In recent years, the field of physics sparked a revolution in scientific communication by making preprints the accepted format for dissemination of the newest results of scientific research.
Preprints are usually documents that have not been fully validated by peer-review. In some cases a document represents an oral presentation at a conference. In other cases the author has posted a preprint while the paper is undergoing review at a scholarly journal. Some preprint databases attempt to link preprint documents with their published version, but readers must otherwise assume responsibility for identifying a validated version.
Here are a few preprint gateways: