Life sciences preprint servers have grown up — and are setting out on their own

On a Tuesday afternoon in the spring of 2013, Richard Sever logged on to Twitter and wrote a brief post introducing the world to bioRxiv, “biology’s answer to the arXiv preprint server,” as he put it. 

It was a fitting place to let life scientists know that the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, where Sever was an assistant director, was launching an online repository of preprints modeled on the popular arXiv, where physicists routinely posted preliminary drafts of their research papers. Twitter was where Sever had first seen discussions among genomics researchers about whether the field should embrace the free sharing of manuscripts prior to their formal publication in peer-reviewed journals. 

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