Preprint publishing challenges the status quo in medicine
The bioRxiv model is coming to medicine, too. A new preprint server – to be called medRxiv – is expected to launch later in 2018 and will accept a wide range of papers on health and medicine, including clinical trial results.
Brand new or rebrand?
Preprint – or at least the concept of it – is nothing new, Dr. Inglis said. It’s simply the extension into the digital space of something that has been happening for many decades in the physical space.
Scientists have always written drafts of their papers and sent them out to friends and colleagues for feedback before unveiling them publicly. In the early 1990s, UC Berkeley astrophysicist Joanne Cohn began emailing unreviewed physics papers to colleagues. Within a couple of years, physicist Paul Ginsparg, PhD, of Cornell University, created a central repository for these papers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. This repository became aRxiv, a central component of communication in the physical sciences, and the progenitor of the preprint servers now in existence.
The biological sciences were far behind this curve of open sharing, Dr. Inglis said. “I think some biologists were always aware of aRxiv and intrigued by it, but most were unconvinced that the habits and behaviors of research biologists would support a similar process.”
