(26 Jun 2026) 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.
The recording and presentations can be found on the event page.
The news in full is here.
