Editors’ note: Today’s guest post is by Shaun Khoo and Mahesh Miikael Karnani. Shaun is a neuroscientist and project manager at UNSW Sydney, and Mahesh is a neuroscientist and group leader at the University of Edinburgh. Reviewer credits to Chef Rick Anderson.

In mid-April, Jonny Coates argued that “the preprint movement sits on a precipice” and, while it “has not failed yet, it is definitely unhealthy.” A key risk, according to Coates (and Richard Poynder before him), is that preprints have been co-opted by commercial legacy publishers. While you might expect us, as two volunteer board members at a non-profit preprint review platform (Peer Community In Neuroscience), to agree wholeheartedly with Coates, we suggest that the involvement of commercial publishers is not unequivocally bad and that preprints provide some room for optimism about open access as a whole.

Not-All-For Profit

Preprints started in the non-profit space and, as Coates notes, some of the most well-known preprint servers are non-profit (Figure 1). But does the growth of commercial publishers into the preprint space really threaten the preprint movement, and if so, how much? Even though Elsevier bought SSRN back in 2016, it remains free to post a preprint and free to read. So even though SSRN is now operated by what is perhaps the most demonized of commercial publishers, it still fulfills the essential function of a preprint repository and hosts over 1.8 million preprints without any author or reader fees.

If the entrance of commercial publishers was significantly harming non-profit preprint servers, we might also expect them to attract fewer preprints. However, this does not appear to be the case. If we look at some of the most well-known preprint servers, like arXiv, bioRxiv, and OSF Preprints, we see that only OSF Preprints has experienced a noticeable decline from a peak of 21,844 to 7,353 preprints in 2025. In contrast, arXiv has experienced uninterrupted growth from 2017 to 2025, averaging 13% p.a., while bioRxiv has averaged 23% growth, from 11,347 preprints in 2017 to nearly 50,000 preprints in 2025 (data source: Dimensions). This suggests that rather than damaging preprints, the entrance of commercial publishers may have simply widened or accelerated their adoption.

Intrinsic Interoperability

A key reason why involving commercial publishers is not as major a problem for preprints as it might be for journal publishing is that preprints are intrinsically interoperable. In journal publishing, part of the publisher’s pricing power is because papers in a subscription journal cannot easily be read elsewhere and derive their career benefits (funding, promotions) from their association with that journal (whether toll or open access). However, for preprints, this is less true since where a researcher preprints is not explicitly associated with any career incentives.

This has not stopped publishers apparently trying, of course. Research Square, for example, shows where a preprint is currently under review. For some, this may attract prestige value as they can verifiably claim that their paper is under review by a journal of a particular reputation. This is not surprising, given what we already know about academic publications as Veblen goods. However, posting to a non-profit server like bioRxiv, the largest preprint server in life sciences, is also motivated by impact and credit or staking a claim. The value of prestige and impact also varies between disciplines since, in physics, the community has been the driving force behind preprinting.

Preprint servers can also vary in the degree of ease with which they connect to others. A commercial publisher’s preprint server might offer seamless submission to their own journals, or perhaps preprinting a submitted paper is as simple as checking a box during journal submission. An easy submission process might support a publisher’s pipeline, but it does not prevent the authors from submitting their preprint for peer review and publication elsewhere. Authors may have to fill in some more forms, but they retain the right to do so, and importantly, readers can always download the preprint no matter where it is published.

Safeguarding interoperability is critical. While mandates on researchers’ preprinting behavior may not be necessary or effective, funders, institutions and advocates should carefully monitor preprint services for signs of weakening interoperability. Any review service or journal should have equal opportunity to integrate with any preprint server to ensure preprints are serving their fundamental purpose.

Preprints Help Point the Way Forward

The preprint movement, as with open access, was never and will never be perfect, and Coates is right to call out problems like decreased breadth of advocacy, poor governance, or missed opportunities to build in equity. Like many social or cultural movements and new initiatives, the preprint movement can be dominated by ideological radicals who may not understand the various economic factors, incentives, and experiences of other people. It is also encountering new challenges, like the rise of AI slop that undermines the credibility of preprint servers and wastes the time of moderators. How well these challenges are addressed by each discipline’s preprint servers of choice will influence the evolution of preprinting culture.

However, this becomes another point where the diversity of non-profit groups and involvement of commercial publishers actually supports, rather than undermines, preprints and the open access principles they uphold. If one preprint service begins to fail, loses funding, or is torn apart by ideological in-fighting, there are multiple other services — both non-profit and for-profit — that authors can use as substitutes. As a whole, this makes the preprinting ecosystem more resilient, not less, and ensures that researchers will continue to be able to make their work openly accessible before inclusion in a journal.

The success of preprints shows that open access principles can survive adoption and co-option by commercial publishers. If an open access practice is sufficiently well-designed, it can support the goals of open access — such as accessibility, affordability, and equity — no matter whether it is operated by a non-profit scholarly community or a global corporation. In the case of preprints, commercial publishers have driven mass adoption, and their entrance has not slowed the non-profits who remain in positions of market leadership. Therefore, preprints show that open access practices do not have to fail. Instead, our systems of scholarly communication are constantly (albeit slowly) changing, and sometimes it is possible to make them better.