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Preprint review should form part of PhD programmes and postdoc training

Institutions owe it to young researchers to prepare them for careers outside academia. Preprint review is a perfect opportunity.
By
  1. Richard Sever

    1. Richard Sever is assistant director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in New York and co-founder of the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv.

Few PhD students ultimately pursue the career for which they have been trained. A rapid expansion in PhD programmes over several decades without a concurrent increase in faculty numbers means that, in the United Kingdom, less than 5% of PhD students will become principal investigators (PIs), a Royal Society report found in 2010 (see go.nature.com/2r1y6pb). The numbers are not much better for the United States (R. C. Larson et al. Syst. Res. Behav. Sci. 31, 745–750; 2014).

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Nature 613, 415 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00085-2

Updates & Corrections

  • Clarification 10 February 2023: An earlier version of this article omitted the author’s statement of conflicting financial interest statement.

Competing Interests

The author is co-founder of the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv.

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