Peer review, despite its flaws, is one of the most important pillars of the scientific process. So preprint servers, which make scientific papers that have yet to be reviewed or published available online, have been slow to catch on in many fields.

But then came the pandemic.

“COVID changed everything,” says Jim Handman, executive director of the Science Media Centre of Canada. Scientists, science communicators, and journalists who had been wary of using preprints in the past suddenly felt the urgency to get important new information out as fast as possible to help deal with the unprecedented public health threat. The use of preprint servers skyrocketed. Now, everyone is adapting to this new way of working, developing best practices to harness the benefits of increased speed and wider reach while mitigating the risks of sharing unreviewed science.

Most of the time, the world of scholarly publishing moves at an almost glacial pace. New publications can take months or even years to wind their way through the process of peer review and publication. Even then, they can be hard to access for most people. So 30 years ago, some scientists started posting their work in online repositories before it had been formally reviewed and published. ArXiv, which shares research on math, physics, and astronomy, was the first to launch in 1991. It was followed by repositories for other subject areas over the next few decades.

For most scientists the main selling point of preprints is the speed at which they can share the results of their research, and find new work uploaded by their colleagues. “Preprints accelerate scientific communication, which is a great thing for science overall and for the authors of the paper,” says Jessica Polka, executive director of ASAPbio, a non-profit group that bills itself as “working to promote innovation an transparency in the life sciences.” They can also be a useful way to get early feedback, find new collaborators, and establish who was first with a discovery, she says.

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