Preprints from preprint archives such as arXiv.org are currently shown as 'article' in Primo. While preprints are a wonderful thing for open science, it’s important to maintain a clear distinction between a journal article, which has undergone peer review, and a preprint, which has not. The article is citable, the preprint is generally not. This is something we teach our students, and also something we try inform the general public about.

Many preprints are also never published in journals in the end. Other preprints end up as e.g. book chapters, not articles.

While arXiv (1991) is the oldest and best-known preprint archive, we’ve seen a rise in preprint archives in recent years, with PhilArchive (2009), bioRxiv (2013), chemRxiv (2016) , psyArXiv (2016) and many more, making the preprint more important than ever.

Technically, a preprint is a type of manuscript, but we think using the ‘manuscript’ resource type for preprints could be confusing for our users. The term ‘preprint’ is a well established term among scientists, so a new resource type for ‘preprint’ would be very welcome.