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Attention Earth Sciences: PLOS ONE wants YOUR Preprint

Dedicated team of Editorial Board Members are now actively seeking manuscripts in the Earth Sciences from preprint servers EarthArXiv and ESSoar.

Preprint servers offer a myriad of benefits to authors who are excited to share their work with the community as soon as possible, so we’ve offered our authors the ease of automatically posting their life science submissions on bioRxiv. But PLOS ONE is a community of many different voices and we want to help promote preprints in all disciplines. This includes providing authors with more reasons to post a preprint – on top of the advantages that posting a preprint already offer such as faster dissemination and allowing for input from the whole community. We’re therefore delighted to announce the introduction of a new program to invite submissions of posted preprint manuscripts specifically in the Earth and Space sciences. Our aim is to support authors posting their papers with a fast and efficient peer review process and journal publication of their work.

Introducing PLOS ONE Preprint Editors

Going forward, we’ve tasked a small group of PLOS ONE Editorial Board members with reviewing and inviting preprint submissions from EarthArXiv and ESSOAr that they feel would be a good fit for the journal. This group will be led by Section Editors Guy Schumann (Bristol University, UK) and Juan Añel (University of Vigo, Spain) along with dedicated Preprint Editors, Xialoe Sun (Stockholm University, Sweden) and Julien Bouchez (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, France).

As part of this program, submissions invited through preprint servers will receive special attention from the staff editors which may include extra promotion on social media. Climate change papers may also be recommended to the “Responding to Climate Change” Channel, of which Juan Añel is also an editor.

“As a preprint editor one can have a substantial positive impact and contribute a potentially very high added-value to the scientific community of a particular research field.”

  • Guy Schumann, Section Editor PLOS ONE

We are truly excited to place this program in the hands of these individuals who’ve proven their dedication to their communities and eagerness to advance scholarly outputs for scientific communication in the Earth and Space sciences.

Why we choose preprints

Recruiting research from preprint servers is nothing new in academic publishing, other journals like PLOS Genetics and eLife already do so. Preprints represent huge opportunities for improvement on slow publication times. When it comes to critical issues like climate change and others, getting results out sooner can have a dramatic impact on our ability to advance science and foster early collaboration and debate on new research results.

“For me, a main advantage of preprints is that they can help to advance science faster, with public exposure of what is going on, what is cutting-edge”

  • Juan Añel, Section Editor PLOS ONE

I’ve never posted a preprint before, should I?

Yes! The benefits are endless. Preprints are an easy way to generate exposure for your research before you even decide where to submit (ESSOAr also accepts uploads of conference posters and other materials). When you post a preprint, you have immediate and unlimited reach allowing you stake the first claim on your methods and results, and even get early feedback from your community. Sounds great, right? Preprints are also beneficial for early career researchers who need discoverable, citable content that speaks to their academic contributions and can help advance their careers.

“Particularly for young scientists, who are the major driving force for science today and need a… good publication record to look for their next job, preprints would be a very [good] choice for them to publicize their findings in a timely way and “decorate” their CV”.

  • Xiaole Sun, Preprint Editor PLOS ONE

We encourage you to join us in our support of preprints, not just in the earth sciences but across all disciplines. Preprints are already one of the fastest growing research outputs, and we can all do our part to making it an even more successful outlet for new communities that are just beginning to explore its potential.

 

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