Four Things to Know about Springer Nature's New Preprint Policy

Preprints are known to provide a number of benefits for the research community and that is why their usage and sharing is rapidly growing in the field; from getting community feedback on your work as a researcher, enabling you to claim priority for a discovery to granting you with free and speedy access to research findings.

At Springer Nature we always supported preprint sharing in our imprints, and now we are pushing the envelope even further to make it easier for researchers and the community to use and share preprints by introducing a new unified policy across all Springer Nature journals.

Here are the four essential things to know about our new policy:

You can choose the license you prefer for your preprint: We support all varieties of licenses for preprints including Creative Commons (CC) licenses. The type of CC-license chosen will affect how the preprint may be shared and reused. More information to help guide licensing choices can be found in these resource documents developed by an ASAPbio licensing taskforce.

You should cite preprints as per scholarly norms for citation: Preprints may be cited in the reference list of articles under consideration at Springer Nature journals, as shown here;  Babichev, S. A., Ries, J. & Lvovsky, A. I. Quantum scissors: teleportation of single-mode optical states by means of a nonlocal single photon. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0208066 (2002).

You can submit your preprint to any legal preprint sharing platform of your choice: Publishing your research manuscript on a preprint server will not affect the way your article is handled when it is submitted: Posting of preprints of research manuscripts is not considered prior publication and will not jeopardize consideration at Springer Nature journals. Furthermore, research manuscripts posted on preprint servers will not be taken into account when determining the advance provided by a research study under consideration at a Springer Nature journal.

You are free to respond or clarify if the media ask you questions about a preprint manuscript: We advise you to be clear with journalists that preprints are not peer reviewed so the claims made in the research manuscript are provisional and may change. Researchers should also be aware that media coverage of preprint material may reduce or pre-empt coverage by other media at the time of publication.