Preprints

Written as a briefing, this piece looks at where preprints fit within biology's publishing world and how the practice developed. Authors post these scholarly manuscripts to a repository or platform so that early work can be shared widely, with no barriers to access. The text traces how quickly the model has expanded and how it relates to wider movements toward openness in research communication.

It also examines the difficulties the model brings, particularly keeping the underlying technical systems running and finding ways to fund them over the long term. Readers learn that more than 60 preprint servers currently exist, each serving a particular subject area or region and each developing at its own pace according to how widely it is adopted and the culture of its discipline. The briefing is aimed at anyone who wants a clear grounding in this fast-changing form of publication.