Preprint Editors – Development’s next step into the preprint landscape

[Editorial from Development’s latest issue.]

Preprints have become an indispensable part of our research ecosystem. Over the last 10 years, the biological community has witnessed an exponential growth in both submissions and readership of preprints. Arguably, the main drivers behind this growth are the ability of preprints to speed up the dissemination of research and broaden access to results long before formal publication.

Development and our not-for-profit publisher, The Company of Biologists, have a long history of actively supporting preprints (Prosée and Brown, 2025). In 2018, the Company launched preLights, a community-run platform that highlights noteworthy preprints across the biological sciences. Over time, preLights has evolved to provide support and training for early-career researchers to develop their writing skills for summarising and critiquing new work. In addition, Development’s own community site, the Node, posts monthly preprint lists from developmental biology and related fields. These lists are among the most-read posts on the Node, demonstrating the value of preprints within our community. Over time, preLights, the Node and Development have started working together more closely to highlight noteworthy preprints; a recent collaboration between preLights and the Node saw the introduction of curated preprint highlights in the form of ‘preLighters’ choice’ posts and a selection of preLights posts from the stem cell and developmental biology community feature in the journal as quarterly ‘Preprint Highlights’.

As part of this preprint ecosystem, Development launched its ‘In preprints’ series in early 2022 to bring curated, contextualised coverage of preprinted findings directly to our readership (Briscoe and Grewal, 2022). These articles are intended to complement other initiatives, such as preLights, in guiding readers to the preprints that matter the most in the field. We know that Development’s ‘In preprints’ articles receive, on average, over a thousand views within the first 12 months of publication and continue to be read in the years that follow. Development has now published around 60 ‘In preprints’ articles on topics ranging from single-cell lineage tracing techniques (Rodriguez-Fraticelli and Morris, 2022) to human stem cell-based embryo models (Moris and Sturmey, 2023) and Polycomb complexes (Iwasaki et al., 2023) to leaf-shape transitions (Byrne, 2024). You can browse all the ‘In preprints’ articles published to date in our dedicated subject collection.

Preprints featured in these articles have mainly been selected by Development’s in-house Reviews Editors. We are now expanding this initiative by appointing a small group of Preprint Editors – active researchers with their finger on the pulse of preprint literature – to commission and write ‘In preprints’ articles. This is an exciting opportunity to co-curate the preprint literature directly with members of the Development community, bringing specialist expertise and diverse perspectives to bear on an ever-growing body of work. We intend to appoint Preprint Editors who represent specialist topics within the broader scope of Development, and we hope that, as expert academics, they will be able to identify and highlight the best preprints from their fields as part of their routine exploration of the research literature.

We are currently accepting applications for Preprint Editors, and our call will close on Monday 30 March 2026. Applicants with at least 3 years of postdoctoral experience or principal investigators from any career stage are welcome to apply. In exchange for their contributions to the project, Preprint Editors will receive formal recognition and financial remuneration, including the option to receive support to attend relevant conferences. To find out more about this initiative, please visit our webpage: https://journals.biologists.com/dev/pages/preprint-editors.

We look forward to working with our first Preprint Editors following their appointment later this year to further strengthen our coverage of important preprinted work. We also anticipate that this programme will continue to evolve in response to community needs. This next step marks our commitment to supporting the reach of preprinted work and bringing curated, quality research to the attention of our community.

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