Clarity on front page

Peter Suber

doi:doi:10.21428/cb6ab371.4450ced0

SearchLogin Login or Signup

Clarity on front page

Meaning of "preprint" and "postprint"

by Peter Suber

Published onFeb 18, 2023

On the front page you offer two options: “Submit a Postprint or Version of Record” and “Submit a Preprint or Working Paper.” I suspect that many people won’t know the difference or will be hard pressed to classify the piece they want to submit. I suggest annotating the first option with “(peer-reviewed)” and the second with “(not peer-reviewed).” Or reword them in some other ways but use “peer-reviewed” and “not peer-reviewed” to help explain what you mean.

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)

Comments

Scott Jacques:

This is where you can reply to a comment, if you’re so inclined.

Scott Jacques:

Hi Peter. Thanks for writing. This issue has been discussed on-and-off at CrimRxiv since the very start. The reasons we haven’t put “peer-reviewed” and “not peer-reviewed” are, to date:

1) A Report, e.g. from a a CJC Center, could be a Version-of-Record that’s not peer-reviewed. We don’t want to signal those Reports are equivalent to unfinished papers.

2) A Preprint and Working Paper could be openly reviewed, and we hope people will eventually do that on CrimRxiv. We actually have a page just for Reviews, but criminologists are, uh, not excited about open review, generally, so there’ll need to be some culture-change.

What I decided was to add 2 footnotes to the Home page. At this exact second, they read:

“A “Postprint” is a paper that’s been through the review process and accepted for publication in an outlet by an editor. A “Version of Record” is the paper as published in the outlet, i.e. the “authoritative” version. Not all Versions of Record have been peer-reviewed (e.g. unreviewed Final Report). You can (and should) review Pubs on CrimRxiv.
A “Preprint” is a paper that’s *not* accepted for publication in an outlet by an editor. A “Working Paper” is basically the same thing. A Final Report is Version of Record. Earlier versions of a Final Report may be considered a “Working Paper.” Not all Preprints and Working Papers are unreviewed. You can (and should) review Pubs on CrimRxiv.

If you think that’s not a solution, and/or have a better soliton, and/or you don’t like our definitions or have any additional comments, we’re happy to receive them. Thanks again.