The CHORUS Forum: Future of Preprints hosted on 4 June 2026 and moderated by Katie Corker, Executive Director, ASAPbio convened stakeholders from scholarly communications, publishing, and research infrastructure communities to examine the evolving role of preprints in the research ecosystem. A panel discussion focused on growth of subject-specific preprint repositories, opportunities for greater discovery and dissemination of research, and the challenges associated with sustainability, integration, and community adoption.

Key presentations from the panelists highlighted the continued expansion of preprint platforms across disciplines:

• Dawn Melley, Senior Director, Publishing Operations at IEEE reported that TechRxiv has demonstrated a significant growth since its 2019 launch, reporting more than 19,000 posted preprints, over 17.5 million views, and more than 7.6 million downloads. The platform’s performance reflects increasing acceptance of preprints within engineering, computing, and technology-focused research communities.
• Kelly Cohen, Senior Publisher, Optica Publishing Group with Optica Open outlined its strategy of combining original preprint submissions with aggregation of relevant content from arXiv, while integrating closely with society journals and broader discovery services. The presentation emphasized enhanced visibility and accessibility for optics research.
• Ben Mudrak, Senior Product Manager at ChemRxiv reinforced the importance of discipline-specific approaches that address the unique needs, cultures, and publishing practices of individual research communities. ChemRxiv hosts over 41,000 preprints, seeing recent growth to over 1,100 new preprints each month. Preprint servers must strike a balance between providing a rapid outlet for new research and taking care to ensure content is valuable and legitimate science.
• Samantha Hindle, Scientific Content Manager with OpenRxiv (organizational home for bioRxiv and medRxiv) highlighted the increased volume of preprints (~6,000/month on bioRxiv and ~2,000/month on medRxiv; >400,000 preprints posted in total) and the attention that preprints receive on their servers (~10 million views/month). Several features exist on bioRxiv and medRxiv that can provide signals of trust to enable judgments of an article’s merits that are not made at a single point in time and help create an open ecosystem. 

Major themes of the panel discussion were-

Growing Acceptance of Preprints

• Researchers increasingly view preprints as a standard mechanism for rapid dissemination of findings.
• Preprints accelerate visibility, feedback, and collaboration prior to formal peer review.

Discipline-Specific Value Propositions

• Specialized repositories can better serve community needs through tailored workflows, metadata, subject classifications, and governance structures.
• Alignment with professional societies and publishers may increase trust and adoption.

Integration Across the Research Lifecycle

• Speakers emphasized the importance of connecting preprints with journal submission systems, research discovery tools, and scholarly infrastructure.
• Improved interoperability can reduce administrative burden while enhancing discoverability.

Opportunities for Collaboration

• Organizations across the scholarly communications landscape share common goals around openness, transparency, and research dissemination.
• Cross-platform collaboration may help address duplication of effort and improve researcher experience.

Future Challenges

• Long-term sustainability, governance, quality signaling, and community education remain important considerations.
• Stakeholders must continue to balance rapid sharing with maintaining confidence in research quality and integrity.

Overall Assessment

The conversation around preprints has shifted from whether they should exist to how they can be most effectively integrated into the research ecosystem. Speakers consistently emphasized researcher needs, interoperability, discoverability, and sustainable governance as the primary priorities for the next phase of preprint development.

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