The survey, which took place over 45 days in April and May 2020, received 356 responses, with the majority coming from India (83.71%), followed by Bangladesh (6.18%) and Nepal (4.49%) and the remaining 6% from other countries (Fig. 1). Among the respondents, 37.08% were Early Career Researchers, 33.99% were Scientists, 23.60% were Faculty members, and 5.34% were Librarians (Fig. 2). The field of study was dominated by Agricultural Sciences, with 54% of respondents, followed by Life Sciences (16.29%) and Social and Behavioural Sciences (14.04%). Most of the survey respondents (356) ranked "Journal's Impact Factor" as the most important factor when choosing a suitable journal for publication. On the other hand, "wider readership" was ranked as the least important criterion (Fig. 3). Out of the survey respondents, 75% had at least 25% of their publications in Open Access, while 25% reported having no publications in Open Access.
The survey results showed that 65.33% (Fig. 4) of the respondents have paid Article Processing Charges (APCs) for their publication, with 9.60% of authors always paying the charges. When asked about the funding for APCs, 16.41% said they came from project funds, 20.43% received institutional support, 3.72% received support from funders, 30.34% pooled money from personal funds with other authors, and 29.10% preferred not to disclose (Fig. 5). On the other hand, 34.67% of the respondents reported never paying any APCs. Most of the survey respondents (222) reported that they share their first draft of manuscripts with their peers or colleagues for feedback and comments. 46.85% stated that they always share the drafts, 37.39% said that they share sometimes, and only 15.77% reported that they never share their drafts with others.
When it comes to preprints, 27.03% of the 222 survey respondents stated that they are not familiar with the concept, while 11.26% stated they never read preprints (Fig. 6). On the other hand, 61.72% of the respondents reported that they do read preprints. In terms of credibility, 64.42% of the respondents expressed trust in preprints. In terms of preferred preprint repositories, the survey respondents ranked institutional repositories as the top choice, followed by personal websites, subject-specific repositories, and lastly, multi-disciplinary repositories. Most respondents ranked "belief in open access" (39.91%) as the most important factor in choosing a preprint repository, followed by "rapid feedback" (23.53%) and "timely sharing of results" (21.72%). However, about half of respondents believed that "peer pressure" was a low factor in their decision (Fig. 7). IndiaRxi.org, a preprint repository specifically for Indian scholars, has seen growth since its launch with 128 records currently available.
Survey respondents were asked about their motivation for sharing preprints (Figs. 8 & 9). The two main motivators were indexing, citation and visibility (30.18%) and taking preprints into account in the assessment and evaluation (22.52%). The least motivated was "acceptance of negative results" (40.99%). In terms of citing preprints (Figs. 10 & 11), 60.36% of respondents said they never quote preprints, while 29.73% said they do occasionally. Only 9.91% of respondents said they frequently cite preprints. Among respondents, 79.73% reported that their preprints had never been cited. Regarding editing and withdrawal after publishing preprints, 83.33% reported that they never edited their preprints, 87.84% never withdrew them, and 73.42% never added links to their peer-reviewed publications related to their published preprints.