Open Infrastructure for Preprints

Duration: 2022
Team: Naomi Penfold
Skillset: Landscape Analysis, Ecosystem Intelligence

Overview

Preprints have become a fixture of scholarly communication. Across mathematics, computer science, the life sciences, and medical research, researchers share manuscripts online before formal peer review as a way to get findings into the world faster and more equitably. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this dramatically, demonstrating both the value of rapid sharing and the importance of having robust infrastructure and verification processes to support it.

What was less clear as preprint use grew was whether the infrastructure supporting it could keep pace. IOI set out to find out.

What we did

We approached this as a landscape question: what is actually going on with open infrastructure for preprints, where is it working, and where does it need investment?

That meant desk research combined with semi-structured interviews with nine stakeholders across the preprint ecosystem, spanning preprint service providers, funders, researchers, and community advocates. We asked about the value preprints provide, the strengths of the current ecosystem, and where the gaps and opportunities are. The goal wasn't to produce a theoretical framework. It was to build a clear, evidence-based picture of the landscape that funders and other stakeholders could act on.

What we found

There is genuine strength in the preprint ecosystem. Services like arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv have built strong brand recognition, and several open infrastructure options exist for hosting and interacting with preprints. The inclusion of preprints in scholarly infrastructure services like Crossref means researchers can receive credit for preprint submissions before traditional publication. And there remains a committed network of people and organisations who care deeply about keeping this space open and growing it further.

The landscape also points clearly to a major opportunity. Most preprints are not yet shared through open infrastructure. There is significant room to grow the reach and resilience of community-governed, open source services that are transparent and accountable to their stakeholders. Business models that can support these services at greater scale are still being developed, and while voluntary and in-kind contributions are prominent, they work best when paired with additional reliable funding sources.

Experimentation with preprint review and curation is at an exciting stage. The pandemic spurred community efforts to triage and review preprints, and those efforts have generated valuable learning about what good verification and validation can look like in a rapid-sharing environment.

Based on what we found, we identified three areas where investment is most needed: raising awareness of the benefits of existing open services as shared infrastructure, supporting research and development of business models that could work at greater scale, and advocating for increased investment in initiatives that make preprint participation more inclusive and equitable.

The full report, including an ecosystem map covering relationships between objects, actors, tools, and policies, is available on Zenodo.

Thinking about where to invest in open infrastructure?

The preprint landscape illustrates something IOI sees across the ecosystem: open infrastructure that provides genuine value to the research community, with real opportunity to build the financial foundations that will help it last. IOI works with funders and other stakeholders to understand where investment will have the most impact. If that's a conversation you'd like to have, we'd be glad to talk.