The Manuscript Life Cycle: From Preprints to the Version of Record

A cornerstone of scholarly practice is sharing results with the scientific community, frequently in the form of electronically publishing in academic journals. Typically, the procedure involves drafting a research manuscript and sending it to a journal for peer review. The steps vary depending on the field, journal, and publisher, but often require multiple cycles of peer review, update of the original manuscript, and resubmission to the journal over the Internet; after acceptance, the document is copy-edited, typeset and published in its final form. Hence, during their life cycle, manuscripts are far from static, and rather updated iteratively. Also, since the process is done electronically, several of the manuscript versions can be, in principle, shared with the scientific community.

However, disseminating scientific results does not only involve authors and publishing, but also readers, who will download and access them. Under the traditional subscription model of publishing, readers can access scholarly information if they pay a subscription, or their library does. The Open Access movement advocates for open online access of research outputs at no cost.

During this talk we will describe different ways of publishing Open Access, while taking into account the dynamic nature of the manuscripts during the publication process, including: preprints and postprints; early view, ahead of print and in press documents; and the fixed journal articles or versions of record, potentially published under an Open Access license (gold, diamond or hybrid Open Access). We will introduce preprint servers and institutional repositories, and discuss which manuscript versions can be deposited in them. Finally, we will explore digital object identifiers (DOI), and discuss when do we consider an article "published".

• Slides: The Manuscript Life Cycle →