"Lack of Sustainability Plans for Preprint Services Risks Their Potential to Improve Science"


Despite successfully building a revenue model that shares the burden between Cornell University, the Simons Foundation and several members and supporters, arXiv’s “funding is still outpaced by [their] growth” – the server hosts over 2 million preprints already and is growing by 10% each year. And while arXiv has been supporting more and more scholars to share and discover preprints, the team behind it has been through significant changes in leadership and is dealing with the urgent need to modernize their 30-year-old technology. As a former Executive Director of arXiv noted, “[arXiv’s success] may not last forever”. Similarly, the recent news that Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has renewed its financial support for the leading preprint servers in biology and medicine, bioRxiv and medRxiv is welcome relief, but this support is temporary, and the team must find a way to continue in the long run.

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Author: Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.