Effective August 25, 2025, the Center for Open Science (COS) will suspend submissions to its generalist preprint server hosted on OSF Preprints. The generalist server has operated alongside community-run preprint servers on OSF Preprints to accept most types of content that did not have a topic-specific service available. All existing preprints will remain available, and authors can continue to revise them. This suspension does not affect the 14 community-run preprint servers running on the OSF Preprints service, including SocArXiv, PsyArXiv, MetaArXiv, EdArXiv, and others, which remain fully active.
Since 2016, COS has provided the OSF Preprints service, an open platform that accelerates the dissemination of research by supporting both community-run and multidisciplinary preprint services.
The service was built in two parts:
- Community-run preprint servers: COS developed infrastructure that can be customized and operated by research communities themselves. This model allows research communities to set their own standards, build norms for open sharing, and reduce redundant development costs. Today, servers like SocArXiv, PsyArXiv, MetaArXiv, and EdArXiv are examples of this approach.
- Generalist server: Alongside the community servers, COS also maintains a multidisciplinary venue that accepts submissions from any domain of scholarship, intended to provide a home for preprints that don’t align with a community-led server. Unlike the community-led servers, this generalist server is managed and moderated directly by COS staff.
Why Suspend Submissions Now?
This decision reflects a number of important considerations:
- Volume and quality challenges: The generalist server has seen increasing numbers of suspicious or low-quality submissions. Preprints are intended to accelerate the dissemination of scholarship, but trends such as generative AI and paper mills have introduced new risks to research integrity. We hypothesize that this server is a particularly attractive target for misuse because of its broad acceptance guidelines.
- Moderation breadth and sustainability: COS introduced preprint moderation in 2024, but moderating a generalist server requires expertise across every field of research, a scale beyond our current capacity. By contrast, community-run servers are better positioned to apply domain-specific or regional moderation and oversight.
- Strategic alignment: COS is reviewing how the generalist server fits into the long-term vision for OSF.
Taken together, these factors highlight a central tension for COS—lowering barriers to sharing research, while also ensuring that openness does not come at the expense of trust and integrity.
What Happens During the Suspension
This suspension provides an opportunity to assess whether the generalist server still fills a unique role, particularly for researchers without another disciplinary preprints venue. It also allows COS to evaluate alignment with our broader vision for OSF as enabling lifecycle open research practices, and to gather input from the research community.
While new submissions to the generalist server are suspended:
- All existing preprints will remain available.
- Authors can continue to revise their existing preprints.
- New authors can still submit preprints to the community-run servers.
- COS will gather data, community feedback, and insights about the role of the generalist server in the broader research ecosystem.
The community-run servers on the OSF remain fully active, and COS will continue to maintain and support the infrastructure that powers them.
Looking Ahead
This review will help COS understand how the generalist server provides tools to support the dissemination of open scholarship, and how our services and moderation policies and tools can best adapt to meet researchers’ needs. By benchmarking and assessing how the service is being used, we aim to learn where it adds value and how it may evolve to better align with our mission of enabling researchers to share their work openly.
We understand this may be inconvenient for some. There are excellent preprint, postprint, and paper services that are supported and moderated by disciplinary communities, on OSF and other platforms. This resource can help you discover other services based on your research area or community, and the ASAPbio Preprint Resource Center has excellent tools and information to help with other publishing needs.
Further updates will be shared in future communications. For questions, contact support@cos.io.
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