> How do publishers have a say over what can and cannot be posted to these repositories? Publishers can and do add restrictions on submitted papers, such as "c

> How do publishers have a say over what can and cannot be posted to these repositories? Publishers can and do add restrictions on submitted papers, such as "can not have been made public before". Indeed, this does not applies to papers that would never have been published, but it does apply to papers that will later be submitted to a journal. ArXiv never had this problem, because it became widespread before the publishers gained much of their influence. It's been a major hurdle for preprint servers in other disciplines, however. It is a lot better nowadays, where many publishers explicitly allow posting preprints. That said, they do still impose some restrictions, and I can imagine having to post works to preprint servers specific to that discipline being one of them. A server like biorXiv wouldn't want to miss out on those preprints, so they'd have to accommodate that - and biorXiv in particular is very apprehensive about not ruffling any publisher feathers. (Likely a factor in its success.)