Four years of chemistry preprints
Nina Notman takes stock of how preprint severs have settled into the chemistry community
In summer 2017, the world of chemistry publishing was quietly revolutionised – by the launch of two preprint servers. Preprints are early versions of scientific papers that haven’t yet been through the peer review process or been published in a traditional journal, and preprint servers are the free, online archives (or repositories) that host them.
The SSRN preprint server (originally for social sciences and currently run by publishing giant Elsevier) launched an offshoot called the Chemistry Research Network (ChemRN). Then, a week or so later, ChemRxiv was launched by the American Chemical Society (ACS) – it is now run as a collaboration between the ACS, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the chemical societies of China, Japan and Germany.