From this year, the Center for Open Science (COS), a non-profit organization powering paleorXiv and many other preprint services through the Open Science Framework (OSF) Preprints infrastructure, asks the different communities to contribute to hosting and maintenance costs. This announcement was received with emotion as some preprint services, like paleorXiv, are maintained by volunteer scientists and have no budget to covert such costs (link 1, link 2).
The paleorXiv team is currently investigating diverse options to ensure the continuing of paleorXiv operations over the next few years. These options go from finding recurrent financial support to cover COS annual costs, to moving paleorXiv to another hosting service.
Peer Community In (PCI), a non-profit association, has generously offered to cover the 2020 hosting and maintenance costs for both paleorXiv and EcoEvoRxiv (a preprint server for ecology, evolution and conservation). PCI promotes the creation of journal-independent editorial boards to organize the peer review of articles deposited in preprint servers in order to develop an alternative, cost-effective publishing workflow. Editorial boards for Paleontology (PCI Paleo), Ecology (PCI Ecology) and Evolutionary Biology (PCI Evol Biol) already exist and regularly evaluate articles deposited on paleorXiv and EcoEvoRxiv.
We warmly thank Peer Community In for its generous support to paleorXiv.