List of Preprint Databases (not comprehensive)
American Physical Society E-Prints
This server began in 1996 and, although a searchable archive, was closed to submissions on May 31, 2000. It now redirects authors to the Los Alamos site or to the American Physical Society’s journals.
arXiv
arXiv is a free distribution service and an open access archive for scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.
CERN Document Server: Preprints
Full text usually provided; coverage from 1994 onward. Includes links to other preprint servers.
Chemical Physics Preprint Database
http://www.chem.brown.edu/chem-ph.html
A joint project of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Brown University’s Chemistry Department. This archive hosts full-text documents for the international theoretical chemistry community.
ChemWeb
Launched in July 2000. Allows free searching of chemistry journals as well as reviewed chemistry Web sites. Free citations and abstracts, but you must pay for full text by subscription or “pay as you go.”
Clinmed Netprints
Launched by the British Medical Journal and Highwire Press, this site provides a place for authors to archive their completed studies before, during, or after peer review by other agencies. It covers original research into clinical medicine and health and includes a warning that articles posted “have not yet been accepted for publication by a peer reviewed journal…Casual readers should not act on their findings, and journalists should be wary of reporting them.” It also has a list under Journal Policies of which journals will and will not accept submissions that have appeared on preprint servers.
E-Math
A preprint server for mathematicians, maintained by the American Mathematical Society. The mission of the server is to make available to the mathematical community the current home page URLs and e-mail contacts of all mathematical preprint and e-print servers throughout the world. The server itself does not offer full text, but can be used as a tool to link to servers that include text.
LANL’s E-Print Archive
Begun in 1991 by physicist Paul Ginsparg this well-organized, if somewhat user-unfriendly server, covers physics, mathematics, nonlinear science, and computer science. Full text is available in various electronic formats.
NCSTRL (Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library)
Online since 1995, this server distributes technical reports in computer science. Searching and online access to full text is free.
PrePrint Network
Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, this is a searchable gateway to preprint servers that deal with scientific and technical disciplines of concern to DOE. The gateway also includes scientific and technical disciplines such as physics, materials, and chemistry, as well as portions of biology, environmental sciences and nuclear medicine. Users can search across the gateway by author, title, full record, date, and collection, or browse the databases alphabetically or by subject pathway [see Figure 3 on page 59]. Search returns include title, author, source, number of pages, and a link to an abstract which then links to the full text. The format of full-text papers can vary considerably.
PubMedCentral
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/
Users can view full text for free in PubMed Central, both as HTML documents through their Web browser and as downloadable PDFs. Features include links from article reference citations to PubMed abstracts, figures sized for on-screen viewing, and support for supplementary information such as data tables, streaming video, and high-resolution images. Coming soon in the next few months: direct links from PubMed search results to the full text of articles in PubMed Central, the development of new search engines, and flexible support for new scientific publishing models, such as “electronic-only” journals. With the backing of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, this represents a major and influential development in the rise of electronic media as a platform for scholarly communication.
SLAC SPIRES-HEP (Stanford Public Information Retrieval System — High Energy Physics)
http://www-slac.slac.stanford.edu/find/spires.html
Contains over 180,000 entries with full text from various other sites. Scope includes preprints, journal articles, theses, technical reports, and other documents.
Social Science Research Network
A database of working papers in accounting, economics, finance, and law. This server will help users identify papers and authors. Some of the material is free, but the main strategy is to have users subscribe to various indexing and abstracting journals at $20 per journal, along with a $50 membership fee. The abstracting journals will link to the full text of the working papers.
Theoretical Ecology Preprint Database
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu:8504/esa/ppr/ppr.Query
This server shows citations and abstracts and includes information on the status of the preprint (i.e., “in-press,” “submitted,” “published,” or “unsubmitted”). A few links to full text.
Topology Atlas Preprints
http://at.yorku.ca/topology/preprint.htm
This site lists over 400 preprints and survey articles in topology. An abstract of each preprint and information about the source of the document is available. Most of these documents reside on the Topology Atlas server, but the server will classify and link to documents residing on any server.
Universal Preprint Directory
http://www.realsci.com/browse.cfm
Offers preprints in religion and other philosophy topics and tells authors that the “Academic Resources Channel is pleased to assist you in publishing your online work. Actually, you are five clicks away from your paper, book, or other academic work being published.”