By Jessica Polka (ASAPbio), Donna Okubo (PLOS), and Tim Vollmer (Creative Commons) Today we’re happy to share two new documents that we hope will aid researchers in their decision to share early work as preprints. Even while the practice of publishing preprints continues to grow, we know from our community outreach that there are still lots of questions regarding open licensing options, including downstream publishing implications for preprints.

Preprints in biology have gained incredible momentum over the last few years, with over 2,000 being posted each month. But, in the context of all published papers, these numbers are still tiny: the rate of preprint posting is <3% of the research that is indexed by PubMed.

A July 24 article by Tom Sheldon of the Science Media Centre raised concerns about the use of preprints in the media. Soon after, nine eLife ambassadors (some of which are also ASAPbio ambassadors) responded in a preprint entitled “Maintaining confidence in the reporting of scientific outputs.” Many of the same sentiments are echoed the following response.