For the past year, bioRxiv and medRxiv authors have been able to include funder information with their preprints. This can be entered in a dedicated field during the submission process, using Research...

Journal brand and peer review are poor proxies for trustworthiness. Here’s how we can design trust signals that work.

Over the last year, conversations about trust signals have increased. However, there remain many outstanding questions, various levels of implementation or experiments, and a lack of clarity on the purpose of such signals. Historically, the credibility of a research article is judged through the presence of peer review and weak proxies linked to publication venue (such as journal name and…

The recent launch of qed's "top 1%" preprint ranking has sparked controversy, with concerns about its arbitrary nature, potential harm to authors, and low-quality inclusions. While the tool aims to provide valuable feedback, backlash against qed and its partnership with bioRxiv highlights the challenges and complexities within the evolving preprint landscape and academic community.

Lately, I have spent a considerable amount of time writing about my concerns regarding the direction of the preprint ecosystem and the behaviour of some of the actors within it. Increasingly, I worry that preprinting is being pushed toward becoming little more than a replica of the existing scholarly publishing system. For those of us who see preprints as an opportunity for genuine and meaningful change, that would be a profound disaster.

Members of our community will have noticed the absence of a familiar face in 2026. Unfortunately, we had to eliminate our Associate Director role late last

Over the past few decades, several reform movements have emerged across scholarly communication and academia. Open science, open access, efforts to reshape research culture, research assessment reform and growing discussions around trust in science are all trying to address genuine problems in how research is produced, evaluated, and communicated. Yet

Over the past few decades, several reform movements have emerged across scholarly communication and academia. Open science, open access, efforts to reshape research culture, research assessment reform and growing discussions around trust in science are all trying to address genuine problems in how research is produced, evaluated, and communicated. Yet

ALT: a man is screaming with the words " unlimited power " behind him

Below are my thoughts and takeaways from the recent Research to Reader conference (that’d be the one in 2026, for future readers of this post). This was my first time attending the Research t…

Our goal is to challenge the status quo, embrace innovation, and create meaningful, lasting change to academia across preprinting and open science, trust in research and academic culture.

This is the report for the State of Preprints in the Life Sciences, investigating preprinting from 2013-2025 and the likely trends in 2026. The underlying code and figures are available from GitHub. The openrxivR package developed for this project can be downloaded from GitHub. Slides associated with this talk containing individual figures are available here.

Our goal is to challenge the status quo, embrace innovation, and create meaningful, lasting change to academia across preprinting and open science, trust in research and academic culture.

This is the report for the State of Preprints in the Life Sciences, investigating preprinting from 2013-2025 and the likely trends in 2026. The underlying code and figures are available from GitHub. The openrxivR package developed for this project can be downloaded from GitHub. Slides associated with this talk containing individual figures are available here.