The emergence of preprints: comparing publishing behaviour in the Global South and the Global North
| Date | 15 January 2024 |
| Pages | 1-22 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-04-2023-0181 |
| Published date | 15 January 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Bibliometrics,Databases,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet,Records management & preservation,Document management |
| Author | Kristin Biesenbender,Nina Smirnova,Philipp Mayr,Isabella Peters |
The emergence of preprints:
comparing publishing behaviour in
the Global South and the
Global North
Kristin Biesenbender
Department of Web Science, ZBW –Leibniz Information Centre for Economics,
Kiel, Germany
Nina Smirnova and Philipp Mayr
Department of Knowledge Technologies for the Social Sciences,
GESIS –Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany, and
Isabella Peters
Department of Web Science, ZBW –Leibniz Information Centre for Economics,
Kiel, Germany and
Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering, University of Kiel,
Kiel, Germany
Abstract
Purpose –The recent proliferation of preprints could be a way for researchers worldwide to increase the
availability and visibility of their research findings. Against the background of rising publication costs caused
by the increasing prevalence of article processing fees, the search for other ways to publish research results
besides traditional journal publication may increase. This could be especially true for lower-income countries.
Design/methodology/approach –Therefore, the authors are interested in the experiences and attitudes
towards posting and using preprints in the Global South as opposed to the Global North. To explore whether
motivations and concerns about posting preprints differ, the authors adopted a mixed-methods approach,
combining a quantitative survey of researchers with focus group interviews.
Findings –The authors found that respondents from the Global South were more likely to agree to adhere to
policies and to emphasise that mandates could change publishing behaviour towards open access. They were
The emergence
of preprints
1
© Kristin Biesenbender, Nina Smirnova, Philipp Mayr and Isabella Peters. Published by Emerald
Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0)
licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both
commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and
authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/
legalcode
This work is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) project
Open Access Effects –The Influence of Structural and Author-specific Factors on the Impact of OA
(OASE), grant numbers 16PU17005A and 16PU17005B. Nina Smirnova received funding from DAAD–
UGC Project-based Personnel Exchange Programme (PPP 2022), DAAD project number: 57608852
(SEASON project) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under grant number: MA 3964/7-2
(POLLUX project).
The authors thank all respondents for their helpful insights and Nicholas Fraser for managing the
previous online survey among bioRxiv authors and the OASE online conference “Open access, preprints
and research impact”.
In the interest of transparency, data sharing and reproducibility, the author(s) of this article have
made the data underlying their research openly available. It can be accessed by following the link here:
Survey: https://github.com/kalawinka/OASE
Focus group interviews: https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.960919
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/1468-4527.htm
Received 27 April 2023
Revised 13 October 2023
Accepted 1 November 2023
Online Information Review
Vol. 49 No. 8, 2025
pp. 1-22
Emerald Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-04-2023-0181
also more likely to agree posting preprints has a positive impact. Respondents from the Global South and the
Global North emphasised the importance of peer-reviewed research for career advancement.
Originality/value –The study has identified a wide range of experiences with and attitudes towards posting
preprints among researchers in the Global South and the Global North. To the authors’knowledge, this has
hardly been studied before, which is also because preprints only have emerged lately in many disciplines and
countries.
Peer review –The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-
04-2023-0181
Keywords Preprints, Open access, Publication behaviour, Global South, Global North, Survey, Focus groups
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Although “open access (OA)”and “open science (OS)”are currently “hot topics”among
science policy makers and research funders (UNESCO, 2021) progress towards OA/OS varies
in many countries. Publishing their research results and making them visible and accessible
to the scientific community still is a major challenge for many researchers. They face
problems in funding their research and article processing charges (APCs) and/or feel
pressured to publish in certain journals to gain recognition and advance their careers. Not
being able to publish OA hinders researchers to benefit from important advantages
associated with OA publications, such as increased citation counts, enhanced visibility and
accessibility (Fraser et al., 2020;Gargouri et al., 2010;Piwowar et al., 2018;Solomon
et al., 2013).
OA-publishing is a broad concept, though. It comprises publishing in OA journals and via
OA-repositories, which is an emerging and in terms of business models even opaque market.
In some countries, for example, there are different transformative agreements with publishers
or different ways of covering possible APCs for OA (Klebel and Ross-Hellauer, 2023;
Sch€
onfelder, 2018). There are APC waivers and discounts for low- and middle-income
countries, but it is questionable who can benefit from this in different parts of the world
(Abdul Baki and Alhaj Hussein, 2021;Momeni et al., 2023;Nabyonga-Orem et al., 2020;Smith
et al., 2021). This may result in research findings not being published in different parts of the
world due to lack of funding or to researchers publishing behind paywalls (Ross-Hellauer
et al., 2022). The recent increase in the number of APC-based journals and the fees themselves
raises the question of whether this is causing researchers to move to other publication
channels that do not incur costs, such as posting preprints.
Concept of the study
Lately, preprint servers have become popular and their number has risen since 2013 (Chiarelli
et al., 2019). Preprints are research papers that are often posted before submission to a journal
and before peer-review to allow early availability and visibility (Penfold and Polka, 2020),
often resulting in citation advantages for journal articles with preprints (Brierley et al., 2022;
Fraser et al., 2020;Larivi
ere et al., 2014). Preprint-posting is highly discipline-specific, e.g.
there is a disciplinary culture of posting preprints in Physics or Economics, which
Humanities lacks (Chiarelli et al., 2019). OA-publication behaviour in general is also affected
by drivers internal and external to science, such as the pressure to post preprints during the
Covid19-pandemic, especially in the Life Sciences (Fraser et al., 2021). There are further
barriers that impede wide adoption of OA-publishing, such as researchers’concerns about
lack of quality assurance or the “Ingelfinger rule”, which states that a manuscript will be
considered for publication only if its contents have not yet been published elsewhere, which
prevents pre-publication in a different outlet, e.g. a preprint server (Chiarelli et al., 2019;
Severin et al., 2020).
OIR
49,8
2
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