ChemRxiv (pronounced “chem-archive”) is a free, open-access preprint server for chemistry and closely related fields. Researchers post manuscripts before or independent of journal peer review, receive a DOI and a public timestamp within a few days, and can typically submit the same work directly onward to a partner journal. This guide covers what ChemRxiv is, who governs it, what it will and won’t host, how its screening differs from peer review, and how it fits into the wider preprint landscape. 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.
Origins and who runs ChemRxiv today
ChemRxiv launched in August 2017, created by the American Chemical Society (ACS) in partnership with several other chemistry societies, as a response to chemistry’s historically slow adoption of preprinting compared to physics (arXiv) and, later, biology (bioRxiv). Since June 2021, ChemRxiv has been hosted on Cambridge University Press’s Open Engage preprint platform, the same underlying infrastructure that also hosts a number of other subject-specific preprint servers.
ChemRxiv is jointly governed by a partnership of chemistry societies: the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), the German Chemical Society (Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, GDCh), the Chinese Chemical Society (CCS), and the Chemical Society of Japan (CSJ). This multi-society governance model is a deliberate design choice — it signals that ChemRxiv is meant to function as a neutral, discipline-wide service rather than a single publisher’s proprietary feeder pipeline, even though ACS was the founding operator.
Scope: what belongs on ChemRxiv
ChemRxiv accepts preprints across the breadth of chemistry and directly adjacent interdisciplinary work: organic, inorganic, physical, analytical, and theoretical/computational chemistry, materials science, chemical biology, medicinal chemistry, chemical engineering, nanoscience, and polymer science, among related sub-fields. As with other subject-specific servers, the boundary is not absolute — a paper with substantial chemistry content is generally in scope even if it also touches biology or materials engineering.
Like most preprint servers built around a specific research community, ChemRxiv applies basic screening exclusions rather than open-ended submission: it screens out content that is not a genuine scientific manuscript (opinion pieces, marketing material), content that raises clear safety, ethical, or biosecurity concerns, and clinical content involving identifiable human-subjects data, which routes to a clinical or life-sciences server instead. These exclusions exist to keep the server’s basic screening tractable, not to enforce a novelty or quality bar comparable to peer review.
Screening, not peer review
Before a submission appears on ChemRxiv, it undergoes a basic administrative and ethical screening — checking that the work is a real scientific manuscript, within scope, free of plagiarism, and free of obvious ethical red flags. This is explicitly not peer review: no reviewer evaluates the soundness of the chemistry, the validity of the methods, or the correctness of the conclusions. That evaluation still happens later, if and when the manuscript is submitted to and accepted by a peer-reviewed journal. This screening-not-review distinction is the same model bioRxiv and most other modern preprint servers use, and it is the single most important thing for a first-time reader of any preprint to understand: a ChemRxiv posting is a public, citable draft, not a validated result.
Authors can typically post revised versions of a preprint as new, dated versions, with earlier versions remaining accessible — this version history is part of what makes a preprint server useful as a timestamped scientific record, distinct from a personal website or a conference slide deck.
Licensing, DOIs, and cost
Posting on ChemRxiv is free for authors — there is no submission fee or article processing charge, in contrast to gold open-access publication in a paid journal. Every accepted preprint receives its own DOI on posting, making it citable immediately, independent of any later journal publication. Authors select a Creative Commons license at submission (ChemRxiv, like most CC-based servers, offers a choice among standard CC license variants), which governs how others may reuse the preprint. Authors retain copyright over the preprint itself; a later journal publication agreement is a separate matter, governed by that journal’s own policies.
Submitting to a partner journal afterward
A ChemRxiv posting is designed to sit upstream of, not instead of, journal publication. ACS, RSC, GDCh, CCS, and CSJ journals — as well as many other chemistry and multidisciplinary publishers — explicitly permit authors to deposit a preprint on ChemRxiv before or during peer review, and several ACS journals support direct transfer of a ChemRxiv submission into their manuscript system, reducing duplicate data entry. As with any preprint server, authors submitting to a specific journal should still confirm that journal’s current preprint policy before posting, since policies vary and do change — CASRAI’s guide to avoiding a “prior publication” conflict covers how to check this systematically before submission.
ChemRxiv compared with other preprint servers
ChemRxiv sits alongside a small set of major discipline-specific preprint servers that together cover most of the natural sciences. CASRAI has dedicated guides to two of the closest comparators: bioRxiv, the equivalent server for the life sciences (also screening-based, also DOI-assigning, now operated by the independent non-profit openRxiv), and EarthArXiv, the equivalent server for the earth sciences. Chemistry work has also historically appeared on arXiv’s physics-adjacent categories and on general-purpose repositories, but ChemRxiv is the field’s dedicated, society-governed home, in the same way bioRxiv and EarthArXiv are for their respective disciplines. For a broader map of how these servers relate to one another and to journal publication, see CASRAI’s Preprint Servers Explained.
Frequently asked questions
Is a ChemRxiv preprint peer reviewed?
No. ChemRxiv preprints pass a basic screening for scope, plagiarism, and ethical concerns, but they are not evaluated for scientific validity the way a peer-reviewed journal article is. Peer review, if it happens, occurs later at whichever journal the author submits to.
Does ChemRxiv charge authors to post?
No. Posting a preprint on ChemRxiv is free. This is separate from any article processing charge a journal may later charge if the manuscript is accepted for publication.
Can I still submit a ChemRxiv preprint to a journal?
Yes, for the great majority of chemistry journals, including all journals published by ChemRxiv’s five governing societies. Preprint policies do vary by publisher, so it is worth confirming a specific target journal’s current policy before posting.
Who can post on ChemRxiv?
Submission is generally open to researchers working in chemistry and closely related fields, subject to the platform’s scope and screening rules described above.
How is ChemRxiv different from bioRxiv or EarthArXiv?
All three are discipline-specific, screening-based (not peer-reviewed), DOI-assigning preprint servers built on broadly similar models, but each is scoped to and governed within its own field — ChemRxiv for chemistry, bioRxiv for the life sciences, and EarthArXiv for the earth sciences. Interdisciplinary work sometimes fits more than one server, in which case authors should pick the server whose audience best matches the paper’s primary contribution.
