From Preprints to Omniprints

Why open publication repositories need to ditch the word “preprint.”

Starting with ArXiv, the idea of preprints has been increasingly in popularity for some time. But now is the time for omniprints. Preprints were a good start. And Crossref has been indexing more and more preprints, with preprints outpacing journal articles by far (Crossref). There are a number of servers, including ArXiv and its derivatives, OSF’s preprint servers, ResearchGate, and more.

I rely exclusively on preprint servers for my publication, mostly out of spite for modern academia and its toxic nature. I absolutely refuse to pay a company so that they can profit off of my work. And honestly, if the goal of publishing is to communicate with other researchers, than traditional publications are not the answer, especially when they’re not open access.

But there’s an issue. A lot of people reject citation of preprints. They want to wait until there’s a “final” version. It’s not even that they’ll scrutinize it more heavily, but rather they will outright use the preprint nature of the paper to ignore it.

Of course, what matters isn’t whether a journal has decided to pick up an article — Wakefield taught us that—but rather what matters is that the content of the article is sound. And in order to determine…