Preprints Galore

FLICKR, THEREALDAVIDFRANCISCold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s life science-specific preprint server, bioRxiv, launched today (November 12). Modeled after arXiv, which is hosted by Cornell University, the new preprint server allows life scientists to post unpublished research findings and manuscripts online, making them available to the community before they are submitted to journals for peer review. BioRxiv joins a growing list of web resources for the dissemination of non-peer-reviewed literature. Open-access journal PeerJ, for example, also rolled out its PrePrints server more broadly this week (November 11), lifting its previous one free preprint per year restriction.

“For years many in the biological sciences community have been jealous of the exist[ence] of arXiv,” wrote Razib Khan at his Discover blog, Gene Expression.

“This is not something that is competing with arXiv,” Cold Spring Harbor’s Richard Sever, co-founder of bioRxiv, told Nature. “It is supposed to complement it.”

Jeremy...