bioRxiv (pronounced “bio-archive”) is a free, open-access preprint server for the life sciences. Researchers post manuscripts — before, during, or independent of journal peer review — where they receive a timestamp, a citable DOI, and public visibility within one to two business days. It is one of the largest and most heavily used subject-specific preprint servers in existence, and its screening-not-peer-review model has become a template other disciplines have followed. This guide covers what bioRxiv actually is, who runs it today, how its screening and licensing work, and how it relates to journal publication. For the underlying concept, see CASRAI’s definition of preprint; for the fuller landscape of servers, see Preprint Servers Explained and How to Choose a Preprint Server. If you are ready to submit, see the step-by-step bioRxiv/medRxiv submission guide.
Origins and who runs bioRxiv today
bioRxiv launched in November 2013, co-founded by John Inglis and Richard Sever at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). CSHL is a private, non-profit biomedical research and educational institution in New York with a long-standing scientific publishing arm (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press), which gave the project institutional credibility and infrastructure at launch, at a time when preprinting was essentially unheard-of in biology.
bioRxiv’s operations, and those of its clinical-medicine sibling medRxiv (launched 2019 with Yale University School of Medicine and BMJ), were spun out of CSHL into openRxiv, an independent non-profit organization, as of March 2025. openRxiv now operates both servers day to day. This is a genuinely current, and easy to get wrong, detail: bioRxiv is not run by the Center for Open Science’s OSF Preprints infrastructure, which is a separate platform that hosts a number of other subject-specific preprint servers (and is a common point of confusion, since so many other servers do run on OSF). bioRxiv has always run on its own dedicated platform, first built and maintained under CSHL and now under openRxiv.
Scope: what kind of work goes on bioRxiv
bioRxiv covers the life sciences broadly. Authors assign each submission to one of roughly two dozen subject categories — among them genetics, genomics, neuroscience, cell biology, bioinformatics, ecology, evolutionary biology, microbiology, and cancer biology — used to organize the site’s feeds and alerts rather than to gate what can be posted. Clinical and health-related research with direct patient-care implications is generally directed to medRxiv instead, which layers additional screening (an IRB/ethics statement and a registered trial ID for clinical trials) suited to that content; see bioRxiv vs. medRxiv for the full scope split between the two servers.
Screening, not peer review
This is the single most important thing to understand about bioRxiv: posting to it is not peer review, and openRxiv does not describe it that way. Every submission goes through a basic screening step, typically completed within one to two business days, that checks for plagiarism, offensive or non-scientific content, and material that could pose a public health or biosecurity risk (dual-use research of concern). Screening confirms a submission is a legitimate scientific manuscript in scope for the server — it does not evaluate the soundness of the methods, the validity of the conclusions, or the significance of the findings the way a journal’s peer reviewers do. Every bioRxiv preprint carries a visible disclaimer to that effect. Readers, journalists, and clinicians citing bioRxiv content are expected to treat it as unreviewed, preliminary work.
Licensing choices
Authors choose a Creative Commons license at posting time: CC BY, CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-ND, or CC BY-NC-SA (a no-license “all rights reserved” option is also offered for authors not ready to release their work more openly). A January 2026 policy change lets authors loosen — but not tighten — a posted preprint’s license after the fact, without filing a new version, provided the preprint is less than two years old.
DOIs and versioning
Each bioRxiv article gets a single DOI that always resolves to its most recent version; older versions remain permanently accessible at version-specific URLs, and authors can post a revised version at any point rather than editing the original in place. Preprints posted before December 1, 2025 carry a 10.1101 DOI prefix; preprints posted from that date onward, coinciding with the CSHL-to-openRxiv operational transition, use a new 10.64898 prefix. Existing 10.1101 DOIs continue to resolve normally and were not reissued. For the mechanics of citing a specific version, see Preprint Version Numbers: Citation and Tracking Across Servers.
How a bioRxiv preprint relates to eventual journal publication
Posting to bioRxiv does not compete with journal publication; the two are designed to work together. Author guidance from ICMJE and CASRAI’s own coverage confirms that posting a preprint is not, by itself, considered prior or duplicate publication by the great majority of journals — see Preprint Posting and the “Prior Publication” Conflict for the conditions that generally apply (disclosure at submission, a link forward to the eventual published version, and so on). Many journals and services also support direct manuscript transfer from a bioRxiv posting straight into their submission systems, saving authors from re-uploading files and reformatting references. A published article’s page on bioRxiv is typically updated to link forward to the version of record once it appears in a journal, via Crossref’s preprint-to-published relationship metadata. Author lists occasionally change between the preprint and the published version; see Do Author Lists Change Between a Preprint and Its Published Version? for how often that happens and what triggers a new version.
What bioRxiv does not do
Because screening is deliberately lighter-touch than peer review, bioRxiv (like other preprint servers) accepts some content that later needs a correction, a revised version, or in rare cases a withdrawal. openRxiv posts withdrawal notices rather than silently removing content, and the underlying version history stays visible. bioRxiv itself has no editorial board issuing accept/reject decisions on scientific merit, no formal retraction mechanism equivalent to a journal’s, and no guarantee that a posted manuscript will ever be submitted to or accepted by a journal at all — a meaningful share of preprints are never formally published. See How Preprint Servers Handle Misconduct and Retraction and Disadvantages of Preprints for Authors for a fuller look at these tradeoffs.
How bioRxiv compares to other preprint servers
bioRxiv is one option among several a life scientist might weigh, and the right choice depends on discipline and audience. See CASRAI’s direct comparisons: bioRxiv vs. medRxiv (life sciences vs. clinical medicine), arXiv vs. bioRxiv (physics/math/CS culture vs. life-sciences culture), ChemRxiv vs. bioRxiv, Preprints.org vs. bioRxiv, and Research Square vs. bioRxiv. For a discipline-specific server built on the same screening-not-peer-review model outside the life sciences, see What Is EarthArXiv?, the earth-science equivalent.
Frequently asked questions
Is bioRxiv peer reviewed?
No. bioRxiv preprints go through basic screening for plagiarism, offensive or non-scientific content, and biosecurity risk — not peer review. Every posting carries a disclaimer stating it has not been certified by peer review.
Who owns and runs bioRxiv?
bioRxiv was founded at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2013. Since March 2025 it has been operated by openRxiv, an independent non-profit spun out of CSHL’s bioRxiv/medRxiv operations. It is not run by OSF (the Center for Open Science’s preprint infrastructure), which hosts a number of other, unrelated preprint servers.
Is bioRxiv free to use?
Yes. There is no fee to post a preprint or to read one, and no institutional subscription is required to access content.
Can I still publish in a journal after posting to bioRxiv?
In almost all cases, yes. Most journals and publishers, including those following ICMJE recommendations, do not treat a preprint as prior publication, provided you disclose it at submission. See Preprint Posting and the “Prior Publication” Conflict for specifics and exceptions.
What is the difference between bioRxiv and medRxiv?
bioRxiv covers the life sciences broadly; medRxiv, launched later, is specifically for clinical and health-related research and applies additional screening suited to that content, such as requiring a registered trial ID for clinical trials. Full comparison: bioRxiv vs. medRxiv.
Does a bioRxiv preprint have a DOI I can cite?
Yes. Every bioRxiv preprint receives a DOI at posting, which resolves to the latest version; older versions remain accessible via version-specific URLs. See Preprint Version Numbers: Citation and Tracking Across Servers for how to cite a specific version.
