Crossref reports that preprints are growing at 10x the rate of articles

Our Community Call on March 26, 2025, focused on the topic of institutional recognition of preprints, which is one of the key barriers to the broader adoption of preprints. Our first speaker, Michael Dougherty, Professor and Department Chair of Psychology at the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, University of Maryland, represented HELIOS (Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship).

A recent ASAPbio Community Call (February 26, 2025) was inspired by a preprint titled ‘Mapping the preprint review metadata transfer workflows.’ The preprint is a working group product borne out of the, ‘Supporting interoperability of preprint ... Maria presented first, defining preprint review metadata as “all kinds of information about the review record,” e.g., reviewer name, affiliation, link to preprint being reviewed, review outcome, assigned score, and more.

The best tool for tracking the quantity of preprints in the life sciences is Europe PMC, an open database that allows discovery of over 925,000 preprints. Europe PMC indexes metadata (such as title, abstract, authors) for 34 different preprint servers, as well as full text for a subset of servers.   Europe PMC also displays a data dashboard, updated monthly, depicting the overall volume of pr...