According to a report by China Science Daily on April 9, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest biomedical research funding organization, has requested that researchers funded by them begin to publish their research results as preprints starting in 2025. This requirement has once again made "preprints" an important concept for researchers and educators to pay attention to.
Preprints are versions of research papers that researchers publicly release before undergoing formal peer review. Compared to traditional journal review and publication processes, preprints allow researchers to upload their research findings immediately after completing their papers, enabling their work to quickly reach the global stage.
As a new mode of academic communication, preprint platforms provide authors with the fastest channel for publishing research results and bridge the gap between authors and other researchers. "Building a high-end communication platform for national scientific research papers and scientific information" is a requirement of China's "14th Five-Year Plan" and its 2035 long-term vision outline, reflecting the current trend of academic communication and dissemination.
The importance of preprint platforms lies firstly in their speed. Such platforms help authors rapidly disseminate their research findings, enhance academic influence, and facilitate the rapid incorporation of reader feedback for continuous improvement. For researchers in the same field, preprint platforms enable them to quickly access the latest research progress, gather inspiration, engage in immediate academic dialogue, and adjust research directions or optimize their own research based on the latest developments in the field.
For researchers who urgently need academic achievements to participate in title evaluations and funding applications, there may still be some academic achievements in the review stage during the evaluation period, and unpublished papers cannot provide support for them. Preprint platforms can provide transparent and visible results for these researchers before their research results undergo peer review and publication.
Publishing papers on preprint platforms is also a way to establish evidence of priority and originality, preempting the publication rights while to some extent preventing research results from being plagiarized or copied. The original data, research methods, and codes uploaded and stored on preprint platforms can serve as copyright evidence for the original authors. In the event of plagiarism, the original authors can promptly present evidence to defend their publication priority and academic rights.
Currently, the review cycle of important journals both domestically and internationally is generally long. In most disciplinary fields, researchers focusing on key research questions are racing against time to gain an advantage. Especially in STEM fields, many research groups worldwide are competing for experimental innovation and publishing at the forefront. For researchers in the humanities and social sciences, although the structure and discourse of articles are rarely repeated, if journals have already published papers with similar viewpoints and converging research conclusions, it means that their publication prospects are bleak. If painstakingly researched results are preempted by other researchers in the field, it is undoubtedly a blow to the researchers.
In the independent enrollment examination of Peking University, there was once a question: "Suppose human cryogenic technology has advanced to the point where a person's brain can be kept active outside the body for a long time, allowing this 'living' brain to communicate smoothly with future generations. How would this affect the scientific development of humanity?"
To this question, a candidate student hesitated for a moment and then blurted out: "If Newton's brain were still active, would Einstein's papers still be published?"
The core of the above question is the potentially obstructive role of authority in the context of scientific revolution. The most important role of preprint platforms is to help "Einstein's" papers overcome the obstacles posed by "Newton" as an authoritative reviewer during the review stage.
Currently, the significance and practical value of preprint platforms and related systems for natural sciences and engineering sciences have been demonstrated. Therefore, most participating disciplines are in the fields of natural sciences and engineering sciences, with few in the humanities and social sciences.
In the homepage discipline classification of the relatively advanced Chinese preprint platform ChinaXiv, only "management studies," "linguistics and applied linguistics," and "library science and information science" can be seen, while important disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, history, and education are categorized under "others," a mixed category.
On March 27, the important journal in the field of education, Higher Engineering Education, published a preprint of a paper by author Fu Jie titled "Engineering Education: Concepts, Competencies, and Growth Paths." This indicates that academic journals in education have begun to actively explore preprints. Preprints serve as both a prelude and preparation for journal publication and as a supplement to journal publication. Through methods such as submitting preprints for review, preprint platforms can provide preliminary screening and peer review results for journals, while the support and cooperation of academic journals also bring more possibilities for preprint platforms. The linkage and coordination between preprint platforms and journals may bring about common development and innovation prosperity.
In the future, it is hoped that more disciplines and journals in the humanities and social sciences will join preprint platforms to collectively enhance the academic influence and recognition of preprint platforms. It is also hoped that more researchers will join the platform to promote its development and prosperity.
(The authors are respectively a researcher at the School of Education, Peking University, and a graduate student at the School of Education, Peking University. This article is one of the achievements of the major project "Research on Education and High-Quality Development" (22JJD880003) of the Ministry of Education's key research base for humanities and social sciences in the "14th Five-Year Plan.")
