Who's Afraid of Preprints? Looking at the Origin and Motivation Behind arXiv for Clues as to Why It's so Successful - Digital Science

" ... The danger is that by focusing on the dissemination aspect of scholarly communication, we run the risk of ignoring accreditation, or rather, the quality control mechanisms that enable it. Last week, an article by Ewen Callaway and Kendall Powell in Nature News discussed the ASAPBio conference, which is dedicated to finding a way to make preprints do for biology, what they’ve done for other disciplines. The article talks about bioRxiv, the life science preprint server which was founded at Cold Spring Harbour in 2013 and modelled after arXiv. While bioRxiv has been growing steadily since its foundation, with around 200 submissions per month, it has a long way to go to catch up with arXiv, which boasts almost 9,000 per month, with a total of over a million articles so far. What accounts for this difference? Is it just the fact that bioRxiv is the new kid on the block or is there something more at work? One key difference between the two projects is the communities that they serve. As this article by Jocelyn Kaiser in Science Magazine pointed out, critics claim that there are cultural differences between biology, for example and physics. I’d actually go a little further and say that arXiv was designed to automate a process that was already going on in fields like high energy physics (HEP) ..."