Preprints

Preprints are your manuscript before the peer-review process. You can upload your preprints to publicly available archives before sending your manuscript to a peer-reviewed journal.

Why is it useful to make your preprint publicly available?

    • It can help to clarify who was the first to come up with some exciting finding

    • You can show your work to your peers and have feedback on it before your work is accepted

    • After publishing your work you can self-archive your paper when you cannot make the final version publicly available (if you cannot publish the final version, and also the journal does not forbid making preprints available – see below)

A useful introduction about the preprints can be found in the Preprints Wikipedia article. A more general background can be found in the Grey literature Wikipedia article. More details about why preprints can be useful can be found in the academia.exchange forum.

Available preprint (or eprint) services

You can upload your preprints to several places: your homepage, institutional repositories, scientific social networks, or public preprint (or eprint) servers - see Bonnie Swoger's blog post about the possibilities.

There are many preprint servers. A few of them are listed in the Preprints Wikipedia article, and in the Eprint archives Wikipedia category. Also, you can search for more on the internet.

Which public eprint server to choose?

There are important differences between the services, e.g.,

    • What topic can be archived?

    • Does it offer a DOI number for citing your preprint?

    • Can others comment publicly on your preprint, and can you reply?

    • Does it have available statistics (altmetrics) about your preprints?

    • What file formats are supported?

See a few more viewpoints and specific examples of services in Ethen White's blog post or the answers on the academia.stackexchange forum.

Some public eprint servers for psychology

Psychology specific services
To my knowledge, PsyArXiv (https://psyarxiv.com/) is the first and only psychology-specific archive.

Services accepting preprints from specific subfields of psychology
Many popular archives that accept papers in biology, also accept neuroscience papers, e.g., https://arxiv.org/list/q-bio.NC/recent or http://vixra.org/mind/

http://cogprints.org/ This pioneer self-archiving system accepts works only in cognitive psychology. It has been less popular in recent years.

General services
You can use any service that accepts papers from any field, e.g., https://www.preprints.org/ or https://osf.io/preprints/

Can I make my preprint available?

Some journals do not allow uploading your preprint to a public server. Therefore, if the journal of your published paper prohibits publishing your preprint, then you cannot do that legally. Also, if you have uploaded your unpublished preprint, then you cannot submit it to a journal that does not support public preprints.

A comprehensive and searchable list of whether a journal supports public preprints (or postprints or publisher's versions) can be found in the Romeo database. See also the preprint policy list on Wikipedia.

Generally, most psychology journals allow public preprints.