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The Story behind the Science: Preprints of pandemic potential—how bioRxiv and medRxiv brought preprints to the life sciences | mBio When we launched medRxiv in mid-2019, we never could have anticipated that just a few months later, New York would be at the epicenter of a rapidly escalating global pandemic, and we would be handling hundreds of papers about a previously unknown virus every week. Articles about bioRxiv and medRxiv preprints would appear on the New York Times front page, and our team worked every waking hour, seven days a week, making rapid decisions about sometimes controversial work and disseminating results of COVID research to millions of readers around the globe. Along the way, we were called dangerous and irresponsible by some, wimps and censors by others, but most in the biomedical community valued the service, and even Anthony Fauci and the head of the WHO called attention to the importance of preprints. https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.02989-25