“To date, the ineligibility of pre-prints in ERA has not been raised as an issue,” the agency suggests in a consultation paper, so the council is raising it

Perhaps this is because the ARC copped a hiding last year for originally excluding research applications that cited pre-prints. Whatever the reason, the agency is now asking what people think of allowing pre-prints in submissions for next year’s Excellence in Research for Australia.

In particular the ARC asks if they are ok for citation analysis and up to 30 per cent of submissions in disciplines that use peer review.

As to including pre-prints at all it rather looks like the ARC thinks it has made up its mind.

“There is a growing acknowledgement of their role alongside peer reviewed research and an increasing number of preprint repositories across a broader range of disciplines. Furthermore, what constitutes a preprint is also evolving as various preprint repositories are incorporating some version of peer review such as open peer review as part of their processes.”