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The aims of this article are to describe the current status, usage, and acceptance of domestic preprint servers in mainland China by investigating three integrated preprint servers in mainland China. These are the Qiji e‐print archive (Qiji), the Chinese Preprint Server (CPS), Chinese Science Papers Online (CSPO).

This research gives a quantitative analysis of the submission numbers to three preprint servers, the subject distribution and citations. An investigation of university websites and their policies was also carried out.

Preprint submissions have a strong correlation with official promotion and policies. The preprints communication pattern in mainland China concentrates on the disciplines of physics, mathematics and computer science which reflects international preprint communication behaviour. As yet the domestic preprint servers in mainland China attract little attention from excellent scholars and have a low impact on scientific communication.

No author survey was conducted.

This is the first paper to characterize the usage and acceptance of domestic preprint servers in mainland China using a quantitative method.