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Knowledge Exchange report on the transformative role of preprints in scholarly communication


10 October 2019

Knowledge Exchange (KE) is an umbrella organisation with partners in six European countries that work to enable the use of digital technologies to improve higher education and research. They recently released the report "Accelerating scholarly communication - The transformative role of preprints". Preprints are the versions of research papers typically prepared prior to peer review and publication in a journal.


The report explores the implications of the growth in preprints for universities, including their relevance to researcher evaluation and reward mechanisms. For this, KE interviewed 38 stakeholders including researchers, research performing organisations, research funding organisations and preprint service providers to provide an answer to questions like: What are the main benefits and challenges of preprints for these stakeholders? Who will be responsible for preprint posting in the future? Do traditional journals have to reframe their value proposition in the light of preprints?

The Knowledge Exchange partners are: CSC in Finland, CNRS in France, DAFSHE in Denmark , DFG in Germany, Jisc in the UK and SURF in the Netherlands.

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