What are preprints/eprints? A preprint is "an issue of a technical paper often in preliminary form before its publication in a journal" (Webster's online). The term "eprint" was coined to also include papers which are never formally published. You can often recognize preprints in bibliographies as "submitted to" or "will appear in" or with a cryptic code such as CONDMAT9803066 or HEPTH9703185.

How do I find them?
A number of services have been established which archive and provide access to preprints. Problems with these services include: some journals forbid online preprints, user interfaces may be cumbersome, submissions are only self-indexed.

arXiv.org, often referred to by its former name xxx.lanl.gov. Started at Los Alamos in 1991, originally for the high energy physics community, and considered the "grandfather" of electronic preprint servers, now operated at Cornell. Over 270,000 papers. Mirror sites are available at http://lanl.arxiv.org/, http://aps.arxiv.org/, and elsewhere.  For more information see the bibliography on this archive's effect on scholarly communications and publishing.

CoRR � Computing Research Repository (http://xxx.lanl.gov/archive/cs/intro.html or http://www.acm.org/repository/) - established in 1988 through a partnership of ACM, the LANL e-Print archive, and NCSTRL. Anyone can browse and search papers and subscribe to get notification of new submissions. Submissions are subject to moderation of appropriateness to archives and subject classes.

Front for the mathematics arXiv - indexes the mathematics portion of the Los Alamos e-Print arXiv. Developed at UC Davis. 30,000+ papers as of April 2004.

NCSTRL - Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library

E-PRINT Network - searchable gateway to preprint servers that deal with scientific and technical disciplines of concern to DOE

SPIRES � HEP Database - joint project of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and DESY libraries etc. Covers more than 500,000 high-energy physics papers received since 1974.

The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. It has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. Publishes the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.

EPrints.org - Software for running open archives.

E Scholarship - "Scholar-led innovations in scholarly communication" sponsored by California Digital Library.

PubMed Central (formerly E-biomed) - Digital archive of life sciences journal literature.

Chemistry Preprint Server from ChemWeb - Active July 2000 - May 2004.

DSpace Open-source digital repository system from MIT.

The case for institutional repositories -A SPARC position paper.