This year marks the 10th anniversary of our platform. In the face of great challenges and sustained growth, Preprints.org has grown into a secure, reliable, and user-friendly preprint platform for sharing and reading preprints openly and freely.
If you have been following our content to celebrate this important milestone, hopefully you can now answer the question of “What are preprints?” In this article, a brief overview of how early research sharing practices developed into the systems researchers use today, and how Preprints.org supports early research sharing practices now.
From paper mailings to modern preprint systems
The evolution of preprint sharing practices reflects a long-standing goal of the research community, which is sharing findings quickly and openly. However, the road was far from smooth. The road to modern preprint systems has faced multiple challenges, including technological limitations and shifting attitudes within the scholarly publishing community.
Physical mailings and early barriers to research sharing
In the 1960s, the discussion about the slowness of publication and the need for more informal and automated methods of communication kept coming from the scientific community. Before the internet revolution, physical mail or “snail mail” was used to distribute hard copies of early drafts of scientific research. A particularly crucial period of development was the 1960s.
Between 1961 and 1967, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began distributing biological preprints through Information Exchange Groups (IEGs). In that time, this informal network grew to include 7 IEGs and a total membership of over 3,600 scholars.
This style of sharing scientific manuscripts did have its critics, particularly from journals that worried that knowledge dissemination was happening too quickly and with uneven quality. Some journals followed strict policies and only considered manuscripts that had not been published elsewhere. Combined with the financial costs of printing and mailing, the NIH’s IEGs were discontinued in 1967.
Electronic and internet-based sharing with disciplinary limits
Following the paper mailings of research papers, technology began to change during the 1980s and into the 1990s. The advent of the World Wide Web and internet-based sharing offered innovative ways to produce and share information.
Originating from SLAC’s work, by 1991, the Stanford Public Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) was the first database accessible online. Here, “e-prints” could be accessed through a bibliographic citation retrieval system.
In the same year, the Los Alamos E-Print Archive launched and later became arXiv in 1991. This was the first open, scalable, internet-based repository for preprints to exist. It continues to be one of the most prominent platforms for the circulation of scientific information. However, despite technological development, preprint sharing practices at the time remained in a limited field, mainly physics, mathematics, and related areas. Broader adoption of preprints was still slow.
Modern multidisciplinary preprint system and journal integration
Entering the 2010s, alongside the open science movement, the preprints platform landscape is extensive and continues to expand as the need for rapid scientific knowledge dissemination intensifies. New subject-specific platforms appeared across disciplines, including bioRxiv in 2013, PsyArxiv in 2016, and medRxiv in 2019. At the same time, multidisciplinary platforms also emerged, such as Preprints.org in 2016, to further support cross-disciplinary knowledge sharing.
Meanwhile, journal policies gradually shifted from caution to acceptance of preprints. More publishers allow preprint posting before formal publication. In recent years, this has evolved further. More journals integrated preprint posting into submission workflows, offering authors a flexible option for sharing their work.
Open and connected research sharing at Preprints.org
As preprints become more widely used by researchers today across scholarly publishing, modern preprint platforms are evolving beyond simple repositories for hosting early research. Preprint platforms become integrated into broader research communication and publishing workflows.
Against this background, Preprints.org has continued to expand its role within the ecosystem. In addition to continuing to develop itself as a secure platform where researchers share and read the latest research, it also supports the connection between preprints and formal publication. Authors submitting to MDPI journals could choose to share their manuscripts on Preprints.org during peer review and before publication. We also initiated a Preprints Friendly Journals program to help early-research sharing move toward peer review and formal publication.
At the infrastructure level, Preprints.org supports standardized research dissemination through DOI registration, metadata management, and indexing across major scholarly databases to improve the visibility of the research on the platform.
Beyond manuscript hosting, we expand our platform in the ecosystem to connect with preprint-related tools and services. Features such as article views, downloads, and integrated Altmetric Attention Score help authors understand their research’s reach.
We also support community engagement through the commenting feature and integration with PREreview, further supporting discussion around preprints.
These developments reflect how Preprints.org, as a modern preprint platform, is continuing to evolve to not only support open research sharing, but also a more connected scholarly communication.
As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into running a platform like Preprints.org. This hard work and innovation over the last ten years have seen an academic community that supports rapid, global knowledge sharing.
Explore how Preprints.org has advanced open research sharing over the past decade. Visit the anniversary hub to see how we’ve expanded the visibility of research on the platform.
