Good news: PNAS won’t embargo papers that have already appeared as preprints

About a month ago, I suggested — based on an example of things gone wrong — that journals shouldn’t embargo papers that had already appeared on preprint servers. A little more than a week after that, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) seemed to agree.

And now, they’ve made it official. Here’s a note the journal sent its press list Friday:

Please note that PNAS allows authors to post versions of their manuscripts on preprint servers, such as arXiv, bioRxiv, or SSRN, prior to acceptance. Accordingly, PNAS may publish without embargo papers that have been previously posted on a preprint server, and authors of such papers will be alerted of their publication date one week in advance. Reporters will be notified of these papers through the PNAS listserv at the time of online publication, and a copy of the published article will be made available.

This is welcome news. What prompted the message, I asked PNAS?

The note was intended to clarify our embargo policy going forward regarding manuscripts posted on preprint servers.

Now, some reporters who rely on embargoed news releases may complain that they’ll miss interesting papers in PNAS because those studies won’t be included in the weekly PNAS alerts to the media. To those colleagues, I say: Get to know arXiv and bioRxiv.