A Primer on Preprints

Abstract

Preprints are getting a lot of press lately: early dissemination of coronavirus research and a new health sciences server with a section especially for nursing are just two developments that are pushing preprints into the news. Many nurse authors, however, have lots of questions and are wondering whether they should post their articles to a preprint server before submitting to a journal for peer review and publication. Nursing journal editors also have questions about how they should handle manuscripts that have previously been posted to a preprint server and have a digital object identifier (DOI). Our goal is to unravel some of these mysteries with a general overview of preprints and then to provide information to help Nurse Author & Editor readers to begin to think through these issues.