Preprints, Embargoes, and What You Can Post

What the journals say, and what they leave to themselves

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors does not treat a preprint as prior publication, but it does not treat it as invisible either. It notes that posting work as a preprint may influence a journal's interest in, or priority for, peer review and publication of that work.¹

The disclosure duty is explicit. Authors should inform a journal if the submitted work has been posted on a preprint server, and provide a link to the preprint.¹ The rest is delegated: journals should clearly describe their policies on posting and citing preprints in their information for authors.¹

Delegated means variable, and variable means the answer has to be looked up rather than assumed. PLOS ONE, for instance, operates a direct transfer arrangement with bioRxiv and medRxiv, and states that eligibility to post on those servers is independent of its editorial peer review.² Another journal may say something different, and the only reliable move is to read the one you are submitting to.

The dissertation side runs on a different clock

A dissertation is published when it is deposited. That surprises students who think of publication as something that happens later, and the surprise is usually expensive.

ProQuest offers embargoes of six months, one year, or two years. An embargo requested during submission runs from the date ProQuest receives the manuscript, and there may be a gap between the student's submission and the institution's delivery of it.³

The reasons it lists are worth reading before choosing. Patentable rights or other issues where disclosure may harm the author's interests. An ethical need to prevent disclosure of sensitive or classified information about persons, institutions, or technologies. The interest of an academic or commercial press in acquiring rights to publish the work as a book. And content likely to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal that does not allow the work to be available before journal publication.³

It adds a warning about the institution rather than the vendor. Many universities enforce explicit policies on delayed release and restricted dissemination, and those policies may preclude delaying or restricting availability in the university's own repository.³ An embargo at the publisher is not an embargo everywhere.

The four questions that settle a case

Whether the target journal treats a preprint as prior publication, in its own words rather than by reputation. Whether the journal requires disclosure and a link at submission, which ICMJE recommends as the general practice.¹ Whether the dissertation will be deposited before or after the journal submission. And whether the university's own repository policy permits the restriction the publisher offers.

Each of those has a published answer. None of them can be answered by asking a colleague what happened to them.

Where an editor is useful, and where an editor is not

An editor can check that the versions agree. A preprint, a submitted manuscript, and a deposited dissertation chapter are often three states of the same text, and they diverge quietly as revisions land in one and not the others.

An editor can also check that the disclosure exists and says what the journal asked for, and that a citation to a preprint is formatted the way the destination requires. Both are checkable against a published requirement, which is copy editing work covering correctness, consistency, and completeness.⁴

What an editor does not decide is whether to post, whether to embargo, or what a journal will make of either. Those are the author's decisions, taken with an advisor and, where rights are involved, with the institution.

Editors Canada's guidance on graduate work is relevant to the last point. Students must obtain written permission for professional editing from their advisor, specifying what the editor is allowed to do.⁵ The conversation that settles an embargo and the conversation that settles editing are usually the same conversation.

Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including preprints, unpublished dissertations, and correspondence with a journal or a publisher. We work on academic and research documents and journal articles at whatever level a client's institution permits.

A student choosing an embargo length is making a commercial decision about a book that does not exist yet. It is worth making deliberately, because the default is chosen for them.