Peer-reviewed publication is a fundamental aspect of science and provides a means to referee research before it is disseminated to the greater public. And owing to their importance, publications are considered by some to be the currency of academia. A researcher’s success or even ability is often judged by the number of publications he or she manages to put out in the span of a career. There are even metrics like impact factor, h-index, and g-index calculated for both journals and authors that are based on publications and number of citations and are used as tools for evaluation.

However, the peer-review process, while vital, is often time-consuming, expensive, and labor intensive. It can take months or even years from initial submission of an article to its final publication, often with several rounds of edits and resubmissions in between. Publishing articles can also be very expensive ($1,000’s!), and the researcher or his/her lab must incur those costs. While open source publishing has become increasing popular in response to rising publication costs and limited journal access, it seems scientists are venturing to a new form of online publication, pre-print publishing, to address these issues.

Pre-print publishing is essentially making results of a research project available to the general public prior to the peer-review process. Researchers write their articles as they would for any journal but before beginning tedious peer-review, they upload those articles to a freely-available online database where the research and results can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection. One database in particular has become a hub for biologists to submit pre-print manuscripts, bioRxiv (pronounced bio-archive).

BioRxiv was initiated by Cold Spring Harbor in 2013 and has since grown immensely in popularity. According to an article published in Nature in January 2019, there were over 37,000 articles uploaded to bioRxiv by the end of 2018, and in October 2018 alone, there were over 1 million downloads from the site. Interestingly, only ~42% of articles posted to bioRxiv are later published in peer-review journals, suggesting this site provides an outlet for research that might not otherwise be disseminated (i.e. negative results, etc).

While pre-print publishing will not replace peer review, it does provide a new avenue to share results to a broad audience, and circumvents issues like paywalls and what might be considered “unpublishable” results. And with usage of sites like bioRxiv only increasing, it certainly seems like we are just at the beginning of a new age in scientific publication.

Written by TPS Fellow Katie D'Amico-Willman

Sources

• What bioRxiv’s first 30,000 preprints reveal about biologists. Nature, January 22, 2019. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00199-6
• BioRxiv: The Preprint Server for Biology. https://www.biorxiv.org/about-biorxiv
• Are preprints the future of biology? A survival guide for scientists. Science, September 29, 2017. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/09/are-preprints-future-biology-survival-guide-scientists