To Preprint or not to Preprint?
In my capacity as managing editor of the Open Journal of Astrophysics I’ve received a few emails recently disagreeing with our policy of asking authors to submit their papers to the arXiv before submitting them to OJAp. Before reflecting on the wider issue, let me just point out that we don’t actually require papers to on the arXiv first. It is possible to submit a PDF directly to the Scholastica platform. We do however say in our For Authors page:
We strongly encourage authors to submit in the manner described above (i.e. on the arXiv first). We can receive and review papers submitted directly to this platform but since the final version must be on the arXiv in order to be published we feel it is far better to submit it there first in order to establish that it is on an appropriate topic for this journal.
Looking back over the 81 papers we have published, only a handful were submitted directly to the platform; the vast majority were put on the arXiv first.
This behaviour is in some sense a continuation of a very old practice in astrophysics. I can’t resist sharing this, one of the interesting astronomical curiosities I’ve acquired over the years, which is a preprint of the classic work of Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler and Hoyle in 1957 (a paper usually referred to as B2FH after the initials of its authors), which is such an important contribution to the literature that it has its own wikipedia page.
Younger readers will probably not realize that preprints were not always produced in the electronic form they are today. We all used to make large numbers of these and post them at great expense to (potentially) interested colleagues before publication in order to get comments. That was extremely useful because a paper could take over a year to be published after being refereed for a journal: that’s too long a timescale when a PhD or PDRA position is only a few years in duration. The first papers I was given to read as a new graduate student in 1985 were all preprints that were not published until well into the following year. In some cases I had more or less figured out what they were about by the time they appeared in a journal!
The B2FH paper was published in 1957 but the practice of circulating preprints persisted well into the 1990s. Usually these were produced by institutions with a distinctive design, logo, etc which gave them a professional look, which made it easier to distinguish `serious’ papers from crank material (which was also in circulation). This also suggested that some internal refereeing inside an institution had taken place before an “official” preprint was produced and this lending it an air of trustworthiness. Smaller institutions couldn’t afford all this, so were somewhat excluded from the preprint business.
With the arrival of the arXiv the practice of circulating hard copies of preprints in astrophysics gradually died out, to be replaced by ever-increasing numbers of electronic articles. The arXiv does have some gatekeeping – in the sense there are some controls on who can deposit a preprint there – but it is far easier to circulate a preprint now than it was.
It is still the case that big institutions and collaborations insist on quite strict internal refereeing before publishing a preprint – and some even insist on waiting for a paper to be accepted by a journal before adding it to the arXiv – but there’s no denying that among the wheat there is quite a lot of chaff, some of which attracts media coverage that it does not deserve. It must be admitted, however, that the same can be said of some papers that have passed peer review and appeared in high-profile journals! No system that is operated by human beings will ever be flawless, and peer review is no exception.
Nowadays, in astrophysics, the single most important point of access to scientific literature is through the arXiv, which is why the Open Journal of Astrophysics was set up as an overlay journal to provide a level of rigorous peer review for preprints, not only to provide quality control but also to improve papers through the editorial process. In fact, I think the latter is more important than the former.
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In the Dark 
May 16, 2023 at 4:57 pm
I remember paper preprints, as well reading your featured preprint.
May 17, 2023 at 11:39 am
My recollection is that most if not all preprints were papers that had already been accepted. Observatories and research institutions used to produce them for their research outputs – such as the one you show – less common for university departments, although some did do so.
When a paper was published, the author would usually get a number of ‘free’ offprints of the paper (anywhere from 25 to 100), which were nicely bound double-sided copies, much better to have than photocopies. So it was common to write to authors and request these, once you saw them in the journal. (There was even a postcard to do this). You could also ask to be added to their mailing list. Back when I had these offprints, I also had a small collection of autographs from well-known astronomers, as sometimes authors would write their name on the paper.
Most journals stopped offprints when they realised that no-one asked for them anymore. You simply downloaded the paper and either printed it or kept on your computer.
May 17, 2023 at 11:41 am
I assumed that offprints were for you to send to your Mam.
May 17, 2023 at 1:49 pm
Nope, that was the extra copy of the bound PhD thesis.
May 18, 2023 at 7:28 am
Certainly the two departments I was in that used to send out preprints did it after acceptance. (There was also a long wait to get into print in a journal at that point, so it made sense to send preprints out even at that stage.)
I’ve never really understood the insistence that there is a ‘right way’ to use the arXiv. It’s a choice, and people should be allowed to make it.