In October, MDPI attended the Plan S and Beyond for Publishers and Societies seminar hosted by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) in London. Here, we’ll overview the discussions around the future of Open Access, specifically regarding the benefits of preprints and need for incentives.

The seminar chair, Tasha Mullins-Cohen, began the day by outlining how Open Access (OA) is here to stay. In 2009, 66% of research was closed access, and only 34% was open. Now, 37% is closed, whilst 63% is open.

The question is how can we continue expanding openness whilst also addressing the challenges the industry faces?

What is Towards Scholarly Publishing?

The EU is a leader in Open Access policy due to cOAlition S, a group of national research funders, organisations, and foundations, and Plan S, the set of principles and mandates supporting cOAlition S.

The conference centred around the Plan S ‘Towards Scholarly Publishing’ proposal, which set out to achieve a community-based, scholar-led communication system. Addressing the challenges this system faces is key, namely, publication delays, rising costs, and the limitations of traditional peer review. The proposal explains

This approach will ensure rapid, transparent dissemination of high-quality scientific knowledge.

It aims to achieve this by a set of recommendations centred around publishing openly, reforming research assessment, and making sure authors are responsible for their findings.

The key recommendation is that “All scholarly outputs are shared immediately and openly”, which preprints can contribute to.

cOAlition S consultation on preprints

Robert Kiley, Head of Strategy at cOAlition S, presented findings from a research consultation of 11,000 researchers one year after the Towards Scholarly Publishing proposal.

Preprints represented one of the main concepts that is represented in the data.

The study found that, although publishing preprints is not seen as important as the journal system, 45% of respondents consider sharing preprints as “extremely” or “very useful”. This is supported by knowledge of the benefits of preprints:

• Enhanced accessibility.
• Increased visibility.
• Early access.
• Transparency.
• Accelerating discourse.
• Early feedback.

However, 75% of respondents felt like they were “never” or “sometimes” rewarded for sharing preprints.

Kiley concluded by suggesting that academics simply want recognition for publishing preprints, which they see as highly valuable. Accordingly, he describes the need for funders and institutions to reward responsible publishing, like preprints or open peer review, to incentivise researchers and reward them.

Understanding the benefits of preprints

As mentioned, the benefits of preprints are widely understood. John Inglis, Co-Founder of bioRxiv and medRxiv, further reflected on the aim and benefits of preprints.

He described the aim of preprints as

Uncoupling the distribution of research from evaluation by rapidly disseminating research manuscripts before peer review.

This is a radical break from the centuries-old scholarly tradition of submitting findings in a written format before peer review. However, he explains, preprint servers can have a screening process. This can involve a mix of humans and automated tools and include

• Looking at scope, article type, risk of harm, signals of fraud.
• Declarations, such as co-author approval, competing interests, medically relevant ones.
• Data availability.

The benefits of preprints for authors are various. He explained how the average speed of posting a preprint is from 1.2 to 2.2 days after submission, with date stamping protecting the authors’ findings. Preprints can also receive public or private feedback, receive a digital object identifier (DOI), and be indexed in databases and aggregators.

In short, preprints can accelerate the output of science, help claim priority on findings, boost visibility, and still enter the traditional process of being published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Finally, Inglis echoed Kiley’s claim that there needs to be incentives.

What is the Publish, Review, Curate model?

Both Kiley and Inglis mentioned the Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) model. This refers to preprint servers becoming the primary point for all submitted research. Then, journals would serve as reviewers and curators of the best research published openly on the servers.

Inglis claims this would enable four of the principles of Plan S: scholars decide when and what to share, early versions of articles are freely available, trust signals are freely available, and articles can be revised to reflect feedback.

This would represent a drastic shift in the present model of scholarly publishing. Consequently, it would require the development of infrastructure to host and screen preprints and also an overhaul of research assessment to incentivise researchers to participate.

The future of preprints

The seminar highlighted the potential and demand for preprints to have a greater and more integral role in scholarly publishing. Not only would they accelerate research, but also increase accessibility and transparency. However, there are a lack of incentives for scholars to publish them at present.

This could change, as funders and institutions begin to mandate preprints. For example, the National Institute of Health encourages the inclusion of preprints in grant applications, allowing them to be cited anywhere other research products are cited. Also, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation mandated that its grantees publish preprints of their work. This marked a significant change in policy for a major funder and could signal the beginning of preprints becoming more widely mandated.

If you want to learn more about changing funder policies and the future of preprints, read our article Rising Importance of Preprints for Open Access Funders.

If you want to learn more about Open Access, see our article Why Open Access is Important for more.