The rise of preprints in earth sciences

(i) EarthArXiv (Narock et al., 2019). Active since 2017, EarthArXiv is a preprint server devoted to open scholarly communication. EarthArXiv publishes articles from all subdomains of Earth Science and related domains of planetary science. EarthArXiv does not evaluate the scientific quality of submissions. Instead, EarthArXiv serves as a volunteer community-driven platform for free hosting and rapid dissemination of scientific results. EarthArXiv partners with California Digital Library (part of the University of California system) as their server host and submission platform using a system called Janeway (developed at Birkbeck, University of London). EarthArXiv also receives a continued support from the Earth Science Information Partners.

(ii) ESSOAr was started in 2018, and recently evolved into the ESS Open Archive. The Earth and Space Science Open Archive is a community server established to accelerate the open discovery and dissemination of earth, environmental, and space science research by archiving and sharing early research outputs, including preprints, presentations from major scientific meetings, and important documents of scholarly societies. ESS Open Archive is governed by a partnership among the following societies (American Geophysical Union, AGU; American Society of Agronomy; Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography; Crop Science Society of America; Ecological Society of America; Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry; Soil Science Society of America) and Wiley and Authorea. Financial and technical support is provided by AGU and Wiley. ESS Open Archive also allows researchers to preserve their posters or slide presentations from recognized scientific conferences. ESS Open Archive allow, and encourages, linking to data sets in leading repositories or other online resources such as posters and videos. Jupyter notebooks can also be included as supplements. ESS Open Archive also provides an archive for official materials of scholarly societies.

(iii) Earth Scientists who have published in the many journals of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) have already become accustomed to such openness and are posting their work prior to peer-review as a discussion on the Copernicus platform (Voosen, 2017). More than 20 years ago, EGU introduced the unique concept of open discussion and transparent peer review in which preprints were posted online; they now have a centralized preprint service EGUsphere, the not-for-profit open scientific repository of the European Geosciences Union (EGU), brings together preprints in the domain of Earth, Space, and Planetary sciences in a diverse, inclusive, and systematic collection of contributions, including conference abstracts, conference presentations and preprints to their articles (mostly) submitted to an EGU journal. EGUsphere is transparent and interactive, giving authors of presentations and preprints the opportunity to receive attributed comments from the public aimed at stimulating discussion, cooperation, and to revise their materials in open review.

• The quick dissemination of research findings, which is important for time-sensitive studies (such as those conducted after natural disasters), for early-career researchers (ECRs) applying for jobs, or for any academic applying for grants or a promotion, given that journal-led peer review can take months or even years (Nguyen et al., 2015);

• Increased visibility and accessibility for research outputs due to the preprint’s free uploading and viewing, especially for individuals who do not have access to paywalled journals or who have restricted access because of remote working (such as during lockdowns);

• Increased visibility may also lead to increased interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary work in fields that would benefit from collaboration between Earth scientists and other disciplines (e.g., Dwivedi et al., 2022). Examples include geologic carbon dioxide removal strategies, water resources management and critical minerals.

• Authors benefit greatly from feedback from interested readers, contributing to improved versions of articles. This is important, since later versions of articles that are simultaneously submitted to journals can benefit from both the journal-mediated peer review and the “crowdsourced” review (Ginsparg, 2016).

• Peer feedback that goes above and beyond what is offered through journal-led peer review (Tennant and Ross-Hellauer, 2020), increasing the likelihood of collaboration through community input and discussion; ECRs can also trained and write their first peer-review of preprints without being asked to.

• Researchers to set priority (or a precedent) for their findings to reduce the possibility of being “scooped” by being assigned a digital object identifier (DOI). Some researchers may be afraid or unable to present their results at conferences. Additionally, abstracts available in conference books and proceedings might not always reflect what is presented on the day of the conference. Preprints allow research output to exist, be known and be stored in the digital world;

• Dismantling of silos that traditional journals sustain by exposing us to a wider range of research than we might otherwise encounter and providing a home for works that do not clearly have a traditional peer-review publication as their intended destination (i.e. sharing diverse types of outputs such as data, research code, or methods);

• Openness and transparency in research, with a focus on enhancing the overall standard, reliability, and reproducibility of findings.

• Authors always have the option of submitting revised versions, with corrections, or they can post a withdrawal notice with explanation for the action taken. In either case, all previous versions remain archived and accessible for comparison, with their original date-stamps (Ginsparg, 2016).

• They may come with a caveat that interpretations are subject to change and that they may or may not lead to actual peer reviewed publication;

• The increased dissemination effect has the potential to be used to promote non-reproducible scholarship or fake news and adds an extra potential burden on readers (e.g. Pourret et al. 2020). But fake news has plagued climate and environmental science for decades (e.g. Nature Communications Editorial Board, 2017) and it is not specific to just preprinted papers. While the original intent of the preprint servers was rapid dissemination, it very quickly became the go-to place for archival access as well, and this has evolved to become an important component of its utility and popularity. Authors are understandably determined to propagate correct information whenever possible, so rather than let readers be misinformed or confused, they ideally make immediate corrections to a latest version, since that’s what many readers access, either before or after publication elsewhere. This is the inevitable consequence if preprint servers come to be regularly used for archival access (Ginsparg, 2016);

• ECR may wary of publications that do not pass prior quality control. Therefore, they often hold back from publishing preprints, and not just because coauthors, senior researchers, prefer to publish in traditional journals. ECRs, due to the competitive circumstances of their career stage, are sometimes more opposed to publishing preprints that do not lead to a traditional publication than other already tenured researchers (Nicholas et al., 2022);

• Posting preprints is advantageous for ECRs because they can be shared, cited, and demonstrate productivity. However, the decision to preprint a manuscript must be made by all of the co-authors, and ECRs are frequently not the decision-maker due to power dynamics associated with academia (Ettinger et al., 2022). As a result, ECRs could encounter circumstances in which they are eager to deposit a preprint but are unsure of how to contact their co-authors or bring up the possibility of preprinting to their advisors. It is especially important for those of them leaving their research group after a contractual term. Indeed, in a short time it is not always possible to fully write a research paper in this particular field, as the process of conducting a field study, sampling and geochemical analyses could take years;

• Preprints may have some other disadvantages, including information overload, insufficient quality assurance, political influence, and outsized impact (e.g. Smart, 2022).