This article presents the growth and development of preprints to help authors, editors, and publishers understand and adopt appropriate strategies for incorporating preprints within their scholarly communication strategies. The article considers: preprint history and evolution, integration of preprints and journals, and the benefits and disadvantages, and challenges that preprints offer. The article discusses the two largest and most established preprint servers, arXiv.org (established in 1991) and SSRN (1994), the OSF (Open Science Foundation) initiative that supported preprint growth (2010), bioRxiv (2013), and medRxiv (2019). It then discusses six different levels of acceptance of preprints within journals: uneasy relationship, acceptance of preprint articles, encouraging authors to preprint their articles, active participation with preprints, submerger by reviewing preprints, and finally merger and overlay models. It is notable that most journals now accept submissions that have been posted as preprints. The benefits of preprints include fast circulation, priority publication, increased visibility, community feedback, and contribution to open science. Disadvantages include information overload, inadequate quality assurance, citation dilution, information manipulation and inflation of results. As preprints become mainstream it is likely that they will benefit authors but disadvantage publishers and journals. Authors are encouraged to preprint their own articles but to be cautious about using preprints as the basis for their own research. Editors are encouraged to develop preprint policies and be aware that double-blind review is not possible with preprinting of articles and that allowing citations to preprints is to be encouraged. In conclusion, journal-related stakeholders should consider preprints as an unavoidable development, taking into consideration both the benefits and disadvantages.

The future is bright for those who embrace change. Since the last editorial for Learned Publishing, a lot has changed. At the time of writing for the April issue, the UK was watching the global spread of COVID-19 but was not yet in lockdown. Since then, a large part of the world has been shut down, and most regions are now starting to slowly return to a new normal.

Most analyses of plagiarism focus on published content and do not report on the prevalence of plagiarism in submitted articles. Fears over large‐scale plagiarism, particularly in articles submitted by authors for whom English is a second language, have only been investigated in small publishing communities or using duplication‐checking analysis, which does not separate legitimate from unacceptable duplication. This research surveyed journal editors from around the world to ascertain recent (past year) experiences of plagiarized and/or duplicated submissions. We then compared their experiences to their assumptions about global levels of plagiarism. The survey received 372 responses, including 119 from Asian editors, 112 from European editors, and 57 from editors in North America. The respondents estimated that c.15% of all submissions contained plagiarized or duplicated content, although their own experiences were in the range of 2–5% of submissions. Of the respondents, 42% reported no incidence of plagiarized or duplicated submissions in the past year. Asian editors experienced the highest levels of plagiarized/duplicated content, although most of the problem articles were resolved, indicating that most of the identified duplication constituted relatively minor problems, rather than fraudulent plagiarism.

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There is evidence of a geographical imbalance of reviewers, leading to concerns about the sustainability of peer review to ensure high‐quality, timely publications. This research evaluated articles submitted during 2016 to 149 Wiley‐owned journals in two disciplines: medicine (112 journals), and agricultural and biological sciences (37). We compared the reviewer location with the location of the author and the Editor‐in‐Chief, the size and rank of the journal, and whether the journal had difficulty in obtaining reviews. We found that reviewers mostly came from the USA, but there was a correlation between the reviewer location and the country and region of the Editor‐in‐Chief and that of the corresponding author. Reviewers were also more likely to accept invitations to review articles when the corresponding author was from their region and were more likely to be positive about such articles. We found no difference between journals of different disciplines and of different rank or size or difficulty in obtaining reviews.