Pressures on the first two fronts are forcing journals to stay relevant in newer ways. A big source of such pressure is the availability of preprints – i.e. manuscripts of papers made available by their authors in the public domain before they have been peer-reviewed. Preprint repositories like arXiv and biorXiv have risen in prominence over the last few years, especially the former. They are run by groups of scientists – like volunteers pruning the garden of Wikipedia – that ensure the formatting and publishing requirements are met, remove questionable manuscripts and generally – as they say – keep things going. Scientific journals typically justify their access cost by claiming that they have to spend it on peer review and printing. Preprints evade this problem because they are free to access online and are not peer-reviewed the way ‘published’ papers are. In turn, the reader who wishes to read the preprint must bear this caveat in mind.
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