Check out our Author Rights and Publication Agreements Guide
Preprints are research manuscripts that have not been formally published or refined/critiqued through the peer review process and are often deposited in preprint servers:
During the pilot, NLM will make preprints resulting from research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) available via PubMed Central (PMC) and, by extension, PubMed. The pilot aims to explore approaches to increasing the discoverability of early NIH research results posted to eligible preprint servers. Pilot is running for a minimum of 12 months, starting June 2020.
Preprints can be submitted to the NIH as a product of award but do not fall under the NIH Public Access Policy since they are not peer-reviewed. If the manuscript is accepted for publication, the peer-reviewed manuscript will still need to be submitted through the NIH Manuscript System (NIHMS) by the publisher or author to receive a PubMed Central ID (PMCID).
Predatory Publishers are publishers that charge APCs for Open Access publishing without providing the editorial and administrative services associated with legitimate journals. Predatory publishers engage in unethical or questionable practices to solicit and process content, such as:
Not all Open Access journals are predatory. Predatory publishers are an aggressive exception. Authors should evaluate each venue they consider for publication before submitting a manuscript. There are several resources to help authors distinguish an ethical publisher from an unethical one.
Open Access publishing enables the free, immediate, and online availability of research and scholarly products. Open Access journals have been successfully producing and disseminating high quality research for over a decade. The Directory of Open Access Journals currently lists over 11,000 vetted Open Access Journals.
There are different business models that support Open Access publishing.
The HowOpenIsIt? Open Access Spectrum Guide identifies the core components of Open Access (OA) -- readers' rights, reuse rights, copyright, author posting, automatic posting, and machine readability -- and how they are implemented in journals. Its aim is to help authors make informed decisions on where to publish based on journal policies.