bioRxiv has no commercial publisher. The platform is owned and operated by openRxiv, an independent, community-oriented non-profit organisation formed in 2025 when Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) transferred ownership of bioRxiv and its sister site medRxiv out of the laboratory and into a dedicated governance structure. CSHL remains a founding partner and funder, with its president on the openRxiv board, but no subscription publisher, journal group, or shareholder sits behind the archive.
bioRxiv is a free, open-access preprint server for the life sciences, not a peer-reviewed journal — a distinction that matters for anyone assessing its editorial screening, its staffing, or why it has no journal impact factor.
- Who owns and governs bioRxiv?
- Is bioRxiv a publisher or a preprint archive?
- Who screens submissions? Editorial staff and Affiliates
- How is bioRxiv funded, and what does it cost to submit?
- Common questions about the bioRxiv publisher
- What this means for institutions and research administrators
Who owns and governs bioRxiv?
bioRxiv was co-founded by John Inglis and Richard Sever in November 2013 as a project of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, with early support from the Lourie Foundation. CSHL hosted and financially supported the server for over a decade, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative confirmed additional funding for bioRxiv in April 2017.
On 11 March 2025, ownership and operation of both bioRxiv and medRxiv transferred from CSHL to openRxiv, a newly formed independent non-profit dedicated solely to running the two preprint servers, as reported by Nature. CSHL’s President and CEO, Bruce Stillman, joined the new openRxiv board of directors, preserving institutional continuity while separating day-to-day governance from the laboratory itself.
This matters for citation and provenance purposes: any reference to “who publishes bioRxiv” that still names CSHL as the current operator is describing the pre-2025 arrangement. The current, correct attribution is openRxiv, with CSHL as a founding institution and ongoing board-level partner.
Is bioRxiv a publisher or a preprint archive?
bioRxiv describes itself as “a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences,” operated by openRxiv. It is not a journal, does not commission or conduct peer review, and does not typeset or copyedit submissions before posting.
That distinction directly answers a common confused search: bioRxiv has no journal impact factor, because impact factor is a citation metric that Clarivate calculates for indexed, peer-reviewed journals — a category bioRxiv, as an unrefereed preprint archive, does not belong to. Individual preprints may later be published in journals that do carry an impact factor, but the server itself is never eligible for one.
| Feature | bioRxiv (openRxiv) | Typical commercial journal publisher |
|---|---|---|
| Governance | Independent non-profit (openRxiv), CSHL board seat | Shareholder-owned or society-owned publishing house |
| Peer review | None at the point of posting | Managed pre-publication peer review |
| Submission fee | None | Often none, but article processing charges common on acceptance |
| Journal impact factor | Not applicable — not a journal | Assigned by Clarivate where indexed |
| Revision after posting | Versioned; original DOI retained | Formal errata/corrigenda process |
Who screens submissions? Editorial staff and Affiliates
Every manuscript submitted to bioRxiv passes through a basic screening process before posting, rather than peer review. openRxiv staff and a volunteer network called bioRxiv Affiliates — working scientists drawn from the life-sciences community — carry out this screening.
The screening checks for:
- Offensive or non-scientific content
- Material that could pose a health or biosecurity risk, including dual-use research of concern
- Plagiarism, via automated text-matching
- Basic appropriateness for the life-sciences scope (papers outside scope are directed to servers such as arXiv)
Affiliates also act as advocates for the platform within their institutions and disciplines. This is a materially different staffing model from a commercial publisher’s in-house editorial board: bioRxiv’s screening is deliberately lightweight and non-evaluative — it does not judge a manuscript’s methods, conclusions, or scientific quality, and posting on bioRxiv implies no endorsement by openRxiv of the work’s validity.
How is bioRxiv funded, and what does it cost to submit?
There is no charge for authors to register, submit, or deposit an article on bioRxiv. openRxiv’s operating costs are covered by a mix of founding-institution support from CSHL, philanthropic funding — including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative — and participation fees from partner journals and publishers that use bioRxiv’s infrastructure.
Scale gives a sense of what that funding supports: bioRxiv had received close to 180,000 preprints in total by the end of 2022, with annual submissions exceeding 36,000 that year. By 2026, Nature reported that roughly four million articles are downloaded from bioRxiv every month, a measure of its role in the life-sciences literature well beyond initial posting volume.
A separate infrastructure layer — the bioRxiv-to-Journals (B2J) initiative — lets authors transmit a manuscript’s files and metadata directly from bioRxiv to a participating journal or peer-review service, avoiding duplicate re-entry. More than 175 journals and services, including titles from PLOS, Frontiers, EMBO Press, and the American Society for Microbiology, participate in B2J, which is a submission convenience rather than a peer-review or publishing relationship in itself.
Common questions about the bioRxiv publisher
Who owns bioRxiv?
openRxiv, an independent non-profit organisation, owns and operates bioRxiv following a formal transfer of ownership from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on 11 March 2025. CSHL remains a funder and holds a board seat through its President and CEO, but no commercial entity is involved in ownership or control.
Is bioRxiv a publisher?
bioRxiv functions as a preprint distribution service, not a publisher in the traditional peer-reviewed sense. It posts screened but unrefereed manuscripts, assigns them citable DOIs, and links to the eventual journal version — but it does not peer review, edit, or claim to validate the work it hosts.
How much does it cost to publish on bioRxiv?
Submitting to bioRxiv is free. There is no registration fee, no submission charge, and no article processing charge, regardless of the reuse licence an author selects (including CC BY, CC0, or no-reuse options) when depositing a manuscript.
Is it okay to cite bioRxiv preprints?
Yes. Every version of a bioRxiv preprint receives a persistent DOI, making it part of the citable scientific record even though it has not been peer reviewed. Readers citing a specific version should include the version-specific URL alongside the DOI, since revisions retain the original DOI.
What this means for institutions and research administrators
For institutional research offices, funders, and hiring or promotion committees, the practical takeaway is definitional accuracy: bioRxiv preprints are screened, not peer-reviewed, and the platform carries no journal-level quality signal such as an impact factor. Policies that reference “bioRxiv publications” should distinguish preprint deposit from formal journal publication, and CVs or grant applications citing bioRxiv DOIs should be read accordingly.
The March 2025 transfer to openRxiv also has provenance implications: institutional data-management plans, library guides, and repository citations that still describe bioRxiv as “a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory service” are now describing outdated governance and should be updated to name openRxiv as the operating body, with CSHL correctly framed as founding partner rather than current owner.
As preprint deposit becomes further embedded in funder and institutional policy, understanding who actually governs a preprint server — its non-profit status, its screening staff, and its funding base — is becoming a standard due-diligence question for research administrators, alongside the frameworks already used to assess journals and repositories.
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