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While arXiv is great, it covers only topics in physics, mathematics and computer science.

Are there any good preprint storage places for other scientific disciplines?

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    arXiv certainly does not only cover topics in physics, mathematics and computer science. Just on the front page you also find finance, biology, statistics and nonlinear sciences represented as major categories.
    – Willie Wong
    Commented Feb 15, 2012 at 11:38
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    everything is applied mathematics if you dig far enough :-). Quantitative biology (stuff like genomics and protein folding) is really quite specialised and outside what one would usually consider mathematics or computer science.
    – Willie Wong
    Commented Feb 15, 2012 at 12:11
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    I know that your question concerns other fields than CS and Maths, and Crypto is basically both, but for the sake of completeness, I just drop this here: ePrint, the Cryptology ePrint Archive.
    – user102
    Commented Feb 15, 2012 at 18:51
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    @WillieWong bonus points for "everything is applied mathematics" :)
    – Suresh
    Commented Apr 25, 2012 at 4:01
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    This question would use an accepted community-wiki answer summarizing all the given answers with a 2-liner description of each system.
    – yo'
    Commented Dec 10, 2013 at 22:04

15 Answers 15

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The OSF provides a general open preprint infrastructure that is connected to a range of preprint services. Importantly, it is not owned by a commercial publisher. It supports a number of discipline-specific preprint services many of which use the ArXiv name under licence.

The list of preprint services is growing over time. For further information go to: https://osf.io/preprints

In general, no matter what the discipline you can post to:

However, the OSF supports the following discipline-specific preprint services. Presumably, if your preprint aligns with any of these disciplines, then you would be better off posting to them.

More discipline-specific preprint services using the OSF framework are being added on a regular basis: https://cos.io/blog/public-goods-infrastructure-preprints-and-innovation-scholarly-communication/

Useful features of OSF-based preprint services

  • Strategy for long term archiving
  • Integration with Google Scholar
  • Integration with OSF projects which allows you to link other materials such as data, code, and materials
  • OSF is a not for profit entity run by academic researchers (contrast this with SSRN, Figshare, ResearchGate; i.e., no ads and goals aligned with academic community)
  • The functionality of OSF preprints is improving on a regular basis. See features road map
  • You can choose a licence
  • You can link to the doi of the subsequently published manuscript.
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    This should be the answer.
    – yellow-saint
    Commented Apr 17, 2017 at 13:33
  • @JB Agreed. I guess its tricky when the answer changes over time. This preprint service emerged only after the question was asked, but it should prove to be the logical home for papers that don't align with the ArXiV.
    – Jeromy Anglim
    Commented Apr 19, 2017 at 4:57
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    true enough. Incidentally, even arXiv is searchable via osf.io/preprints now!
    – yellow-saint
    Commented Apr 20, 2017 at 15:01
  • The Center of Open Science (head of OSF) is partly sponsored by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), involved in developing new military technologies. Not my cup of tea.
    – marsei
    Commented Mar 27, 2018 at 20:02
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Ones more aimed at social sciences (that I am aware of) are;

SSRN is dominated by economic and legal research (and NBER is obviously focused on economics).

Another I recently became aware of is Academia.edu, although this appears to me more like a personal website that has the option to upload working papers than an organized repository like SSRN or arXiv (here is an example profile page on Academia.edu).

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It seems that neither option presented below are taking new submissions. I keep the answer here for historical interest.

One option is:

  • Philica which occupies a bit of a strange place. It is a free, open-access journal that publishes immediately and in any discipline. The website comes with a non-traditional review system. It is in between what one may call a pre-print server and what one would call an electronic open access journal.

Nature Precedings used to take submissions, but no longer does:

  • Nature Precedings: a pre-print repository run by Nature Publishing Group that focuses on chemistry, biological sciences, and earth sciences. Edit: As bobthejoe noted below in the comments, Nature Precedings is no longer taking new submissions; though it will for the foreseeable future remain a repository for the pre-prints already submitted.
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    Unfortunately, we will now have to say RIP to Nature Precedings.
    – bobthejoe
    Commented Apr 17, 2012 at 6:58
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    Philica has been downed too?
    – Ooker
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 12:26
  • @Ooker: Google has a cached copy of Philica from February 25 of this year. From the look of it, the list of "Most recent articles" appears to be mostly nonsense and Spam, with titles like "Tips On Hiring Dulles Airport Shuttle" or "Basics Of Selling Your Family Business ". That may explain why the website's account now appears to be "suspended".
    – Willie Wong
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 13:29
  • in that case, I guess a downvote for not being useful is appropriated? :)
    – Ooker
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 16:00
  • Better yet, vote this answer up since I think it is currently the best option of everything presented so far. Mine only has more votes by virtue of being older.
    – Willie Wong
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 12:53
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Figshare is a rather new service (compared to ArXiv) that is just starting to gain momentum. I haven't used it personally, but they have partnered up with some other Open Access players, most notably and recently with PLoS (Figshare will host supplemental data for all PLoS journals). As far as I know, there is no restriction regarding the fields the submissions must be in.

It is a repository, the service is free (unlimited public posts, 1GB private posts). No review or moderation; the submissions will be posted immediately under CC-BY. Each submission is given a DOI. I cannot find info about how many submissions they have received and posted.

NOTE: Just checked with Figshare through twitter, and after one year they have 200,000 files shared by users (could be papers, figures, charts, data, etc)

Edit: just realized I should also mention the following:

PeerJ was just launched very recently (like in the last month or two I think). It's a journal but has its own pre-print system. You can submit unlimited number of public pre-prints in their preprint server PeerJ Preprints, which has its own ISSN number. You will be able to submit your pre-prints subsequently to their peer-reviewed journal. The journal is gold OA and charges what I believe is a one-time membership fee. The journal has limited scope (does not publish in the Physical Sciences, the Mathematical Sciences, the Social Sciences, or the Humanities ), not sure what the pre-print service will look like yet and it is worth checking out later on.

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    Figshare looks interesting, but I think it would have some limitations as a preprint server. One is the mandatory CC BY licensing (which is incompatible with many journals), and the other is that I don't think there's a culture of scanning through Figshare announcements for the latest papers. If you post a mathematics paper on the arXiv, many of the leading experts will notice it the next day. Currently, Figshare seems to fulfill the hosting aspect of being a preprint server but not the publicity or dissemination aspect.
    – Anonymous Mathematician
    Commented Feb 18, 2013 at 16:31
  • I agree that it will still need some time to grow to have the structure that ArXiv has currently. With more OA players on board and community input, hopefully that will happen soon. I wasn't aware of the CC-BY licensing issue with journals though - am now curious. Do you have examples of journals with which the CC-BY licensing could create an issue for submission?
    – Theresa Liao
    Commented Feb 18, 2013 at 18:59
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    Probably you could get away with it by simply not telling the journal what you did, but it strongly conflicts with the publishing agreements of most non-OA journals. For example, if you don't choose a gold OA option, Springer insists on a transfer of exclusive rights, which is impossible if you have already released the paper under a CC-BY license. (There are exceptions for some things like the arXiv, but I'd be very surprised if they allowed a CC-BY license, since letting people do that for free would undermine their gold OA options.)
    – Anonymous Mathematician
    Commented Feb 19, 2013 at 3:23
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    I don't think there's anything special about Springer here (I just mention them since I was looking at springer.com/open+access/…). Some non-OA publishers, particularly non-profit ones, may be fine with a CC-BY paper, but I think most would not. In any case, if anyone is considering doing this, I would urge them to check out their favorite journals and make sure they would be OK with it.
    – Anonymous Mathematician
    Commented Feb 19, 2013 at 3:26
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    Thanks for pointing this out. Just found another post in stack exchange regarding this: What are risks or disadvantages in uploading to figshare or related services?. I personally like OA & CC-BY but also recognize the reality of the situation, so yes it is better to check first.
    – Theresa Liao
    Commented Feb 19, 2013 at 7:20
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To complement the other answers,

in mathematical physics there is mp-arc in addition to arXiv,

and in biology one has biorXiv which is apparently modelled after arXiv.

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  • Next to bioRxiv, there's also medRxiv.
    – mike
    Commented Mar 3, 2021 at 10:52
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HaL ("hyper archive en ligne") is a French open archive repository that covers all fields. As far as I know it is open for submission beyond people working in French departments. It can automatically deposit on arXiv for papers whose topic is covered.

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I'm not sure why this hasn't come up on this thread yet:

  • PubMed Central is the main open-access repository in the biomedical and life sciences. It has its own added metadata, and it is the mandatory recipient of all research funded by the National Institutes of Health and a number of other funding bodies. There are also specific versions for Canada and Europe.
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There are some more specialized ones for math:

Linear Algebraic Groups and Related Structures

Cryptography

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F1000Posters (http://f1000.com/posters) is an open access repository that hosts posters and oral presentation slides in biology and medicine, and can also be considered a pre-print server. It allows researchers to extend the visibility of their work outside of the conference hall, maximising the return on the time, effort and money invested in creating each presentation. Many of the posters are submitted with their subsequent research article added to them when it is eventually published. It also completely free to submit.

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For the geosciences and earth sciences (climatology, meteorology, geomorphology, oceanography, etc.) the American Geophysical Union (AGU) now allows and encourages pre-prints to Earth and Space Science Open Archive (ESSOAR) for AGU journals. They also host PDF's of posters from meetings including the annual meeting.

Most of the papers coming out from coworkers in AGU journals are hitting ESSOAR.

https://www.essoar.org/

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For linguistics, there's LingBuzz.

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Optimization Online is a preprint site for papers in optimization: http://www.optimization-online.org/

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If your purpose is only to have an openly available version of your paper that you can link to (and that people can find using Google Scholar), you can also upload it to your institutional or personal website. At least in CS, this is allowed by pretty much all major publishers I am aware of (and more frequently allowed than ArXiv). Google Scholar will pick up your paper eventually.

Additionally, some universities host their own ePrint servers for their own students and faculty. Again, this is not really a place to find new interesting research, but a great way to get your paper hosted and indexed by Google Scholar et al., and is also commonly allowed by publishers.

As a bonus, both of these options do not require you to register any new accounts or upload your paper to some (potentially commercial) third party service, which may be a plus, depending on your personal stance on these matters.

If your purpose is to also "get the word out" about your paper, one of the other mentioned repositories is obviously the better way.

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In economics, there is also MPRA.

EDIT: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/ MPRA is a repository run by the Munich University Library and has a description here. https://blog.repec.org/2009/08/27/mpra-the-munich-personal-repec-archive/

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    Welcome to academia.se! Could you please add a link for our benefit, expand the abbreviation, and maybe quickly describe this e-print server?
    – Federico Poloni
    Commented Nov 27, 2015 at 13:36
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    Also please disclose your affiliation with this site (which seems to exist).
    – Wrzlprmft ♦
    Commented Nov 27, 2015 at 14:08
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I think academia.edu and authorea are also possible answers to OP's question

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