Biology's Roiling Debate Over Publishing Research Early

Five years ago, Daniel MacArthur set out to build a massive library of human gene sequences--one of the biggest ever. The 60,706 raw sequences, collected from colleagues all over the globe, took up a petabyte of memory. It was the kind of flashy, blockbuster project that would secure MacArthur a coveted spot in one of science's top three journals, launching his new lab at the Broad Institute into the scientific spotlight. But before all that happened, he did something that counted as an act of radicalism in the world of biology: He put it on the internet. Posting scientific papers online before peer review--in so-called preprint archives--isn't a new idea. Physicists have been publishing their work this way, free to the public, for decades. But for biologists, preprints are uncharted territory. And that territory is rapidly expanding as academia and its big-time funders shift toward a culture of openness.