently hosted a two day seminar in Washington DC entitled “Open Access: the Role and Impact of Preprint Servers,” representing stakeholders across #scholcomm discussing the perceived value, purpose, and implementation of preprint servers.

As a novice to preprints generally (and the nuances of genesis, value proposition, and current implementations specifically), I attended to “bone up” on all things preprints and because of a preview I received a week earlier. At the Charleston Conference Hyde Park debate , Oya Rieger of Itaka S+R and Kent Anderson of Caldera Publishing solutions debated whether preprints have improved the scholarly communication system. 

Oya’s position on the benefits of fast, early communication of results, prior to peer-review, encapsulated the “pro” arguments I’m familiar with re: preprints. Kent’s comments were new to me and when stripped of some of the agent provocateur language — “preprints disrespect peer-review” — raised many valuable points to evaluate when considering the role of preprints. 

Now, don’t get me wrong, I ultimately come down on the side of PLOS with respect to our commitment to preprints (see an extensive overview on our blog re: current preprint pilots ); however, I do think the discussion at NISO merits deeper consideration (and for the full live tweet thread, see #NISOAccess19)

So! Do the benefits outweigh the concerns?

Various communities have demonstrated over decades that preprints are valuable, useful, and relatively “safe” in terms of exposing the broader public to research that is not peer-reviewed. As the opening keynote to the seminar, Kent Anderson made some interesting distinctions. First, he’s not anti-preprint (although his twitter feed sometimes conveys the contrary), he’s anti-preprint server (that is, the online platforms that disseminate preprints without taking responsibility for the quality of that content and potential downstream effects of making it discoverable). For the extended unpacking, view the #NISOAccess19 hashtag.

The argument is an interesting one: In a current information dissemination climate rife with alternative facts/misinformation and dominated by algorithms that encourage outrage (where anger = clicks = revenue), research findings — peer reviewed or not — that feed this ecosystem risk spreading like wildfire. And with closed media bubbles reinforcing belief systems held by groups, indifferent to facts, unverified, unvalidated scientific claims can be consciously manipulated to further political, social, economic, national security, etc agendas. At the very least they generate clicks, at the very worst they can instantiate beliefs that jeopardize, for example, public health.

Dog ageing: the perils of news reporting findings on preprint servers

And I certainly see this more and more. As an guilty-as-charged trashy news junkie, I stumble upon the infamous Daily Mail from time to time and they are continually publishing click baity articles. The most recent one I’ve seen is about dogs ageing quite differently that we have generally assumed. The research was featured in The Telegraph and The Times , which is probably how it found its way to the DM. The DM article certainly doesn’t link to the bioRxiv.org paper ( here ) and only mentions in passing that it’s not peer reviewed. The Telegraph mentions it as the closing line to the article. 

When was the last time you got to the final sentence of an online article? Much less a clicky-baity one? (Note, it took me almost 10 minutes to get from the DM article to the bioRxiv article and none of the news outlets linked directly to it, just to bioRxiv.org. I had to search within the platform myself)

Yes, non-peer-reviewed, dog age-ing research seems fairly harmless and mildly amusing. If it turns out, dogs don’t age like this, no one will die. 

But once you get into research about vaccines, climate change, and politics, the cost/benefit calculus starts to change.

What happens when reputable outlets do it?

The famous case of the cell phones = brain cancer study still lingers. (I’m choosing to link to an article debunking it rather than the original paper in biorXiv, which is still available.) Reputable outlets like Mother Jones and the New York Times published the findings and now most reliable sources have to preface their reminders that there’s no real evidence for this with extensive explanations of why people think there is. American Cancer Society has to explain how cell phones work, and the National Cancer Institute , spends so much time explaining what radiofrequency radiation is that you might miss the section where they state that there’s no evidence to back these concerns.

What about when the far right does it?

The case of the far-right populist party, Vox, in Spain is an interesting and cautionary one. Social scientists across Spain have been raising the alarm over the Vox party’s use of research to justify their racist, xenophobic, and nationalist positions. Currently over 3000 spanish researchers have signed a petition to hold Vox accountable for their misrepresentation of scientific research.

They state in their petition:

“ As such, VOX’s strategy amounts to nothing else than a facetious resort to using (allegedly scientific) data in order to pursue an ideological agenda impregnated by extreme nationalism, intolerance, racism and xenophobia. It is an agenda that misuses, derides, and ultimately mocks the work of thousands of social scientists, at the same time as it undermines the foundations of our polity through lies and fabrications. (emphasis mine)”

One such example of misrepresentation of social science research comes in their misrepresentation of a recent study done by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicos (CIS) on the Spanish public’s attitudes toward immigration. According to the Spanish newspaper, El Pais ,  

“Para sostener sus argumentos, el partido de Santiago Abascal se apoya en el CIS publicado este martes, según el cual “el 15,6% de los encuestados considera la inmigración como un problema para España”, mientras que el cambio climático “solo interesa al 1,5% de los españoles”. En realidad, cuando el CIS pregunta a los encuestados “cuál es el principal problema que existe actualmente en España”, el 10.7% cita la inmigración entre los tres primeros y solo el 2,3% menciona los problemas medioambientales; lo que les sitúa en el 8º y en el 18º puesto, respectivamente, entre las preocupaciones de los españoles.“

“To support their arguments, Vox used data from a recent CIS survey claiming, “15.6% of respondents consider immigration a problem for Spain while only 1.5% care about climate change. In reality, CIS asked respondents, “What is the principal problem that exists right now for Spain,” and 10.7% mention immigration in their top 3 problems while only 2.3% mention environmental issues.”

The actual CIS study can be found here .

What does this have to do with preprints?

Well that’s the question. If misinformation coupled with systems primed to spread it is the primary concern of those, like Kent, who are worried about research that’s not peer-reviewed entering the mainstream, isn’t this already a problem? Peer-review isn’t the mechanism that stops malign actors for misrepresenting — or entirely fabricating — the “facts” they want to promote. (if InfoWars hasn’t taught us this, then nothing has).

When the Vox party manipulates research findings to further its messaging, it’s simply misrepresenting how respondents answered surveys. Peer-review isn’t preventing this kind of manipulation.

Indeed, at the NISO event, numerous speakers representing publishers, funders, preprints providers, and libraries focused on how the benefits outweigh those concerns. This fantastic visual published in PLOS Biology in a 2017 paper on the benefits of preprints for Early Career Researchers (ECRs) illustrates what the various NISO speakers were identifying. 

NISO speaker Thomas Narock, Assistant Professor in Integrative Data Analytics at Goucher College, noted that successful preprint servers come from communities that value them. They can’t be successful independent of a community driving them. As Angela Cochran put it on Twitter: it’s not a “if you build it, they (the community) will come” situation. Communities have to drive it.

And the ones that drive it, clearly value it. Jessica Polka, Executive Director at ASAPBio (currently a PLOS collaborator re: preprints), closed out the NISO event by underscoring these benefits in a presentation that speaks for itself . Slides 8-10 really speak to how ASAPBio has seen engagement with preprints evolve and what authors want out of them. It’s this kind of feedback that is really driving PLOS’ own approach to preprint and open peer-review collaborations.

The overall takeaway from the second day of seminars was thoughtfully synthesized by Jessica — let’s not get lost in the naval gazing on what a preprint is. Rather, we should focus our efforts to generate a clear “vocabulary for the full suite of peer review and screening checks that can be applied to any version of an article in the publishing continuum.”

Much of the justified concern about the dissemination of research findings that aren’t peer-reviewed can be mitigated by using the checks and taxonomies appropriate to the field, clearing indicating the moderation strategies used by that community/server, and effective version monitoring so readers understand how the version they’re reading fits into a wider scheme community feedback.

With organizations like NISO, ASAPBio, and PLOS modeling these kinds of standards and behaviors, the benefits of preprints seem to far outweigh the costs (notwithstanding the serious question of the financial sustainability of preprints, which I haven’t addressed at all here but is a serious hurdle to their long term viability as a vehicle for dissemination — but more on that another time).

Since September 2023, cOAlition S, in partnership with Jisc and PLOS, have been working with a multi-stakeholder working group to identify business…

Note: PLOS issued the following press release on Tuesday, April 2nd. Brussels, Belgium, and San Francisco, United States – The Public Library…

Author: Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Director, Open Research Solutions, PLOS; and Chris Heid, Head of Product, PLOS Summary Research by PLOS and Research Consulting…

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• Published: 08 May 2024

Accurate structure prediction of biomolecular interactions with AlphaFold 3

• Josh Abramson   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0000-3496-6952 1   na1 ,
• Jonas Adler   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9928-3407 1   na1 ,
• Jack Dunger 1   na1 ,
• Richard Evans   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4675-8469 1   na1 ,
• Tim Green   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3227-1505 1   na1 ,
• Alexander Pritzel   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4233-9040 1   na1 ,
• Olaf Ronneberger   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4266-1515 1   na1 ,
• Lindsay Willmore   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4314-0778 1   na1 ,
• Andrew J. Ballard   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4956-5304 1 ,
• Joshua Bambrick   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0003-3908-0722 2 ,
• Sebastian W. Bodenstein 1 ,
• David A. Evans 1 ,
• Chia-Chun Hung   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5264-9165 2 ,
• Michael O’Neill 1 ,
• David Reiman   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1605-7197 1 ,
• Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8594-1074 1 ,
• Zachary Wu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2429-9812 1 ,
• Akvilė Žemgulytė 1 ,
• Eirini Arvaniti 3 ,
• Charles Beattie   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1840-054X 3 ,
• Ottavia Bertolli   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8578-3216 3 ,
• Alex Bridgland 3 ,
• Alexey Cherepanov   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5227-0622 4 ,
• Miles Congreve 4 ,
• Alexander I. Cowen-Rivers 3 ,
• Andrew Cowie   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4491-1434 3 ,
• Michael Figurnov   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1386-8741 3 ,
• Fabian B. Fuchs 3 ,
• Hannah Gladman 3 ,
• Rishub Jain 3 ,
• Yousuf A. Khan   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0201-2796 3 ,
• Caroline M. R. Low 4 ,
• Kuba Perlin 3 ,
• Anna Potapenko 3 ,
• Pascal Savy 4 ,
• Sukhdeep Singh 3 ,
• Adrian Stecula   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6914-6743 4 ,
• Ashok Thillaisundaram 3 ,
• Catherine Tong   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7570-4801 4 ,
• Sergei Yakneen   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7827-9839 4 ,
• Ellen D. Zhong   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6345-1907 3 ,
• Michal Zielinski 3 ,
• Augustin Žídek   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0748-9684 3 ,
• Victor Bapst 1   na2 ,
• Pushmeet Kohli   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7466-7997 1   na2 ,
• Max Jaderberg   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9033-2695 2   na2 ,
• Demis Hassabis   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2812-9917 1 , 2   na2 &
• John M. Jumper   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6169-6580 1   na2  

Nature ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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We are providing an unedited version of this manuscript to give early access to its findings. Before final publication, the manuscript will undergo further editing. Please note there may be errors present which affect the content, and all legal disclaimers apply.

• Drug discovery
• Machine learning
• Protein structure predictions
• Structural biology

The introduction of AlphaFold 2 1 has spurred a revolution in modelling the structure of proteins and their interactions, enabling a huge range of applications in protein modelling and design 2–6 . In this paper, we describe our AlphaFold 3 model with a substantially updated diffusion-based architecture, which is capable of joint structure prediction of complexes including proteins, nucleic acids, small molecules, ions, and modified residues. The new AlphaFold model demonstrates significantly improved accuracy over many previous specialised tools: far greater accuracy on protein-ligand interactions than state of the art docking tools, much higher accuracy on protein-nucleic acid interactions than nucleic-acid-specific predictors, and significantly higher antibody-antigen prediction accuracy than AlphaFold-Multimer v2.3 7,8 . Together these results show that high accuracy modelling across biomolecular space is possible within a single unified deep learning framework.

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Author information.

These authors contributed equally: Josh Abramson, Jonas Adler, Jack Dunger, Richard Evans, Tim Green, Alexander Pritzel, Olaf Ronneberger, Lindsay Willmore

These authors jointly supervised this work: Victor Bapst, Pushmeet Kohli, Max Jaderberg, Demis Hassabis, John M. Jumper

Authors and Affiliations

Core Contributor, Google DeepMind, London, UK

Josh Abramson, Jonas Adler, Jack Dunger, Richard Evans, Tim Green, Alexander Pritzel, Olaf Ronneberger, Lindsay Willmore, Andrew J. Ballard, Sebastian W. Bodenstein, David A. Evans, Michael O’Neill, David Reiman, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Zachary Wu, Akvilė Žemgulytė, Victor Bapst, Pushmeet Kohli, Demis Hassabis & John M. Jumper

Core Contributor, Isomorphic Labs, London, UK

Joshua Bambrick, Chia-Chun Hung, Max Jaderberg & Demis Hassabis

Google DeepMind, London, UK

Eirini Arvaniti, Charles Beattie, Ottavia Bertolli, Alex Bridgland, Alexander I. Cowen-Rivers, Andrew Cowie, Michael Figurnov, Fabian B. Fuchs, Hannah Gladman, Rishub Jain, Yousuf A. Khan, Kuba Perlin, Anna Potapenko, Sukhdeep Singh, Ashok Thillaisundaram, Ellen D. Zhong, Michal Zielinski & Augustin Žídek

Isomorphic Labs, London, UK

Alexey Cherepanov, Miles Congreve, Caroline M. R. Low, Pascal Savy, Adrian Stecula, Catherine Tong & Sergei Yakneen

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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Max Jaderberg , Demis Hassabis or John M. Jumper .

Supplementary information

Supplementary information.

This Supplementary Information file contains the following 9 sections: (1) Notation; (2) Data pipeline; (3) Model architecture; (4) Auxiliary heads; (5) Training and inference; (6) Evaluation; (7) Differences to AlphaFold2 and AlphaFold-Multimer; (8) Supplemental Results; and (9) Appendix: CCD Code and PDB ID tables.

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Abramson, J., Adler, J., Dunger, J. et al. Accurate structure prediction of biomolecular interactions with AlphaFold 3. Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07487-w

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Received : 19 December 2023

Accepted : 29 April 2024

Published : 08 May 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07487-w

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