The case for preprints; Go Green!

There are a lot of ongoing efforts around scholarly communication reform. Amongst the most discussed, fall under the open access rainbow. Of these, much of the discussion focuses on “gold” (Article Processing Charges; APCs) or, as a remedy to the problems of gold, “diamond”. The problem with the diamond approach is that it fails to move beyond the multiple issues with journal prominence. Increasingly, there have been policy changes and discussions focussed on the green route of open access; preprints.

But the argument for preprints is not simply technical or about access. It is infrastructural, cultural, economic, and ultimately moral. If the goal of research communication is to circulate knowledge efficiently, fairly, and openly, then the continued (relative) marginalisation of preprints becomes increasingly difficult to justify. So why should preprints move from an underdiscussed option to becoming the primary route for change? Here, I answer that question by summarising the evidence that exists when assessing the benefits of preprints.

Efficiency

The most obvious argument for preprints remains the most compelling: they are fast. But this isn’t about rushed work, rather improved efficiency. 

The traditional publishing system is defined by delay. Months, and often years, can pass between the completion of a manuscript and its formal publication. Much of this lag is not attributable to careful scholarly evaluation, but to the procedural inertia of journal workflows: editorial triage, repeated rounds of resubmission, formatting requirements, embargoes, and production pipelines inherited from a print era. Worse still, in recent years peer review itself has been breaking down with increasing delays and difficulties in finding peer reviewers causing even longer delays; one study estimated that the cumulative cost of invitations that resulted in no review cost 235,000 years of elapsed wait time.

Preprints avoid much of this friction. They allow findings to enter public scholarly discussion immediately (generally within 48 hours), rather than waiting for the slow choreography of formal publication. During the COVID-19 pandemic, preprints became essential infrastructure precisely because the alternative was untenable. Researchers, policymakers, clinicians, and journalists could not afford to wait months for conventional publication cycles to complete.

But the case extends beyond emergencies. Slow dissemination is itself a structural inefficiency. Research is publicly funded, institutionally supported, and socially consequential. Delaying access to findings often serves neither authors, readers or society. It does however serve systems built around scarcity and prestige.

The irony is that researchers already communicate rapidly through conferences, mailing lists, collaborative documents, Slack channels, social media, and informal peer networks. Preprints simply formalise this existing behaviour in a transparent and citable form, making this efficiency more equitable.

Career Benefits; evidence of productivity and citation boosts

Within academia, the biggest beneficiaries of preprinting are early career researchers (ECRs).  

Preprints provide visibility in a system that too often withholds recognition until publication. In a system in which academic careers are increasingly shaped by compressed timelines such as fixed-term contracts, fellowship deadlines and expanding competition for funding and hiring, this can be devastating.

Traditional publishing schedules remain stubbornly slow. The result is a structural mismatch between when research is completed and when researchers receive credit for it. Preprints help to close this gap. They establish priority, demonstrate productivity, and make ongoing work visible to potential collaborators, employers, and funders. In doing so, they shift scholarly communication away from the binary logic of “published versus unpublished” toward a more continuous model of research dissemination. Better still, funders are increasingly recognising preprints in fellowship and grant applications, directly rewarding this behaviour. 

Preprints also benefit researchers operating outside elite institutional networks. The journal system has long functioned as both dissemination mechanism and gatekeeping apparatus. Preprints partially redistribute that power by allowing researchers to participate in scholarly conversations before institutional prestige mechanisms have rendered judgment. Independent researchers, without academic affiliation or funding, can share their work. In my own experience as a postdoctoral researcher conducting independent research, preprints were the only viable route to disseminating my work. 

Preprints are also consistently associated with higher citations compared to work that is not first posted as a preprint. In fact, posting a preprint is the best open science activity you can engage in to achieve this. This boost in citations is beneficial for career advancement but can also help with journal publication. Posting a preprint can attract the attention of editors and help with subsequent journal publication; further benefitting careers. 

Critics sometimes suggest that preprints create information overload or encourage premature dissemination. Yet academia already rewards visibility, networking, and speed. The difference is that preprints make these dynamics more open and accessible rather than confining them within private correspondence and institutional privilege.

Quality & feedback

The most persistent objection to preprints concerns their quality. Without peer review, critics argue that readers cannot trust the work.This concern is understandable but is often based on an idealised account of peer review itself. Traditional peer review is valuable, but it is neither infallible nor uniform. Weak studies pass review; important studies are rejected; methodological errors persist long after publication. The rise of LLM use has further exacerbated (and highlighted) these problems. Indeed, peer review is not a quality control mechanism. 

The answer, however, is not to force all preprints to undergo conventional peer review before they are treated seriously, as some have called for. Doing so would merely recreate the same bottlenecks and problems under a different name; shifting goalposts without introducing meaningful change. This is not an argument against peer review. It is an argument against treating peer review as the sole legitimate mechanism of scholarly validation. However, peer review is an important source of independent feedback for authors. Preprints make this feedback more accessible to a wider range of authors and reviewers.

There is a growing body of evidence comparing preprints to their published versions with each study utilising different methods and investigating different disciplines. All of these studies report a similar finding; preprints are comparable to their published versions. This strongly implies that rather than focussing on peer review as a quality control mechanism, the focus should be on providing authors with feedback; a desire reflected in author surveys. Feedback is a big benefit of posting a preprint and one that authors want through private mechanisms rather than public responses. Some preprint peer review services focus on this feedback aspect, along with broadening who can participate in providing feedback. 

By providing feedback early, researchers can not only improve their work but this can lead to new avenues of research, strengthening the final publication, and even brand new collaborations that result in entirely new projects.

Innovation

Publishing systems shape research cultures, for better or worse. When dissemination becomes slow, expensive, and prestige-driven, research behaviour adapts accordingly.

The traditional journal economy incentivises conservatism. Researchers are encouraged to pursue work that appears publishable within established disciplinary norms, while riskier, interdisciplinary, negative, or exploratory findings struggle to find space. The result is a communication system optimised less for discovery than for reputational management and a scientific system optimised for publishable units rather than significant advances. 

Preprints offer a partial correction. Because they reduce barriers to dissemination, they create space for experimentation, iteration, and intellectual openness. Researchers can share preliminary methods, negative results, replication attempts, datasets, software tools, and interdisciplinary work that may otherwise remain invisible. Preprints also change who can share and access scholarly outputs. 

This matters because innovation rarely emerges fully formed through polished final outputs. Scientific and scholarly progress is iterative, collaborative, and often messy. Preprints make more of that process visible.

They also support new forms of scholarly infrastructure. Machine-readable repositories, open citation networks, text and data mining, and linked research objects become far easier when research outputs circulate openly from the outset rather than being enclosed behind fragmented proprietary systems. 

Preprints provide a platform that is just comfortable enough with the current practices to elicit strong support whilst opening the door to much greater change. In this sense, preprints are not simply alternative publishing formats. They are enabling infrastructure for a more networked, operable and computationally accessible research ecosystem.

Equity and access

Ultimately, however, the strongest argument for preprints may be the simplest. The access to knowledge and participation in science are human rights.  

Much of academic research is publicly funded, conducted within public institutions, and justified through claims of public benefit. Yet the outputs of that research often remain inaccessible; delayed by publication systems, restricted by paywalls, or controlled through commercial licensing arrangements. Preprints challenge this directly. They recognise that access to knowledge should not depend entirely on institutional wealth, subscription agreements, or publishing monopolies.

For researchers in lower-income institutions and countries, preprints can provide immediate access to current scholarship otherwise locked behind expensive journal packages. For independent scholars, practitioners, policymakers, journalists, patients, and the broader public, they offer participation in scholarly conversations that would otherwise remain closed.

Research communication is not just a professional exercise. It is part of the collective production of knowledge. Systems that unnecessarily slow, restrict, or privatise that process deserve scrutiny.

“Going green” through preprints is not simply a cost-saving measure or a workflow optimisation. It represents a different philosophy of scholarship that prioritises access, inclusion and openness.

The future of scholarly communication will remain plural. Journals will persist, peer review will evolve rather than disappear, and disciplinary differences will continue to matter. But the direction of travel is increasingly clear. The question is no longer whether preprints have a place within research communication. The real question is why we tolerated such slow and closed systems for so long and how we plan to ensure the right kind of change moving forwards.