Are preprints the future of biology? A survival guide for scientists | Science | AAAS

One day in May 2014, while visiting his parents in Bulgaria, biologist Nikolai Slavov sat at his laptop and called up a free online archive of scientific papers called bioRxiv. Then, with a click of an "upload" button, he submitted the draft of a paper he'd written about his postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge on the unexpectedly diverse structure of ribosomes, the cell's protein-making factories. "I was mostly excited, but a little bit nervous" about sharing findings that hadn't been scrutinized by peer reviewers, he says.