Discovery Seminar - Mathematics: To Be Discovered - Chen - Fall 2023

A preprint is a scholarly journal article that has not undergone the peer review process. Preprints may be in a draft form, or they may be published online as-is. There are many reasons why authors may choose to publish their work as a preprint:

• Authors feel that the information is of importance (e.g., for public health reasons) and desire to share with the public prior to formal peer reviewed publication in a journal.
• Authors may wish to have public discussion on their work before it is formally peer reviewed and published in a journal.
• The paper has been submitted to an open-access journal and has already been peer reviewed but is awaiting formal publication.
• The paper was submitted to one or more journals and was rejected.
• Authors wish to make negative data available to the public and don’t feel that it would qualify for publication in a traditional journal.
• The article may be a critique of a previously published paper rather than a full article in its own right.
• Authors are frustrated by the slow speed of traditional publishing and wish to accelerate dissemination of their results.
• Authors wish to establish priority of scientific findings.
  (Elmore, 2018)

Scholars have been advocating for decades for preprints to be accessible online, so scholarly communication and information sharing can happen more quickly. In 1991, physicist Paul Ginsparg founded the research-sharing platform arXiv.org, which today hosts scholarship in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics (Cornell University).

Peer review is still an important process to help make sure scholarly research is reliable and conducted ethically. It's always important to cross-check and verify information published in any scholarly work, and it is worth checking to see if a later version of a preprint was published in another source.

Preprints are not without problems, either: arXiv has received fake papers authored by AI and by authors pretending to be someone that they're not. The site uses moderators and software to screen submissions, but fakes do sneak through, and some authors have argued that the moderation process is already too strict. (Though fake papers have also been published by peer-reviewed journals!) ArXiv has considered allowing user comments to help fill this gap, but users worry that this would invite discriminatory comments against underrepresented groups.

Remember that not every scholarly field communicates in the same ways. In mathematics and computer science, preprints are a popular way to share findings and communicate ongoing work on problems.

Consider: How does the use of preprint sites and other repositories shape the scholarly conversations in these fields? Who decides who is an authority in these fields?