Those of you who know me know that I like preprint servers. In a past life, I used to manage a subscription journal that had a near-100% overlap with the ArXiv preprint server. This meant that readers could read the scientific content of the journal on ArXiv for free and that authors could also have access to our publishing services for free. Win-win, right?

Well, it’s not a perfect solution. Often, the peer reviewed version of an article is not available on ArXiv. (And it’s not financially sustainable for peer-reviewed journals to give all of their content and services away for free.)

So, the access problem in research communication remains without a solution, but preprint servers work remarkably well as a means of distribution and are indispensible to the communities that use them. In some areas of physics research, you might hear the mantra “If it’s not on ArXiv, it doesn’t exist”. With that in mind, you could easily believe that ArXiv is a lot bigger than it is.

Personally, I would like to see wider adoption of preprint servers. And, indeed, there are a lot more of them than there used to be, and they seem to be growing fast. But, there is a big mountain to climb.