Happy Birthday to preLights – we turn four!

preLights launched on 20 February 2018…over 1200 posts and over 300 preLighters later, we are very happy to be celebrating our fourth birthday!

The pandemic saw a huge boost to the number of preprints posted and downloaded on bioRxiv and medRxiv, and also a big jump in the number of preLights posted and read. We are glad to see preprints getting more attention, and we hope this momentum continues into our fifth year.

Since our last birthday post we’ve got a new Community Manager, nearly 40 new preLighters have joined our community, and we launched our interview series ‘preLights talks to…‘. We’ve been glad to talk about preLights at several online events, including those organised by Young Researchers in Life Sciences, the Sydney Postdoctoral Development Committee and HighWire press. As we start to get back to in-person events we hope that more preLighters will have the opportunity to meet one another, too!

To celebrate our fourth birthday we are hosting an ECR advocacy event on 23 February 2022, along with our sister community sites FocalPlane and the Node. You can find out more and register here, and we hope to see and meet lots of you there!