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Scientific papers can take months or even years to get published in an academic journal. Preprints, on the other hand, can be deposited into online repositories and are typically made available within a day or two of submission. So when COVID-19 started spreading rapidly across the globe, scientists worldwide turned to preprint servers to share their findings at the pace needed to address the crisis.
Preprints have long been a fixture in the physical sciences. The longest-standing preprint server, arXiv, was launched for the physics community in 1991. The biomedical sciences, however, took much longer to embrace preprints. The first preprint server for biology, bioRxiv, was established in 2013, and medRxiv, a preprint server for the health sciences, came to life just a few years ago, in 2019. Today there are dozens of preprints servers that cover many different disciplines—and the pandemic has accelerated ...
