what is research square preprint

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My paper was rejected but was posted as a preprint with a DOI on Research Square. Can I now publish it in another journal?

My paper has been rejected recently but its content could be seen in the Research Square website. Why has this happened, and why did it also get a DOI link?

I asked and they answered:

Thank you for your message. Your work has been posted as a preprint on Research Square through the optional In Review preprint service offered by SpringerNature during journal submission. A preprint posted on the Research Square Platform is issued an official DOI and becomes a part of the citable scholarly literature. DOIs are intended to be permanent records and cannot be fully removed. Additionally, GoogleScholar, ResearchGate, EuropePMC and Crossref automatically index preprints, creating a permanent digital presence. In Review preprints remain posted regardless of the status at the journal. However, please note that the DOI also ensures that your work is properly linked to you, which helps avoid another individual claiming credit for your work. Finally, preprints are widely embraced by most major publishers, so a preprint is unlikely to negatively affect your publication chances. Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns.

So can I publish this work in another journal? Since it is not published? I don't understand why they have done that.

• publications

• 3 This needs details. Who rejected your paper? What did you agree to when you submitted this? –  Terry Loring Commented Aug 21, 2021 at 16:17
• A prestigious journal rejected it. Normal submission sir –  user145115 Commented Aug 21, 2021 at 17:40
• Was the journal in any way affiliated with research square? researchsquare.com/journals –  Terry Loring Commented Aug 21, 2021 at 18:53
• 2 even if affiliated why put there after rejection –  user145115 Commented Aug 22, 2021 at 13:29
• 7 Did you opt-in to the "optional In Review preprint service offered by SpringerNature"? It sounds like you did, or at least the journal thinks you did, and that would answer the "why has this happened" part of your question. –  Bryan Krause ♦ Commented Aug 24, 2021 at 18:23

3 Answers 3

Research Square seems to be an attempt by SpringerNature to make a profit by operating their own preprint server. I suggest that this will never work and the scientific community will not support their efforts.

The fact that your work appears in Research Square has no relation to your submission of the paper to another journal.

• 3 In addition I don’t see how assigning a DOI implies transfer of copyright and thus how it can imply the paper cannot be resubmitted, but IANAL… –  ZeroTheHero Commented Aug 24, 2021 at 18:41
• 1 @ZeroTheHero Several preprint services would have problems if it did. –  Anyon Commented Aug 24, 2021 at 19:58
• 3 Transfer of copyright is something that must be done explicitly. But some journals won't publish things that have appeared in preprint. This might be an attempt by Springer's parent to lock out papers from (some) other journals even for papers not accepted. –  Buffy Commented Aug 24, 2021 at 19:59
• 1 So, you mean I cannot submit in other journals? It is not like that. but the fact that they put this paper to public access is strange. –  user145115 Commented Aug 25, 2021 at 16:07

I suspect you opted into this :

To opt in, all co-authors agree to have their manuscript posted as a preprint with a CC-BY 4.0 license and a DOI, becoming a permanent part of the scholarly record. Read more about our editorial policies here.

If you were tricked into this by an odd website then perhaps these journals are not reputable after all.

I have never heard of having the submission to the journal combined with the posting of a preprint. I think these should be separate but I can see the appeal of combining this.

• 3 So I asked and they answered like above in the post. Can you please help me about my questions ? –  user145115 Commented Aug 24, 2021 at 14:43
• 1 No this is reputable journal from springer –  user145115 Commented Aug 27, 2021 at 18:48
• "I have never heard of having the submission to the journal combined with the posting of a preprint." This seems to be a recent thing. I have seen something similar a few months ago with a Wiley journal and a preprint service called Authorea. Never heard of this before, but the journal itself was definitely reputable. –  Snijderfrey Commented Dec 30, 2021 at 12:55

You are free to publish it anywhere. Nature has a tie up with research square only for preprint like Arxiv.

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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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Preprints: Where to Post a Preprint

• Recommendations for Authors
• Where to Find Preprints
• Where to Post a Preprint
• How to Cite Preprints
• Journal and Funder Policies

Preprint Repositories

• arXiv arXiv is a preprint server for physics, math, computer sciences, quantitative biology and statistics.
• Authorea Authorea is a platform for publishing articles, data, figures and preprints.
• bioRxiv bioRxiv is a preprint server for biology.
• ChemRxiv ChemRxiv is a preprint repository for chemistry.
• Figshare Figshare is a repository where users can make all of their research outputs available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner.
• medRxiv medRxiv is a preprint server for the health sciences.
• Open Science Framework (OSF) WUSTL is a member of OSF, a free, open platform to support your research and enable collaboration. OSF contains over two million preprints from a number of preprint repositories. Use your WUSTL Key to register for an account.
• Preprints.org Preprints is a platform dedicated to making early versions of research outputs permanently available and citable. Content on Preprints is not peer-reviewed and can receive feedback from readers
• Research Square Research Square contains over 25,000 preprints and allows authors to submit preprints and make edit prior to peer review in a journal.
• SciELO Preprints SciELO is an multidisciplinary international preprint server.
• SSRN SSRN is a multidisciplinary preprint server.

Guidance for Selecting a Preprint Repository

NIH offers guidance on selecting a repository for interim research products including preprints. 

The NIH strongly encourages interim research products arising from NIH funds to be deposited in repositories that ensure: 

• Content is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable ( FAIR ).
• Interim product metadata, including usage statistics, are open, and easy to access by machines and people (e.g. via application program interfaces).
• Content is easy to use by machines and people. This access is both a function of permission (e.g. use of Creative Commons licenses) and technology (e.g. application program interfaces).
• Policies about plagiarism, competing interests, misconduct and other hallmarks of reputable scholarly publishing are rigorous and transparent.
• Records of changes to the product are maintained, and users have clear ways to cite different versions of the product.
• Links to the published version, if available.
• A robust archiving strategy that ensures long-term preservation and access. 

Source:  Reporting Preprints and Other Interim Research Products

International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Guidance

Per International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE):  Authors who choose to post their work on a preprint server should choose one that clearly identifies preprints as not peer-reviewed work and includes disclosures of authors’ relationships and activities. 

Source:  Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals , December 2024.

• << Previous: Where to Find Preprints
• Next: How to Cite Preprints >>
• Last Updated: May 13, 2024 12:26 PM
• URL: https://beckerguides.wustl.edu/preprints

Quickly Share, Gain Feedback, and Improve Your Papers with Research Square

The HSLS Update has published numerous articles about preprints over the years. Here we introduce another iteration of the preprint movement — Research Square , a multidisciplinary platform that helps researchers share their work early, gather feedback, and improve their manuscripts prior to (or in parallel with) journal submission.

So what differentiates Research Square from other preprint servers? The focus is on “added value” features such as:

• Increased discoverability and readability due to indexed and machine-readable full text in HTML
• Commenting via a custom-built system or the hypothesis annotation tool
• Figure rendering with a lightbox, which allows for zooming and downloading
• Full metrics, including Altmetrics and Dimensions data
• Research Square Badges to indicate preprint quality
• Editing services to improve the manuscript prior to journal submission
• Video and infographic services to help communicate the research

In addition, Research Square collaborates with Springer Nature on a free preprint service that provides authors with the opportunity to have their manuscript posted online in conjunction with submission to select journals . This service, called In Review , gives authors and readers access to the manuscript status through a peer review timeline during the article review process by the selected journal.

Research Square accepts many types of submissions: research articles, systematic reviews, methods articles, short reports, case reports, and data notes. The latter type is particularly compelling, as it provides an opportunity to post a brief write-up of a single dataset ( Data Note example ). All submissions are encouraged to include a Data Availability Statement documenting where to locate the data . Unacceptable submission types are literature reviews, hypotheses, opinions, theories, and commentaries, but manuscripts reporting negative results are included.

Each posted preprint is published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license and assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) issued through Crossref . The community-supported scholarly content preservation repository, Portico , permanently archives all content. In addition to preprints, Research Square posts protocols from Protocol Exchange , an open repository of community-contributed protocols sponsored by Nature Research. Explore the FAQ for additional information about the entire Research Square preprint platform.

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Journal-integrated preprint sharing from Springer Nature and Research Square

Share your preprint and track your manuscript’s review progress with our  In Review service

Our commitment to early sharing and transparency in peer review inspires us to think about how to help our authors in new ways. So, in October 2018, we added a new option for you when you submit to select Springer Nature journals. This first-of-its-kind option, called In Review , brought to you by our partners at Research Square, makes it easy to share a preprint of your manuscript on the Research Square platform and gives you real time updates on your manuscript’s progress through peer review.  In Review clearly links your manuscript to the journal reviewing it, while it’s in review. 

How can you participate?

It's simple! Just select the In Review option when you submit your next article to one of the participating journals. ( But be sure all your coauthors agree to opt-in , too.) And here is a list of journals currently on  In Review . 

Learn more about In Review

Brought to you by Research Square

With In Review you can:

• Share your work early  with funders and others as a preprint on Research Square in a citeable way while it is under review, and engage the wider community in discussion to help make your article even better including through the Hypothes.is open annotation tool. And social sharing of your preprint is easy—every article page has social media buttons at the top
• Track the status of your manuscript , including when reviews have been received (see below for details)
• Benefit from early sharing, such as more collaboration opportunities and earlier citations

Your peers will be able to:

• Comment on/see emerging science in full HTML—in both phone and desktop-friendly sizes
• Find new discoveries with fully-indexed search
• Gain insight into the peer review pipeline at participating journals

What can you expect if you opt in?

The editorial and peer review process will continue through the peer review systems as usual. You can use  In Review  to access up-to-date information on where your article is in the peer review process. 

The system will also immediately post a preprint of your manuscript to the In Review section of Research Square, in easy-to-read HTML, and with a citeable DOI. There, it will become a permanent part of the scholarly record —that means that your manuscript will permanently remain publicly available, regardless of whether the journal you submitted it to accepts it or not. (The FAQ has more details about the mechanics of how this works.)

You can see an example in the article above .  

What happens when you opt in to In Review?

When you submit your article through the manuscript submission system you will get the chance to opt in to  In Review . All coauthors must agree to post a preprint and participate in  In Review . 

2. Quality control checks

If you choose to opt in, your article will undergo some basic quality control checks before being sent to the  In Review  platform. 

3. Preprint deposition

Research Square converts the manuscript to HTML, assigns a DOI, and posts on the platform with a CC-BY license. This is public, and permanent. 

4. Author notification

Research Square notifies authors of preprint posting, and sends a link to the author dashboard. Authors will need to create an account (i.e., password) before logging in to see the dashboard.

5. Author dashboard (private)

Authors will get real time updates on their manuscript’s progress through peer review in the private author dashboard. 

6. Peer review timeline

Updates appear on the public peer review timeline as the manuscript progresses through peer review* (*Not available on Nature-branded journals.)

7. Final Decision

If the article is published, the preprint is updated with a link to the version of record. If that article is rejected, the journal name and public peer review timeline will be removed but the preprint and any versions of it, if any, will remain public. 

Still have more questions about In Review?

If you still have questions about what In Review can do for you or how it works, read our FAQ. 

Find out more about In Review across Springer Nature

• Authors’ original submitted version and all versions are released in real time as peer review progresses
• Public peer review timeline
• Authors will be able to track peer review on their private author dashboard

(Including  Nature Communications )

• Authors’ original submitted version

• Coming soon

For further information, please contact Research Square at [email protected] . 

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Temporary DOI Registration Delay Due to Crossref downtime from 21:00 UTC Monday, 16 September 2024 and 21:00 UTC Tuesday, 17 September 2024 , DOI registration for new preprints may be delayed. DOIs will be registered promptly once service resumes. Thank you for your patience.

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Participating Journals & Platforms

Research Square is a multidisciplinary preprint platform. You can submit directly to the platform or opt in to In Review , a free preprint service, when you submit to a participating journal.

Browse Research Square

In Review is a free preprint service that lets you post your paper online and track its status during peer review. Opt in when you submit to participating journals and receive real-time updates on your manuscript.

Have a question about In Review?

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How the world is adapting to preprints

• Michele Avissar-Whiting 0

Michele Avissar-Whiting is the editor-in-chief of Research Square, the preprint platform behind Springer Nature’s In Review service.

Produced by

The past year saw an explosion in the use of preprint severs, both by researchers and those who follow their work. How might scientists find true north in this chaotic new reality? Credit: Research Square; Canva.com

During a string of recent scholarly publishing conferences, I came to count on two things: that the event would be remote and that someone would be talking about preprints.

A certain trend emerged from the preprint discussions. Praise for preprints and their virtues was reliably bracketed by an acknowledgement that the medium was a bit green and a bit untamed: the Wild West of scientific publishing, where anything can happen.

Similar analogies from the publishing community have been abundant. At a talk organized by the Society for Scholarly Publishing, Shirley Decker-Lucke, Content Director at SSRN, likened preprints to raw oysters: They’re generally safe, but sometimes you get a bad one. On the same panel, Lyle Ostrow, Assistant Professor of Neurology at Johns Hopkins, compared the adoption of preprints to the shift from horse-drawn buggies to automobiles: They’re faster, they’re better, but they will require education to use safely. The following week, a Scholarly Kitchen article about preprints drew a parallel with unruly teenagers: “tremendous promise, but in need of more adult supervision to achieve their potential”.

I don’t disagree with any of these views. We must–and we will–learn to live in a world where most research is available to read before it undergoes peer review. Some of it may never get that scrutiny, and we’ll learn to live with that, too. But for all the challenges this new medium presents, it brings many more opportunities. It is a substrate for innovation. A preprint-first world holds potential for radical transparency, a realignment of incentives in scholarly publishing, an escape from the burden of impact factors, and a shift toward recognition of merit at the individual article level. Collectively, these changes stand to address problems that have plagued science for decades.

The new kid in town

While preprints aren’t actually new, they surged in popularity during the pandemic, quickly becoming the most visible source of information about the novel coronavirus. Everyone had to learn and adjust. Preprint platforms had to recalibrate to a new magnitude of submissions, scaling technology and operations in an effort to keep up. The character of incoming papers changed, too; many espoused poorly supported prophalaxes and treatments for COVID-19. A new burden of potential consequence meant preprint screeners had to reconsider their protocols while maintaining the low barriers to entry that authors have come to expect. Some platforms adopted new policies to correct for a preponderance of “noise” , and nearly all of the major servers unveiled new disclaimers to help calibrate readers’ interpretations of the content. Nonetheless, journalists often reported on these studies without acknowledging that they hadn’t been peer reviewed. And armchair epidemiologists, virologists and immunologists ran amok with their own hot takes over social media. Preprints on Twitter: the Wild West squared.

But over the subsequent months, some course correction ensued . Journalists and tweeters alike became more careful with their citations, and people started to take better notice of the disclaimers and to correct each other online. Perhaps more importantly, several high-profile retractions of COVID-19-related research in respected journals awakened people to a reality that has always existed: peer review doesn’t protect us against bad information, particularly at a time when scientists and editors are under enormous pressure to supply the world with useful, actionable data.

The literature is awash with bad science, and the small collection of retracted articles are dwarfed by reams of articles that could have been retracted were they not simply ignored. Journal articles based on bad (poorly conducted, irreproducible, unsupported) science typically fade into obscurity; so too, shall bad preprints.

Taming the Wild West

We will learn to live in a world with preprints as we learn to see them for what they are–part of a process that is, de facto, impressively messy. In fact, this is how we should view all scientific outputs, no matter how polished and well-formatted they appear. At a webinar hosted by Scholastica in September, my co-panelist Peter Coles, Editor in Chief of The Open Journal of Astrophysics , said, “Perhaps it's time for the public to understand what science is really like.” Preprints, by their imperfect, mutable nature are a reflection of the scientific process, which is, as Ed Yong put it best, “ a stumble toward ever less uncertainty ”.

So, how will the Wild West be tamed? As it is, most preprint servers have not been agnostic about the papers they post. Generally, they restrict passage of content that is clearly unscientific, unethical, potentially harmful or not representative of a novel, empirically derived finding. That is, they already impose some editorial standards.

Preprint platforms offer authors a legitimate place to host their work with unprecedented speed, for free. In time, they could be in a position to enforce, or at least strongly incentivize, standards that are widely acknowledged to support research integrity, like data and code availability, details of randomization and blinding, study limitations and lay summaries for findings that are consequential to human health.

Community peer review of preprints, a practice that has already seen some uptake , will eventually become fully normalized. There will be an emergence of unprecedented transparency in research reporting: studies with links to their comprehensive data and analysis posted alongside their criticisms and plaudits. Researchers who look forward to this future can hasten it by uploading preprints and by commenting substantively or conducting more structured reviews on preprints in their field via mechanisms like PREreview and Peer Community In .

The West did not stay wild. The preprint model, likewise, will be tamed by the communities that have shaped and strengthened it through the digital age, and it will become the basis of a new stage in the evolution of scholarly communication.

To learn more about preprints and their role in the scholarly publishing landscape, visit https://www.researchsquare.com/blog .

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Research Square Reaches 100,000 Preprint Milestone

Durham, NC, USA (August 12, 2021) -- Fewer than three years after the first preprint was posted on Research Square, the world’s fastest-growing multidisciplinary preprint platform has surpassed 100,000 preprints.

These 100,000-plus preprints combined were produced by 530,415 unique co-authors, 85,887 of whom were corresponding authors. The preprints also collectively generated 6,669 citations, logged 880,665 PDF downloads, and 39,532,968 HTML page views.  

Research Square’s growth rate has continued to increase over time. Since November 2020, after Research Square reached its 50,000 preprint milestone, authors from across more than 200 disciplines posted preprints at a rate of 206 per day. Before the 50,000 milestone, authors posted at a rate of 65 preprints per day. 

At the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in February 2020, preprinting exploded, beginning with the clinical sciences and quickly spreading throughout the life and social sciences, as well as some disciplines in the humanities. 

Michele Avissar-Whiting, Editor-in-Chief of Research Square, says preprinting has existed for decades and is rapidly becoming a natural part of the scholarly publishing process. 

“Preprints are nothing new and everything new at the same time,” said Avissar-Whiting. “Physicists, statisticians, and computer scientists have been circulating preprints online for more than 30 years, and it’s been a common step in their publication process for decades. Now history is repeating itself, just much more quickly and on an exponentially larger scale. The use of preprints has spread across hundreds of disciplines because of their potential to  accelerate research discovery.” 

Avissar-Whiting says researchers personally decide to post on preprint servers like Research Square for a number of reasons. Among them: to make their work immediately citable and discoverable, to establish the primacy of their discoveries, and to get comments and other feedback from the research community before submitting their work to peer-reviewed journals.

Preprints are uploaded to Research Square through one of two routes: through its innovative In Review feature, which allows researchers to upload their preprints while submitting to one of nearly 500 participating journals or via direct submission to the server. 

Research Square has shown significant adoption in countries with high-growth research programs. More than 45 percent of the authors preprinting on Research Square are associated with institutions in China and India. Among the other top 10 users by country: the United States, Iran, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Brazil, and Ethiopia.

Amye Kenall , Vice President of Publishing and Product for Research Square Company, says that the Research Square preprint platform is well positioned to become the largest and most robust preprint platform in the world. 

“Hitting the 100,000 preprint mark is a powerful milestone for us,” said Kenall. “It makes this growing and evolving publishing ecosystem more accessible to authors, and it is a reminder to continue to be led first and foremost by our users, the thousands of authors who post with us every week, whose embrace of the Research Square platform has gotten us here.”

About Research Square Company

Research Square Company, a five-time INC 5000 award winner, exists to make research communication faster, fairer, and more useful. Through our industry leading preprint platform, Research Square, research promotion tools, and AJE’s comprehensive suite of manuscript preparation services, we are proud to have supported over 2.5 million authors in 192 countries since our founding in 2004. Across all sides of our business, our team of former researchers and publishing industry professionals truly understand the importance of sharing research results with the world. By helping researchers communicate their work more effectively, we accelerate the pace of global discovery and advancement. 

For more information on our services and partnership opportunities, visit company.researchsquare.com .

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Can I withdraw or remove my preprint from the platform?

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