Community Aspects of Preprinting

• Community aspects of preprinting are defined by digital dissemination practices that establish norms for visibility, credit allocation, and open scientific exchange.
• Preprinting accelerates research by enabling rapid sharing, early collaboration, and timely feedback through centralized repositories.
• The evolution from informal offprints to platforms like arXiv illustrates how community-driven practices are reshaping research communication and governance.

Preprinting refers to the public dissemination of scholarly manuscripts prior to formal peer review and journal publication, typically via dedicated digital repositories such as arXiv, bioRxiv, SSRN, or discipline-specific servers. Over the past four decades, preprinting has evolved from informal circulation in closed communities to a public infrastructure shaping research visibility, credit allocation, community norms, and the collective pace of scientific knowledge exchange. The community dynamics of preprinting vary sharply by discipline, temporal regime, and sociotechnical structure, encompassing phenomena such as competitive signaling, the democratization of access, reinforced citation elites, governance conflicts, and social risks of rapid amplification.

1. Historical Foundations and Infrastructural Regimes

The earliest forms of preprinting in high-energy physics (HEP) emerged as private "offprints" distributed among society members, later evolving into tool-sharing networks powered by preprints mailed on curated lists among trusted collaborators. By the early 1960s, the CERN library formalized a global infrastructure: every HEP preprint submitted was catalogued, assigned a unique CERN Preprint Number, and listed in multilingual newsletters sent to major centers. This system codified rules for access ("Always included" theoretical/experimental particle physics; strict exclusion of low-energy physics, chemistry, plasma), modes of conduct (no secrecy), classification, and professional roles (Scientific Information Officers) (Roth, 17 Jul 2025).

Decades later, arXiv introduced a centralized "space of flows" (Delfanti, 2016): daily batched submission, strict moderation (institutional email, endorsement, plagiarism filters), and chronological digests that encode communal time and visibility. In computing, life science, and social science, the rise of overlay journals, open peer commentary, and identity-linked repositories now mirrors—but does not replicate—the degree of centralization found in physics.

2. Temporal Cycles, Sociotechnical Practices, and Community Norms

Distinct communities conform to discipline-specific temporalities and social signaling regimes. In theoretical physics, the "minute–day–year" cycle governs publishing: researchers may race to submit before the daily cutoff (4 PM EST) to secure prime exposure in the next digest, scrutinize new papers and collaborations each morning, and strive for an annual target frequency (3–5 arXiv entries per year for postdocs) as a marker of insider status (Delfanti, 2016). Experimentalists, by contrast, operate under years-long project cycles in collaborations with alphabetic author lists and "hyperauthorship": personal visibility is diluted, and career recognition depends on submitting "grey literature" such as white papers or technical reports.

In computing disciplines (AI, HCI), preprints have become essential for visibility in a flood of publications, priority claims against "scooping," and demonstrating productivity for job markets and tenure. Social media amplifies Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO), lending preprint timing additional prominence (Zhou et al., 6 Nov 2025). As more labs preprint "because everyone else does it," the cycle becomes self-reinforcing.

Preprints also anchor interdisciplinary exchanges, early collaborative recruitment, and equity in access: policymakers and NGOs benefit from paywall-free dissemination, particularly evident during public health emergencies (Xie et al., 2021). Central framing (e.g., "the main thing is done" once a preprint appears on arXiv; journal publication is "the dessert") underscores the shifting valuation of these modes (Delfanti, 2016).

3. Credit Allocation, Authorship, and Social Stratification

Preprinting modifies traditional credit and authorship conventions. In HEP, arXiv membership and successful navigation of its moderation regime ("endorsement and institutional email") segregate insiders from outsiders (Delfanti, 2016). Large experimental collaborations institutionalize collective credit via written "constitutions" granting authorship after periods of labor; hyperauthorship obscures individual contributions, and withdrawal of endorsement constitutes a rare act of dissent.

In computing, early preprints serve as timestamped proof against scooping and as assets in CVs and grant applications. The process enhances identity-building, especially for early-career researchers (ECRs), who otherwise face visibility gaps during protracted peer review (Mishkin et al., 2020).

Citation stratification is amplified in preprints: Gini coefficients of five-year citations (G_preprint ≈ 0.88; matched journals ≈ 0.70–0.75) show that citation inequality is both broader and deeper in preprints, especially in mature disciplines where prior reputation propagates more strongly into impact (Miura et al., 9 Jun 2025). Preferential attachment (π(c) ∼ c^α, α<1) cannot alone explain this; empirical data reveal that citation disparities are largely driven by social reputation of authors—top 10% authors receive roughly 11× more citations in preprints than average, a larger gap than in journals.

4. Community Benefits: Visibility, Collaboration, and Pace

Across all domains, preprints accelerate research visibility, enable rapid collaboration, and increase scholarly impact. Preprints reach audiences about 14 months earlier than journal papers on average (Δt ≈ 400 days across servers; domain range: 217–822 days) (Xie et al., 2021), and correlate with 2–8× higher median citations. Notable discipline-level ratios include economics (7.86×), computer science (5.52×), physics (2.78×), and mathematics (1.95×).

Preprints function as the "new results feed"—arxiv-sanity, arxiv-vanity, and code/data indexing services depend on their open structure. Practitioners use them to bypass institutional limitations or peer review bottlenecks. During public health emergencies (COVID-19), preprints became the fastest channel of knowledge transfer, appearing in hundreds of news stories and tens of thousands of tweets (Xie et al., 2021). In HCI and AI, visible preprints drive conference attendance, research invitations, and grant opportunities (Zhou et al., 6 Nov 2025).

Early sharing, timestamped priority, and open feedback loops often lead to new collaborations before peer-reviewed acceptance: case examples include co-author recruitment from preprint engagement (Zhou et al., 6 Nov 2025).

5. Challenges: Inequality, Misinformation, and Governance

Despite democratizing access, preprints entail risks relating to reinforced elite dynamics, misinterpretation, and governance tensions. Citation inequality in preprints is higher and more pronounced in established fields; absent editorial and peer scrutiny, fame-driven attention can crowd out innovative work from lesser-known contributors (Miura et al., 9 Jun 2025). This has prompted calls for evaluation metrics that avoid overcrediting high-status actors and tools to surface low-visibility contributions.

Open access to non–peer-reviewed preprints on public platforms (Reddit, 4chan/pol/) exposes preliminary research to lay or ideologically motivated audiences. Large-scale analyses show low text similarity (mean cosine < 0.32 for abstract, < 0.25 for full text), indicating frequent misinterpretation, amplification of tentative findings, and skepticism toward perceived pseudoscience (Yudhoatmojo et al., 2021). Misinterpretation can become acute during topical surges (COVID-19), leading to misinformation and alarmism.

Recommendations for mitigating such distortions include fact-check bots appending metadata, community-driven lay summaries ("ELI5"), scientist engagement on open platforms, and linking rapid commentary forums (PubPeer) into discussion threads (Yudhoatmojo et al., 2021).

On governance, centralized moderation systems (endorsement, automated screening, subject expert oversight) maintain quality, but pose challenges regarding gatekeeping, transparency, and disciplinary adaptation. Some research argues that requiring anonymity for preprints is as detrimental as banning them, suggesting best practice is author-controlled timing and identity (Mishkin et al., 2020).

6. Interdisciplinary Expansion and the Future of Preprinting Culture

Preprint culture has propagated from HEP into mathematics, computer science, biology, economics, and now AI, HCI, and the life sciences, each adapting the infrastructure to field-specific epistemic and temporal regimes. In physics, single-stop centralized platforms such as arXiv have become the de facto "primary mode" of communication (Ginsparg, 2017). In emerging areas, hybrid models are developing: overlay journals, post-publication commentary, and enhanced linking to datasets and code (Ginsparg, 2017).

Exponential growth persists (annual volume increased 63× in 30 years; doubling time ≈ 10 years), with discipline-specific adoption ratios (physics ≈ 27.7 %, mathematics ≈ 15.7 %, biology ≈ 6.5 %, computer science ≈ 5 %) (Xie et al., 2021). As more universities and funders recognize preprints for career evaluation and grants, and moderation frameworks evolve, the community impact of preprinting is poised to widen further, balancing immediacy, inclusivity, expertise, and robust quality control.

Preprinting thus continues to restructure research communities—not only by accelerating communication and collaboration, but by recalibrating social boundaries, credit pathways, and governance norms across the sciences.