Designed to allow researchers to share their results rapidly with the scientific community, preprints offer a variety of benefits to researchers. Preprints have a long history in research dissemination and are part of the story about how the web was created. They have long been used in physics and math for over two decades with nearly 10000 preprints posted per month at arχiv in 2016. Adoption in other disciplines like the life sciences is also starting to increase rapidly. In fact the growth of preprints in other disciplines was named one of Science's events that shaped 2016.