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When it comes to the rapid dissemination of scientific knowledge, preprint servers play a vital role. They act as online repositories that store early versions of research, commonly known as “preprints”. Preprints offer authors the opportunity to publish preliminary versions of their work, allowing researchers to share their discoveries early on in their research journey and receive feedback prior to formal journal publication.

But what are the benefits of preprinting? In this blog post, we dive into the benefits of submitting your work to be published as a preprint on VeriXiv.

Benefits of preprints

Rapidly claim priority on your findings and receive more citations

By publishing your research as a preprint, it will enter the public domain much faster. You can claim priority on your findings by documenting the provenance of your research via the unique identifier assigned to each preprint. Doing so will prevent your work from being “scooped” by other researchers working in your field of research.

Additionally, you can use preprints to enhance grant, job and tenure applications by showcasing the full range of outputs from your work. You can also take the opportunity to share your research with your peers and gain valuable early feedback before submitting your research for peer review and full publication. Furthermore, by informing your community about what research is underway, you can prevent duplication of studies, ensuring resources are channelled into further advancing knowledge.

Like published articles, every preprint is assigned a digital object identifier (DOI) by Crossref. This means that they are instantly citeable via a permanent identifier for the preprint. If the preprint is updated later, it will receive a new versioned DOI to ensure that the most up-to-date version is available for authors to cite. Research suggests that on average, articles published as a preprint first may receive up to 36% more citations.

Expand the potential reach of your work and accelerate the research of others

By sharing your research under a Creative Commons open access licence, your outputs will be freely accessible to all –  and not only to researchers, but also policymakers, practitioners, patients and the wider public. By doing so, non-academic stakeholders who may be interested in your work will be able to access and use the findings and apply it to their field, increasing the potential real-world impact of your work. Aside from journal citations, studies have also shown that preprints receive more social media coverage on average than journal research papers.

Publishing your research as a preprint also benefits scholarly communities and the wider public more quickly by removing the processing time associated with the publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. Your fellow researchers can use your preprint to further their research and to better coordinate research efforts, accelerating scientific progress by enabling others to build upon your findings.

Tell the full story of your research project

Preprints can be published at different stages of the research lifecycle. From conception to final outputs of a project, research outputs such as Data Notes, Methods, Protocols, Software Tools, replication and refutation studies, negative/null findings, incremental findings and much more can be published as a preprint, documenting progress throughout the research project.

This allows funders to see how their money is being spent, reduce research waste, and inform other researchers of important updates before a full research paper has been prepared. Additionally, publishing other outputs helps to support the full research paper, painting a more complete picture of the project and providing more insight into the findings. It can also enable you to share outputs that are maybe tangential to the direction of your main project but that others could benefit from.

Furthermore, preprints can tell the story of how your research evolves and develops over time. The ability to update your preprint allows you to share iterations of your research over time and keep the content up to date, rather than having to write up a new article each time. This can potentially lead to interest from other researchers in your field to further your research based on the data gathered from the preprint.

Why publish your preprint with VeriXiv?

Typically, most preprint servers conduct a relatively limited set of checks on submissions to prioritise speed of sharing.  However, as preprints become more widely recognised as a citable research output, it’s important that the research is verified prior to publication to help identify forms of malpractice, from poor research practice to fraudulent activity. This, in turn, helps to prevent the spread of misinformation, which can cause lasting damage to public trust in science, and the uptake of policies based on scientific outcomes.

VeriXiv is a Verified Preprint Server that aims to provide a much more rigorous set of quality checks than many other preprint servers, providing greater peace of mind to readers in the quality of the content across the server. These enhanced checks take slightly longer but preprints are still published rapidly, achieving a balance between accelerating the rate of progress of research while maintaining high standards of research quality and integrity.

Mandatory checks on VeriXiv focus on three key areas:

• Authorship: This includes the right to publish, as well as author contributions, confirmed by Author Contribution statements (CredIT), and author validity.
• Publishing ethics: This includes information pertaining to consent, removal of any identifying information and ethical oversights.
• Research integrity: Image manipulation, permissions and generative AI usage.

Preprints that pass these checks are made available as high-quality full-text HTML with associated metadata and typeset PDF, making your research easily accessible and discoverable. 

In addition to these checks, authors submitting their work to VeriXiv can also benefit from further transparency checks of their work through the sharing of their underlying data, methods and code. A series of open research transparency checks will highlight those preprints that have achieved this extra step, which will also further demonstrate the integrity of their research.

These Open Research checks aim to answer the following questions:

• Is any underlying data open and available?
• Is any software and code open source and available?
• Have all necessary reporting guidelines been followed?
• Is there adequate methods detail to support attempts to reproduce the work?

Authors who are planning to submit their work for full peer review on VeriXiv and publication in Gates Open Research will need to pass this set of open research checks.

VeriXiv supports researchers to comply with the Gates Foundation’s updated Open Access Policy, which will require Gates Foundation-funded authors to make their research available as a preprint before publishing in their journal of choice, from 1^st January 2025.

To find out more, or to submit your preprint to VeriXiv, click here.

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