{"id":3502,"date":"2020-01-10T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-10T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pl-asapbio.local\/niso-and-preprints\/"},"modified":"2025-03-28T21:37:26","modified_gmt":"2025-03-28T21:37:26","slug":"niso-and-preprints","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asapbio.org\/niso-and-preprints\/","title":{"rendered":"NISO and Preprints: Interoperability, Engagement, and Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alice Meadows, Director of Community Engagement, and Jill O\u2019Neill, Director of Content, NISO<\/em><\/p>\n

Preprints have come a long way in the past few years. The granddaddy of digital preprint platforms is, of course, arXiv<\/a> (launched in 1991). But although it was joined by a handful of others over the years, including SSRN<\/a> way back in 1994, it\u2019s only recently that preprints have really taken off, driven in part by support from major funders such as the Wellcome Trust, the US National Institutes of Health, and others. Today, there are global preprint platforms serving most broad disciplines (and some narrower ones) \u2014 from agriculture<\/a> to philosophy<\/a> \u2014 as well as a number of regional platforms. <\/p>\n

So far, so good for those of us who support the open and early sharing of research. But, with this kind of growth \u2014 across disciplines and regions \u2014 comes a need for some level of standardization, to help both researchers, whose work is often cross- or inter- disciplinary, as well as the platform providers themselves. To date, this has been largely, if not entirely lacking, which is why we made preprints the focus of a recent NFAIS Foresight Event in Washington, DC. Open Access:The Role and Impact of Preprint Servers<\/a> was attended by 35 participants from across the information community \u2014 publishers, librarians, repository managers, and others. And it\u2019s also why we will be participating in the upcoming ASAPBio workshop<\/a> on best practices in preprint infrastructure.<\/p>\n

NISO is built on three central tenets \u2014 interoperability, engagement, and education \u2014 and the outputs of our NFAIS event fall neatly into the same three areas of focus.<\/p>\n

Interoperability<\/strong><\/p>\n

All attendees agreed that the information community could and should develop a common nomenclature (including for metadata) and a set of definitions for scholarly outputs across all disciplines, and for the stages of the research workcycle they represent (such as interim research data, preliminary results, initial article draft, preprint, and so on, through the final version of record).  The group therefore recommended that we work with our community to update the NISO Journal Article Versions (JAV) recommendations<\/a> from 2008 to take account of preprint requirements. <\/p>\n

They also identified several other areas that they felt would benefit from best practice guidelines, including:<\/p>\n