eprint

An eprint, short for electronic print, is a version of a scholarly manuscript that is made available online, typically before or alongside formal publication in a journal or conference proceedings. Eprints enable rapid dissemination of research findings, open access to results, and opportunities for community feedback prior to formal peer review.

The practice originated in the early 1990s with the arXiv repository at Cornell University, founded by Paul Ginsparg, and has since spread across disciplines. Today, discipline-specific repositories and institutional repositories host eprints, including arXiv (physics, mathematics, computer science), bioRxiv (life sciences), SocArXiv (social sciences), and HAL (French open access).

Types of eprints include preprints (manuscripts posted before peer review), postprints (the accepted manuscript after peer review but before typesetting), and the publisher's version of record (when allowed). Rights and licensing vary; authors often retain some rights and grant repositories non-exclusive licenses, with open licenses such as CC BY or CC0 used on some platforms. Some publishers permit posting preprints, while others restrict posting of the final version.

Benefits include faster dissemination, broader accessibility, and higher visibility; potential drawbacks include the absence of peer review at posting and variable quality control. Eprints are typically assigned a timestamp and may be versioned; some repositories assign DOIs or preserve links to the final publication. They are indexed by search engines and scholarly databases, aiding discoverability.

Overall, eprints are a central component of modern open science infrastructure, complementing traditional publication and enabling broader participation in scholarly communication.