Question: How common is it that journals reject submitted manuscripts purely because the paper is already available as a preprint in some repository?
At our institution (UiT The Arctic University of Norway), master students' supervisors very often advice their students not to make their thesis available in our IR, because they intend to rewrite it into one or more journal article(s). At the time of finished thesis, they do not know where the paper version will be submitted. And they are afraid that having the thesis openly available in our IR will severely limit their choice of journals to submit to. I was attending the Emtacl15-conference in Trondheim last week, and there I heard about the effort to build a "preprint culture" at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. And in response to my question the presenter said that there is no problem with journals not accepting manuscripts already freely available in their IR. So, to all our students and their supervisors, can we comfort them and say that there is no need to hold the theses back from our IR, and that they need not fear rejection? (The same fear is also common among doctoral students who often submit PhD theses that include papers not yet submitted to a journal.) This matter, whether an available preprint is acceptable or not for the journal editors, is not an information you find in Sherpa/RoMEO. In Sherpa/RoMEO you find what you may do with your pre- and postprint if and after it is accepted by the journal. Grateful for views on this. Yours, Leif Longva UiT The Arctic University of Norway
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