ChemRxiv: Boiling Down Preprints in Chemistry

By Ben Mudrak (Senior Product Manager, ChemRxiv) <curator@chemrxiv.org>

The rapid sharing of research results before peer review, pioneered by arXiv decades ago, leads to an acceleration of progress by the global research community. While this acceleration grabs headlines more frequently in fields such as epidemiology, the same principles apply to chemistry and adjacent fields of study. Even with similar goals, ChemRxiv users’ viewpoints and needs do not always exactly reflect those of the broader preprint community, especially as the field of chemistry has not yet caught up with other fields that have been exploring preprints for longer.

ChemRxiv was launched over five years ago, on August 15, 2017, with this accelerated progress in mind, aiming to build on the success of arXiv and bioRxiv in other scientific disciplines. Specifically, ChemRxiv sought (and still seeks) to provide researchers the opportunity to gather feedback, rapidly disseminate their work, establish priority for their discoveries, document their research output, and stay up to date in their field, all at no charge. In keeping with the site’s goals of fostering connection and collaboration, the service is jointly managed by five chemical societies: the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Chinese Chemical Society (CCS), the Chemical Society of Japan (CSJ), the German Chemical Society (GDCh), and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). Input from a Scientific Advisory Board of 29 active researchers from 17 countries also helps guide operations and policies.

options included:

• Feedback from peers on new results

• Staking the first claim to new research

• Rapid sharing of results to the community

• Public record of research activity

• Transparency into the evolution of a research paper before publication

Data from ChemRxiv community survey (n=834). Divided based on whether the respondent self reported having posted preprints before (“Posted preprints”; n=425) or not (“No preprints”; n=409). The percentage of all respondents ranking the option highly beneficial (4 or 5 on a 5-point scale) is noted.

ChemRxiv has now posted more than 16,000 preprints from researchers around the world, covering fields from basic organic chemistry research to medicinal chemistry and chemical education. You can find more details on the growth and usage of ChemRxiv in its five years since launch in a recent editorial posted to the site

Last summer, we surveyed authors and readers from the ChemRxiv community to better understand their views on preprints. One particular aim behind the community survey was to gain a better understanding of how our audience may differ from researchers in fields with a longer history of posting preprints.

One important question asked authors what they saw as the top benefit(s) of preprints, with the ability to rank a few of the benefits derived from ChemRxiv’s launch goals. In this case, the

There was general consensus among the community that establishing priority was a driving focus, with rapid sharing following closely (i.e., by posting results before the potentially lengthy peer review process takes place at one or more journals). A public record of research results and feedback were also rated highly by about half the survey takers. These are not new observations (similar benefits to preprints are articulated nicely by Saribipour, et al.), falling in line with viewpoints from researchers in other areas of study.

We also asked the survey takers to rank some concerns about preprints from the following items brought up in our conversations with ChemRxiv users, potential users, and Board members:

• Preprints can be misinterpreted by readers

• Preprints can jeopardize publication in a journal

• Preprints create confusion for readers

• Preprints can be used to spread misinformation

• Preprints do not receive many citations

Data from ChemRxiv community survey (n=834). Divided based on whether the respondent self reported having posted preprints before (“Posted preprints”; n=425) or not (“No preprints”; n=409). The percentage of all respondents ranking the option highly concerning (4 or 5 on a 5-point scale) is noted.

These concerns, likewise, are not unique. There is more variability based on breaking down responses by prior experience with preprints, with those who have not yet posted a preprint focusing more heavily on the potential to jeopardize publication (which is not typically a hurdle with publisher policies widely accepting preprints nowadays). Overall, these concerns were also not rated as strongly, reaching the top of our scale at nearly half the rate of the benefits.

Of note, prior preprint authors’ most highly cited reason for not preprinting more was “Confidentiality concerns or other reasons that preclude public posting of early drafts.” ChemRxiv does not accept clinical data, so anonymization is rarely a concern, but some chemistry fields involve new intellectual property that will be subject to patents or institutional oversight. In general, people in the field exhibit some hesitation to post certain results: for example, instructions on synthesizing a new compound. Overcoming this hesitation and providing appropriate safeguards is an ongoing effort to help ChemRxiv grow.

Preprints and journals are increasingly connected, and the boundaries and system flows have been a major topic of discussion recently. ChemRxiv, like many preprints, places a link to the peer-reviewed article when available, and we offer Direct Journal Transfer to allow authors to export their manuscript and relevant metadata to over 150 participating journals. One potential new feature would be the ability to post a preprint on ChemRxiv after submission to a journal, much like Research Square or bioRxiv/medRxiv receive preprints from certain journals. Such a path would represent a way to grow the number of preprints on the site although, at the moment, our authors largely look to transfer to a journal.

A number of services are now offering a system to provide peer review on preprints, often with the reviews themselves shared. Early discussions with the chemistry community haven’t uncovered much appetite for this, but it’s an area we’ll be watching closely. In our survey, over 95% of ChemRxiv authors indicated having a destination journal in mind most or all of the time. They see ChemRxiv as a place to read the latest research and stake a claim to their results while the peer review process plays out in the context of a journal.

As ChemRxiv looks to the next five years and beyond, we’re hoping to continue strengthening the connections between our content and metadata and the broader scholarly publishing space. We’re delighted to be helping develop a preprint dashboard with CHORUS, which will tie preprint metadata to funder, institution, and publisher data. ChemRxiv has also participated in a wide-ranging advisory group organized by Crossref to document best practices for preprint metadata. We will also look to expand the destination journals available through our Direct Journal Transfer program (over 150 titles are available for automated transfer currently). Such expansion will support our authors, who overwhelmingly use ChemRxiv as a step toward peer-reviewed publication.

Finally, we look forward to many more collaborations within the preprint community, which is a vibrant, friendly, and creative space to solve the challenges we face in helping researchers share their findings. ChemRxiv’s community is unique but fits well alongside others who are pushing to solidify the place of preprints in research communication.

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