Preprint sharing has become an increasingly common practice; one which has greatly expanded since the COVID-19 pandemic. Posting a preprint makes an article quickly and freely available to everyone (while the published version may take months and be behind a paywall) and opens the manuscript up for transparent community review. The move towards greater preprint sharing is being accompanied by other innovations that leverage the availability of these manuscripts such as open peer review and endorsement services, and the ‘publish, review, and curate’ approach – whereby some publishers will only review manuscripts already published as preprints. Some funders are now accepting open peer review on preprints as an alternative to traditional journals. These trends have the potential to drastically improve research communication, making it more efficient, open, and transparent.
There are an increasing number of dedicated preprint servers (preprint-specific repositories) that are developing new practices to support the unique needs related to managing preprints. However, there are still large gaps in geographic and domain coverage and some authors will choose to deposit their research outputs into another type of repository, such as an institutional or generalist repository.
As preprint sharing becomes more widespread, it is clear that generalist and institutional repositories have an important role to play in supporting open and early sharing of research manuscripts.
In December 2022, a COAR-ASAPbio Working Group has identified Ten Recommended Practices for Managing Preprints in Generalist and Institutional Repositories across three areas: linking, discovery, and editorial processes. The practices are listed below and the full report contains more detailed explanations. While we acknowledge that many of these practices are not currently adopted by institutional and generalist repositories, we hope that these recommendations will encourage repositories around the world to begin to apply them locally.
