New Open Access Repository for Unrefereed Preprints: PLoS Contents

A new open-access repository for preprints on biomedical research findings prior to peer review -- "PLoS Currents: Influenza" -- is a welcome development, as are all services that provide free online access to research findings, before and after refereeing, in all fields. As long as the unrefereed/refereed distinction is prominently tagged, as it will be, it is always good to encourage researchers in all fields to make their drafts available for peer and public scrutiny as soon as they feel ready to do so.

It would, however, make more sense for central repositories like PLoS Currents to harvest their contents from the researchers' own institutional repositories, rather than to try to serve only as yet another locus for direct central deposit. Researchers' institutions are the universal providers of all research output, in all fields, and central repositories should be facilitating universal self-archiving and self-archiving mandates, rather than competing with them. That said, self-archiving mandates [i.e., institutional and funder policies requiring OA deposit] can and should be applied only to refereed postprints, not to unrefereed preprints, whose self-archiving must be left a matter of author choice.

I'm not sure, though, that is it quite accurate to describe me, in 1999, as having been "[o]ne of the fiercest critics of the proposal"!

I greeted the e-biomed proposal as an "extremely welcome and important initiative... deserving of the strongest support" and went on [as is my wont] to make some "recommendations... in the interests of strengthening the proposal by clarifying some crucial central aspects and modifying or eliminating some minor, weaker aspects."

Among those recommendations was that of making and retaining a clear distinction between between (1) peer-reviewed journal publishing (now called "Gold OA") and author self-archiving (now called "Green OA"), as well as a distinction between (2) unrefereed drafts ("preprints") and refereed, published articles ("postprints"). Each of these crucial distinctions was conflated in the original 1999 e-biomed proposal, and it is good to see them de-conflated 10 years later.

The fundamental dichotomy between unrefereed drafts and refereed articles predates Open Access, PLoS, e-biomed, Arxiv, the Web and the Net.

What has changed is that it can now all be done at a global scale, far more rapidly, far more interactively, and by a means that is freely accessible to everyone.

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Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum