Preprints.org is a multidisciplinary preprint service that is dedicated to sharing your research from the very beginning and empowering your research journey. It is fully funded by MDPI, a pioneer in scholarly, open access publishing. It is run on a non-profit basis.

• Establish Precedence: Publicly share and record your research through a time-stamped preprint;

• Fast Dissemination: Grant the scientific community free and early access to your research findings without the delays caused by the traditional publishing process;

• Increased Visibility: Enhance the discoverability of your work and attract potential collaborators rapidly;

• Early Feedback: Receive input from the scientific community before a formal peer review;

• Credible and Citable: A permanent digital object identifier (DOI) will be allocated, making your paper instantly citable;

• Grant Applications: Preprints can serve as early evidence for grant applications;

• Demonstrate Productivity: Preprints can serve as endorsements for funding proposals or job applications, providing a record of your ongoing research activities;

• Support Open Science: Preprints promote transparency and open sharing of scientific knowledge with the global community.

• Free to post and read: Preprints.org is free for both authors and readers thus maximizing access to knowledge sharing within the scientific community globally;
• No membership: We welcome new users to directly submit without requiring any endorsement;
• All Disciplines: There are no restrictions in terms of research field. Preprints.org features research across all disciplines, allowing a diverse community of authors to share their work;
• Community Engagement: Preprints.org fosters community engagement through public discussion and screening by our Advisory Board and screeners, enabling authors to receive valuable feedback and engage in the latest scientific discourse;
• Web of Science Indexing: By posting your preprint with us, your research will be indexed in the “Web of Science - Preprint Citation Index”, and thus is discoverable by a wider readership;
• Easy Submission: Navigate a straightforward, user-friendly, and efficient submission process that takes only 3 minutes;
• Make Your Work Citable: Each preprint is registered with a unique digital object identifier (DOI) issued by Crossref, making it permanently available and citable;
• Free Layout Editing Service: This service helps authors engage their readers with a professionally presented preprint, in addition to meeting the submission requirements of journals;
• Free Plagiarism Check: Preprints.org provides free reports that highlight any instances of text duplication, along with advice on where to modify the text, helping to increase the likelihood of passing initial checks when submitting to a peer-reviewed journal;
• Friendly Journals and MDPI Topics: We offer two services that provide a direct connection between journals and Preprints.org. Using these two channels, authors can save time by automatically transferring manuscript information to their journal of choice;
• Open Access: All preprints are posted with a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, ensuring that authors retain the copyright and receive credit for their research, while allowing anyone to read and cite their work.

We encourage scholars to leave comments on any paper they find interesting. Preprints.org is also collaborating with PREREVIEW to receive comments and feedback from the wider research community. You can provide general comments on the presented research, make suggestions for extensions or improvements, or draw attention to certain parts for other readers. Comments will be screened for any offensive language and off-topic discussions before they are posted.

Readers who would like their comments to be counted as a review can receive credit from Publons by linking their accounts.

Click the submit button on Preprints.org to submit your paper. You will be directed to the login page first if you have not logged in. If you have not yet registered an account on Preprints.org or any other MDPI platform, you will have to register and log in first to submit your paper.

You will need to provide the following information to make a submission:

• Manuscript title;

• Abstract;

• Keywords;

• Names, affiliations, and email addresses for all authors (institutional email addresses or email addresses used in previously published papers are recommended);

• A manuscript in a Microsoft Word or LaTeX format. For LaTeX files, please ensure that all the files (e.g., bib file, references) necessary to create a PDF are included in a .zip or similar format;

• Supplementary materials (if applicable);

• Copyright holder permission (if applicable);

• Some types of content, such as research conducted on humans or experimental animals, have additional requirements, such as providing an ethical approval statement from a research ethics committee, informed consent of the research participants, and information regarding conflicts of interest and/or funding concerns.
  
  

• If your paper has not been posted online yet, you can send your revised version to the assigned editor directly via email. The editors will check and post your revised version online as the first version of the paper.
• If your paper has already been posted online and you have found some minor typos or revisions that require correcting (for example, errors in the title, author names, author affiliations, or abstract), please contact the editor assigned to your paper with your updated version, highlighting the parts that require revisions. The editor will check and make the necessary revisions to the first version of the paper.
• If your paper has already been posted online and you wish to make substantial updates to the content (for example, include new findings/data, expand the discussion, update the analysis in a manner that may lead to new conclusions, etc.), you can click the Submit button and select the “submit a follow-up version” button, or find the paper under the “online” tab, and click the “submit a follow-up version” button on the right to submit your new version. Our editor will check the new version as soon as possible, and an email will be sent to you once it has been posted online.

You can either directly contact the editor assigned to your paper or contact info@preprints.org with the necessary changes/corrections.

If you need to make authorship changes, such as adding or removing authors from the preprint paper, you will need to clarify the contributions of all authors whose authorship has changed and the reasons for this change. A form must then be signed and agreed upon by all current authors.

No. The papers posted on Preprints.org are not peer-reviewed.

Preprints.org encourages all authors to link the peer-reviewed versions of their preprint papers for the benefit of both the authors and readers. After authors have linked the peer-reviewed version of their paper to the preprint paper, the citation format of the peer-reviewed journal article will be shown on the preprint page. Linking the peer-reviewed version of the paper to a posted preprint has the following benefits:

1. Readers of the preprint can stay up to date on the subsequent progress of the research.

2. It allows the peer-reviewed version to reach a wider audience and provide more reliable references for other researchers.

3. By providing a link to the peer-reviewed version, Preprints.org can display citation instructions on the preprint page, encouraging readers to cite the peer-reviewed version and thereby increasing its number of citations and impact.

Normally, no action is required from your side. Preprints.org should automatically link your preprint paper to its peer-reviewed version within 14 days. The submitting author and the corresponding author will be notified by email.

Due to technical difficulties, sometimes this linking process is unsuccessful. Therefore, we encourage authors to manually link the peer-reviewed versions to their preprint papers by following the steps below:

1. Log into Preprints.org;

2. Go to your dashboard and find the preprint under the “online” tab of My Preprints field;

3. Click the “link published article” button to submit the request.

The Preprints.org editorial office will process your request as soon as possible.

In most cases, journal publication will not be affected by posting a preprint. However, there are a few publishers who do not accept papers that have been posted on Preprints.org or other preprint servers prior to submission. We strongly recommend that you clarify this with all journals that you plan to submit to in advance. The preprint policies of many journals and publishers are available in the Sherpa Romeo database. 

No. Preprints posted on Preprints.org with a registered DOI cannot be removed. They are indexed by services such as Google Scholar and Crossref, creating a permanent digital presence outside of our records. In some cases, preprints may be “withdrawn” at the discretion of our editors and Advisory Board for the following reasons: 

• Misconduct by authors, including plagiarism and data fabrication;

• Egregious scientific errors that cannot be corrected by updating the paper;

• When leaving a paper online would constitute an illegal act, including copyright violation.

Please check the withdrawal policy carefully before posting your work.

Preprints.org adheres to the Committee on Publication Ethics(COPE) Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines. Note that COPE does not currently cover preprints specifically, but many of the same principles apply, including the following:

• Authors must accurately present their research findings and include an objective discussion on the significance of such findings.

• Plagiarism, data fabrication, image manipulation, knowingly providing incorrect information, copyright infringement, inaccurate author attributions, attempts to inappropriately manipulate the screening process, failures to declare conflicts of interest, fraud, and libel are not permitted.

• The posting of the submitted materials must not be illegal.

• Manuscripts containing research conducted on humans or experimental animals must follow the Declaration of Helsinki and contain details of approval from a research ethics committee. The project identification code, date of approval, and name of the ethics committee or institutional review board must be cited in the “Methods” section.

• The informed consent of research participants must be obtained if necessary. Authors must be able to provide a (redacted) copy of the consent form.

Preprints.org respects the intellectual property rights of researchers, scientists, publishers, and others and requests mutual respect among the academic community in this regard. To ensure that you have the right to upload or reproduce any published material (figures, schemes, tables, or any extract of a text), you should request permission from the copyright holder prior to posting on Preprints.org.

Permission is required for the following:

• Your own research published by other publishers and for which you do not retain the copyright.

• Substantial extracts from research by any authors.

• The use of tables, graphs, charts, schemes, and artworks if they are unaltered or altered with minor changes.

• Photographs for which you do not hold the copyright.

Permission is not required for the following:

• The reconstruction of your own table with data already published elsewhere. Please note that, in this case, you must cite the source of the data in the form of either “Data from...” or “Adapted from...”.

• Short quotes that are considered fair use, and thus do not require permission, must also be properly cited.

• Graphs, charts, schemes, and artwork that have been completely redrawn by the authors and are altered beyond recognition.

All authors must agree to the following:

• I grant Preprints.org a perpetual, non-exclusive license to distribute this preprint.

• I certify that I have the right to grant this license.

• I understand that submissions cannot be completely removed once accepted by Preprints.org and may appear on websites other than Preprints.org.

Preprints.org applies the following ICMJE definition of a conflict of interest: “A conflict of interest exists when professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patients’ welfare or the validity of research) may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain). Perceptions of conflict of interest are as important as actual conflicts of interest.”

All authors must disclose all relationships or interests that could inappropriately influence or bias their work. Examples of potential conflicts of interest include, but are not limited to, financial interests (such as membership, employment, consultancies, ownership of stocks/shares, honoraria, grants or other funding, paid expert testimonies, and patent licensing arrangements) and non-financial interests (such as personal or professional relationships, affiliations, and personal beliefs).

Authors can disclose potential conflicts of interest via the online submission system during the submission process. Declarations regarding conflicts of interest can also be documented in the MDPI Disclosure Form. The corresponding author must include a summary statement in the manuscript in a separate section, entitled “Conflicts of Interest”, placed just before the reference list. The statement should reflect all potential conflicts of interest disclosed in the form.

See below for examples of disclosures:

Conflicts of Interest: Author A has received research grants from Company A. Author B has received a speaker honorarium from Company X and owns stocks in Company Y. Author C has been involved as a consultant and expert witness in Company Z. Author D is the inventor of patent X.

If there are no conflicts of interest, the authors should state the following:

Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.