There are two major ways authors can provide open access (OA) to their work. One is to publish it and then self-archive it in a repository where it can be accessed for free (‘green’ OA). The other is to publish from publishers based on article processing charges (APC) authors pay (‘gold’ OA).

The pioneering work by arXiv enables authors to submit and distribute papers before the publication in peer-reviewed journals. It has been regarded as one of repositories, which we call ‘preprint archive’, and is only for academia. It has been considered that the preprint servers have no relationship to the commercial use of achievements.

Recently, many authors get to submit their papers to the preprint archive in life science (BioRxiv) where researchers in life science have not had preference to submit their works to the preprint. In August 2017, American Chemical Society announced the beta version of preprint server for chemists called ChemRxiv. In spring 2017, Elsevier developed BioRN preprint server for life scientists. These preprint servers are designed to include the data archive, which involves OA to the data (open data) in the publications. Preprint servers are now very important not only in OA but in open science, and its position in scientific information life cycle has changed.

In the 2nd SPARC Japan Seminar 2017, we will review the role and management of the preprint servers in these 30 years and discuss how to contribute to the advancement of scientific research and the issues concerning the importance of the commercial publication, sustainable models of the publication and the quality control of papers with the comments from researchers.