SeqDesk · original analysis

Preprints are exploding — but do they share data?

Preprint volume has grown roughly twenty-fold in a decade, yet preprints link a dataset far less often than open-access MEDLINE-indexed journal papers. Whole-index counts from Europe PMC, re-counted weekly. The preprint data-link share is shown for transparency but is sensitive to annotation lag — read the gap and the volume, not single-year wobbles.

Europe PMC indexed 7.6K preprints in 2016 and 186K in 2025 — a roughly 25-fold rise that reshaped how biology is disseminated. Preprints are now a major channel for first reporting of results; the question is whether the data underneath travels with them.

In every year, a preprint is far less likely than the published version of record to carry a resolvable data link — about 53% for open-access journal papers versus 6% for preprints in 2025, a roughly 8-fold gap. Two honest caveats about the preprint line: the 2020 bump is COVID-era data-rich preprints, and the apparent recent decline is largely an artefact — Europe PMC’s text-mining lags on very recent preprints, and preprint servers have broadened well beyond data-rich life sciences, diluting the denominator. The durable finding is the size of the gap, not the shape of the preprint curve.

The dissemination counterpart to the open-data card: preprints now carry a huge share of new results, but the data underneath them is linked far less often than for the version of record — re-counted weekly straight from the EMBL-EBI / Europe PMC. Only aggregate percentages and counts are published. · back to all research data