
A postprint is a digital draft of a
research journal
An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, an ...
article ''after'' it has been
peer review
Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...
ed and accepted for publication, but ''before'' it has been typeset and formatted by the journal.
Related terminology
A digital draft before peer review is called a ''
preprint''.
Postprints are also sometimes called accepted author manuscripts (AAMs), because they are the version accepted by the journal after the author has addressed the peer reviewer comments.
Jointly, postprints and preprints are called
eprints.
Postprints are variously referred to by different publishers as pre-proofs, author's original version and variations of these.
After typesetting by a journal, authors will often be provided with
proofs (the draft of the final formatting) and finally the version that is published is called the
published/publisher's version.
The term postprint used to also refer to the formatted publishers version, however usage has narrowed to refer only to the current definition of accepted but unformatted.
Role in open access
Journal publication licenses typically claim copyright over the typeset and formatted version, but permit authors to release the postprint version as open access (
self-archiving
Self-archiving is the act of (the author's) depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles, as ...
).
This is often termed
green open access, and enables access and reuse of material even in paywalled subscription journals (typically under a
creative commons license
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyric ...
). Permission by the journal to release a postprint may be immediate or after an embargo period, with licensing terms for most journals collected in the
Sherpa/Romeo database.
Since the advent of the
Open Archives Initiative, preprints and postprints have been deposited in
institutional repositories, which are interoperable because they are compliant with the
Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.
Eprints are at the heart of the
open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre o ...
initiative to make research freely accessible online. Eprints were first deposited or
self-archived in arbitrary websites and then harvested by virtual
archive
An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located.
Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual ...
s such as
CiteSeer (and, more recently,
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...
), or they were deposited in central disciplinary archives such as
arXiv
arXiv (pronounced " archive"—the X represents the Greek letter chi ⟨χ⟩) is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists o ...
or
PubMed Central.
See also
*
Ahead-of-print
References
Further reading
*
External links
{{commonscat, Postprint
Academic publishing
Open access (publishing)