ublishing in the biological sciences has become a much lengthier process \cite{Vale_2015}.  One way to separate the sharing of scientific outputs from quality evaluation purely in the hands of publishers, is posting your manuscript as a preprint. 
Preprints are complete pieces of scientific work shared online before the completion of journal-organized peer review. Preprints are often the same manuscripts that are submitted to a journal for peer review, but are stored on freely accessible public servers such that they become available to the whole web community within 1-2 days from submission. Preprints have been extensively used in the fields of physics and astronomy for more than 20 years, and are only recently starting to take off in biological sciences (Fig. 1). Preprints are usually posted online on preprint repositories either before or at the same time as submission to a journal. Most journals will accept manuscripts that have previously been submitted to a preprint repository (check out SHERPA/ROMEO, a tool that will help you learn about publishers’ copyright policies and self-archiving).