Supporting open science: Advances in Clinical and Experimental Medicine and preprints.

Abstract

This editorial outlines the issue of preprints in scholarly communication. It presents the policy regarding them in Advances in Clinical and Medical Problems and a summary of papers released as preprints and subsequently published in this journal or rejected until July 10, 2024. The introduction discusses the definition of preprint, and leading preprint servers are listed. Policies of 2 such services - Research Square and medRxiv - most frequently chosen by Adv Clin Exp Med authors are then described, followed by a broad outline of the advantages of preprints and controversies surrounding them, based on selected literature on this topic. The next section discusses the policies of most renowned medical journals and publishers regarding preprints. The preprint policy of Adv Clin Exp Med is then thoroughly explained, as well as its reasons. All papers previously released as preprints and published in this journal in 2021-2024 are presented, focusing on meaningful differences between them. Rejected papers previously released as preprints, submitted to Adv Clin Exp Med in 2022-2024, are also listed and discussed. The conclusion is that the basis for endorsing preprints in this journal is not that they benefit this journal but that they serve the scientific community as a whole and science in general by facilitating rapid dissemination of results and fostering immediate assessment of those results by other investigators and debate around them. The most justified line of action is educating authors about the benefits and problems related to preprints.