[GOAL] Preprints from MDPI

[Martyn Rittman]

Dear GOAL list members,

In May this year, a multidisciplinary platform Preprints at 
http://www.preprints.org was launched by MDPI. The purpose of this 
message is to give some information about Preprints and its performance 
to date.

So far, we have received more than nearly 900 submissions, of which over 
600 are online. 165 have been rejected based on an initial screening, 
and 72 withdrawn by authors. The remainder are either being processed or 
waiting for the authors to respond to issues raised during screening. 
The majority have come from MDPI authors - we offer the option to upload 
to Preprints during submission - but we are seeing an increasing number 
of submissions from other sources.

Our primary criterion for putting a preprint online is that it has the 
basic structure of a scientific paper, either a research article or a 
comprehensive review paper. In addition, it should not have appeared in 
a peer reviewed journal (i.e., we don't accept postprints). Authors need 
to be identified and give their affiliations, in most cases we require 
an institutional email address as a means of validation. The main 
reasons for rejection are that the papers are unscientific, contain 
unsupported claims, or are discussion/editorial type material.

Authors can update their paper at any time, and we have seen quite a few 
instances of authors taking advantage of this option. On the other hand, 
the comment and rating feature has not attracted much attention and we 
are looking at ways to gather constructive feedback on papers from the 
community. We register doi's for all papers, and want to thank Crossref 
for developing the new scheme specifically for preprints.

There has been a learning process and we have adapted a few policies. 
One example is with regard to withdrawals: we give a short window before 
registering a doi to allow authors who haven't fully understood the 
implications of posting to Preprints to take it offline.

Preprints.org is currently owned and operated by MDPI, which is a 
commercial open access publisher. Since Preprints is a .org, it is 
necessarily be run on a not-for-profit basis. We do not intend to change 
this status and eventually plan for Preprints to be under the ownership 
of an independent, non-profit entity.

Kind regards,

Martyn Rittman
on behalf of the Preprints editorial team

-- 
Martyn Rittman, Ph.D.
Chief Production Editor
Email: rittman at mdpi.com

--
MDPI AG
Postfach, CH-4005 Basel, Switzerland
Office: St. Alban-Anlage 66, 4052 Basel, Switzerland
Tel. +41 61 683 77 35
Fax +41 61 302 89 18

Make your research visible before peer review at Preprints.org: http://www.preprints.org