Preprints: A brief history and recommendations from the NIH for authors citing preprints

What is a preprint? 

Per Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), a preprint is:  

• A complete written description of scientific work that contains data and methods
• Posted by an author to an openly accessible repository
• Not yet submitted for peer review to a journal
• Not formally published

Origin of preprints 

Preprints can be traced back to the Information Exchange Group (IEG) started by NIH in 1961. There were over 2,500 IEG memos disseminated via postal mail by 3,600 participants from 46 countries. The IEG was discontinued in 1967 after the release of an article published in Nature. The article discussed a series of decisions made by a group of journal publishers to not accept a manuscript that was previously released as an IEG memorandum and that IEG memoranda could not be cited in a published paper. To learn more, refer to The prehistory of biology preprints: A forgotten experiment from the 1960s.

NIH expects awardees to: 

• Make the preprint publicly accessible
• Follow recommended guidelines for selecting a preprint repository that abides by FAIR principles
• Acknowledge NIH support/funding
• Clearly state the work is not peer-reviewed
• Declare any competing interests

NIH awardees are strongly encouraged to:  

• Select a “Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license or dedicate their work to the public domain”   

NIH awardees can:  

• Add citations for preprints in My Bibliography. (My Bibliography offers a template for adding preprints if a record for the preprint is not available from PubMed. See: Adding Citations Manually)
• Associate awards to preprints in My Bibliography
• *Claim preprints as products of their award on an RPPR
• Cite preprints in a biosketch

*Note: Preprints are exempt from the NIH Public Access Policy as they are not peer-reviewed.