User:Springsunrise/preprintsandbox

History
The sharing of preprints goes back to at least the 1960s, when the National Institutes of Health circulated biological preprints. After six years the use of these Information Exchange Groups was stopped, partially because journals stopped accepting submissions shared via these channels. This policy, known as the Ingelfinger Rule, discouraged researchers from circulating preprints.

More recently, preprints have increasingly been distributed electronically on the Internet. Some authors and readers of preprints use topic-specific preprint servers like arXiv and HAL (open archive); others use publisher-affiliated preprint servers like Research Square; others use journal-affiliated preprint servers like JMIR Preprints; others use generalist preprint servers like OpenScience Framework Preprints. Some authors post preprints (or "author accepted manuscripts") in institutional repositories.

In January 2017, the Medical Research Council announced that they will now be actively supporting preprints beginning in April 2017. Also in January 2017, Wellcome Trust stated that they will now accept preprints in grant applications. In February 2017, a coalition of scientists and biomedical funding bodies including the National Institutes of Health, the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust launched a proposal for a central site for life-sciences preprints. In February 2017, SciELO announced plans to set up a preprints server – SciELO Preprints. In March 2017, the National Institutes for Health issued a new policy encouraging research preprint submissions. In April 2017, Center for Open Science announced that it will be launching six new preprint archives.

At the end of the 2010s, libraries and discovery tools increasingly integrate Unpaywall data, which indexes millions of preprints and other green open access sources and manages to serve over half of the requests by users without the need for subscriptions.