Preprint publishing challenges the status quo in medicine

The competition inherent in research biology was likely a large driver of that lag. “Biological experiments are complicated, it takes a long time for ideas to evolve and results to arrive, and people are possessive of their data and ideas. They have always shared information through conferences, but there was a lot of hesitation about making this information available in an uncontrolled way, beyond the audiences at those meetings,” he said.

[polldaddy:9970002]

Nature Publishing Group first floated the preprint notion among biologists in 2006, with Nature Precedings. It published more than 2,000 papers before folding, rather suddenly, in 2012. A publisher’s statement simply said that the effort was “unsustainable as originally conceived.”

Commentators suspected the model was a financial bust, and indeed, preprint servers aren’t money machines. BioRxiv, proudly not for profit, was founded with financial support from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and survives largely on private grants. In April 2017, it received a grant for an undisclosed amount from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, established by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.