Publishing Preprints and Receiving Feedback About Them

A preprint is a draft version of your work that has not yet been subject to a review. It may already be submitted to a publisher in parallel, without having undergone formal peer review. Even though in principle a preprint could be distributed via any medium, in practice they are often self-archived and distributed on central repositories. Community members of these repositories will then be notified and can review the uploaded content. There are several of these kinds of repositories or preprint servers.

Infographic: What are Preprints

In order to get the greatest benefit from the additional dissemination of a preprint, you should select a publication location for your preprint where it will find the greatest possible number of interested readers.

The following economics and business studies repositories offer you the opportunity of publishing in Open Access:

In worksheet 6 “Make your preprint accessible” in the worksheet series of the Open Science Magazine of the ZBW, you can learn how to publish a preprint using the example of EconStor.

Cross-disciplinary repositories in which you are able to publish preprints are:

ArXiv
OSF Preprints
Preprints.org
SocArXiv
Zenodo
You can find further repositories with the search services for repositories
You can find further repositories with the overview lists of repositories

ShareYourPaper is another helpful tool for the publication of preprints. It helps researchers to make their research visible and thereby to receive more citations. Moreover, it simplifies self-archiving by helping to make papers available in Open Access quickly, free-of-charge and legally.

Preprints serve not only the faster dissemination of research results but can also contribute to improving the quality of publications before they are printed. Feedback can be given to the authors at an early stage and changes incorporated into the work. Some platforms support the giving or seeking of targeted feedback to publications.

Platforms that support the giving or seeking of feedback to publications:

Tip

You can view the policies of almost all journal publishers regarding parallel publication in Open Access repositories, among other things, in the Open policy finder. It also provides information about the respective permitted versions and publishers’ restrictions.