BioRxiv, biology's answer to the physics preprint server arXiv, is turning one, writes Jocelyn Kaiser at ScienceInsider. And its developers say it's off to a good start.
"It is going really, extraordinarily well from several points of view," says John Inglis, the executive director of CSHL Press, which hosts the server. He says the volume of submissions has been high, that they are coming from biological subdisciplines that haven't previously used preprint servers, and have been of high quality.
When it started last fall, the server contained about nine papers and it now hosts some 800 papers. But as Kaiser points out, 80 new papers a month isn't much.
"Obviously, if you look at papers published in PubMed it might be 30,000 a month or something like that," Inglis says. "But there are plenty of people who a year ago were quite willing to tell me this was not a good idea and it wouldn't work. And they pointed to previous efforts to do that in biology that had clearly not worked at all. I think this is clearly different."