Scientists have welcomed an official by the European Research Council that it will accept preprints as evidence of academics¡¯ previous work when applying for grants.

Preprints are first-draft papers yet to be peer-reviewed and published in a journal. They have long been used in fields such as physics to facilitate early discussion of results and to circumvent the often-lengthy journal review process.

In finally accepting preprints from applicants, the ERC¡¯s scientific council said that it wanted to ¡°signal support¡± for open-access publishing. Preprint platforms ¨C such as arXiv, which focuses on mathematics and physics, and receives more than ¨C are generally free to access, whereas many journals remain closed without a subscription.

Another reason for the change, the council continued, was because ¡°in some fields, especially for frontier research, the timeliness of scholarly communication is crucial ¨C the publication cycle can be too long¡±.

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, a Lisbon-based neuroscientist, said on Twitter that the change was ¡°great news for in Europe!¡±

But it was also pointed out on Twitter that the ERC, in accepting preprints, has only just caught up with other funders ¨C the US National Institutes of Health started accepting them last year to allow researchers to ¡°accelerate dissemination and enhance the rigor of their work¡±.

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The ERC also said that next year it would pilot?allotting ¡°lump sums¡± to researchers in an experiment to see what happens if spending bureaucracy is reduced drastically. The idea is to ¡°test reduction of administrative burden and increase in implementation efficiency¡±, it?said.

Lump-sum grants will be used first in the ERC¡¯s proof of concept scheme, which aims to spin out socially or commercially useful innovations from existing ERC projects.

david.matthews@timeshighereducation.com