Preprints Make Inroads Outside of Physics

"In the years following World War II, a flood of research created a crisis for scientific communication. To keep up with the deluge, physicists began mailing unpublished manuscripts across the country and around the world. These preprints speedily brought research to physicists hungry for news, outstripping traditional publications by months. By the time Paul Ginsparg launched hep-th@xxx.lanl.gov (now known as arXiv.org) in 1991, paper preprints had been entrenched in the culture of physics for decades.

The success of arXiv, which now holds 1.5 million preprints, is well known to physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists who rely on it. But similar efforts in other fields foundered. Life sciences repository Nature Precedings quietly shut down after six years and only about 2,000 preprints; the Chemistry Preprint Server barely got off the ground. In many fields, journal editors refused to publish papers posted as preprints.

Recently, however, the tide has begun to shift. Since 2013, dozens of preprint servers in fields such as biology, chemistry, and sociology have popped up and garnered tens of thousands of submissions.

In 2017, the National Institutes of Health allowed the inclusion of preprints in grant proposals. In May, the Nature family of journals announced that it would move from allowing preprints to encouraging them, now allowing researchers to speak to the media about preprints of submitted manuscripts. And on June 25, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), Yale University, and the journal BMJ launched a new server for medical preprints, medRxiv...."