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.
Version 2 includes an update to Fig 7, adding a year on year change in the number of preprints posted to bioRxiv. This also includes a small update to the executive summary. The biggest change is that the case study on PREreview has been removed (for space) and an additional section has been included that summarises the studies investigating researcher perceptions towards preprints.
Publication Date: 2026-06-14