The practice of preprinting in the life sciences has grown rapidly. In addition to accelerating scientific publication, preprinting also has the potential to open new avenues of communication among researchers. For example, preprint peer review offers tremendous potential for changing the culture of scientific assessment, broadening participation, and enhancing the robustness of scholarship.

Once all but unknown to anyone but economics or high energy physics researchers, preprints are becoming more popular across the disciplinary spectrum. These unreviewed reports allow scholars to share their work with the wider research community as soon as it is finished, without having to navigate what can sometimes become a lengthy peer review process.

By Mario Malički and Juan Pablo Alperin This blog post is inspired by our four part series documenting the methodological […]

I’m posting this the morning after generating a graph, and it’s already out-of-date. During the worldwide COVID-19 outbreak, preprint servers such as bioRxiv and medRxiv have again shown that they are the most effective way of communicating science rapidly. A collection of all papers on COVID-19 deposited on these two servers is available here, and it is growing daily.

This blog is cross-posted from ASAPbio and reused under CC-BY 4.0 license.

In the last of our four-part series documenting the methodological challenges we faced during our project investigating preprint growth and uptake, we turn to the metadata of arXiv’s Quantitative Biology section.

This blog post is the third in a four part series documenting the methodological challenges we faced during our project investigating preprint growth and uptake.

Working with preprint metadata? As we highlight in this post, OSF’s preprint servers might not be the best place to start.

In this four-part blog series, we explore the many challenges we encountered in working with preprint metadata, including lack of documentation, missing values, and incompatible and erroneous data.

Which researchers preprint more than others in their network? In which research fields is preprinting growing in popularity, and in which fields is adoption disproportionately low?