By Kent Anderson — 20 Oct 2026

The Era of Big Preprint

The most viable preprint servers are those of Big Tech and big publisher

Like everything else, the dream of preprints wresting control of academic publishing from large corporate influences has not only failed but has been exploited by the very entities it was meant to defy.

It has also led to the victory of misinformation in science (see box below).

Of the major preprint platforms, the most prominent in the life sciences are run by commercial publishers with large and growing Gold OA portfolios:

Research Square by Springer Nature
Preprints.org by MDPI
SSRN/Preprints with the Lancet by Elsevier

Others are funded by Big Tech philanthrocapitalists/oligarchs:

openRxiv [bioRxiv/medRxiv] by CZI LLC
OSF Preprints by the Arnold Fund LLC

These entities have non-scientific motives for getting their mitts on early and/or unpublished drafts of papers posted without paywalls or copyright protections.

The oddball is run by CERN. Zenodo is such a disaster that it barely registers except when it is committing a blunder or supporting an infrastructure of scams.

ACS and a few other large society publishers also have preprint servers, but these prove that technology is expensive as they all accrue to the largest and most commercially-oriented of the non-profits.

This leaves poor little arXiv as the last vestige of an idealistic past, one that now must itself own up to corporate responsibilities like meeting the demands of generating a surplus and managing expenses as a standalone non-profit.

The commercial entries are mainly wide funnels for Gold OA portfolios, seeking to capture authors early. They are part of a pay-to-play wolf in preprint sheep’s clothing.

Preprints are now mainly nexuses of power for commercial publishers and Big Tech.

Isn’t open science working out well?

💡

Measles from medRxiv and Yale: The recent announcement about a vaccine injury clinic at the NIH was full of language about how people needed to “listen” to people claiming vaccine injury, using what Jonathan Jarry calls “the Square One fallacy” — that nobody has examined vaccines for safety, and now these brave souls are going to “listen” for the first time. The announcement led to a rare public rebuke from the NIH’s Hospital Board.

The repeated use of the word “listen” is a clear callback to the LISTEN Study propped up by Yale, one that has no scientific validity and seems to have been tailor made to create a potential class action group to sue vaccine makers. Of course, Harlan Krumholz, EIC of JACC, has been at the heart of this without consequences, as are too many other physicians and researchers.

Kids and adults are getting sick and dying, but the Ivory Tower remains completely defended.

Where is the accountability here?

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