Today (June 5), Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Yale University, and The BMJ are launching medRxiv, a preprint server for clinical research. It joins the likes of bioRxiv for basic biology and arXiv for math and physics, although medRxiv will have more stringent requirements for manuscripts. Authors will be asked to provide competing interests, all relevant ethical guidelines, clinical trial IDs, and other detailed information.
Richard Sever of Cold Spring Harbor Labortory is a cofounder of medRxiv and its predecessor bioRxiv, which was launched in 2013. The Scientist spoke to Sever about the launch of medRxiv.
The Scientist: What is the need for preprint servers?
Richard Sever: In general, there are a number of reasons. I think first and foremost it is speeding up dissemination of research. If you submit a paper to a journal, it takes on average about seven months before the work is actually published. But that’s an ...
