openRxiv is the independent, researcher-led nonprofit that has run bioRxiv and medRxiv since March 2025, replacing Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s institutional stewardship with a six-member board, diversified funding, and a mandate to keep both preprint servers free to read and free to post. The spin-off was designed to insulate two of biomedicine’s most-used pieces of open-research infrastructure from dependence on any single institution or funder — a governance question every standards body and infrastructure provider eventually has to answer.
openRxiv is the independent nonprofit, launched on 11 March 2025, that now stewards the bioRxiv and medRxiv preprint servers on behalf of the global research community, rather than as a programme of a single host institution.
- What is openRxiv, and what does it actually run?
- Why did bioRxiv and medRxiv leave Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory?
- Who governs openRxiv, and who pays for it?
- What is openRxiv Labs, and what launched in June 2026?
- Answer-first questions people are asking about openRxiv
- What the openRxiv spin-off means for research-infrastructure stewardship
What is openRxiv, and what does it actually run?
openRxiv is the organisational and legal home of two preprint servers: bioRxiv, covering life sciences, and medRxiv, covering health and clinical research. Neither server changed its submission process, screening policy, or URL when the transition happened — researchers post to biorxiv.org and medrxiv.org exactly as before.
What changed is who is accountable for the platforms’ survival. bioRxiv was founded in 2013 at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL); medRxiv followed in 2019 as a joint initiative between CSHL, Yale University, and BMJ. Both grew into the dominant preprint venues for biomedicine, and by 2025 that success had outgrown the administrative capacity of a single laboratory to sustain indefinitely.
Why did bioRxiv and medRxiv leave Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory?
CSHL’s own account of the move calls it a “natural evolution,” not a rupture. Bruce Stillman, CSHL’s President and CEO, joined openRxiv’s board rather than severing ties, and co-founders John Inglis and Richard Sever moved with the platforms into the new entity.
The stated rationale centres on three risks that concentrated stewardship inside one institution:
- Sustainability risk — a single laboratory’s budget cycle is not designed to guarantee decades of continuity for global research infrastructure.
- Governance risk — decisions about screening policy, features, and funding priorities benefited from a board drawn from outside CSHL alone.
- Funder-concentration risk — the platforms needed a structure that could accept diversified funding without any one funder gaining outsized influence.
openRxiv formally launched as an independent nonprofit on 11 March 2025, with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) providing three years of seed funding for the transition, according to openRxiv’s own governance Q&A published that May. In October 2025, arXiv — the physics, mathematics, and computer science preprint server run by Cornell University — joined openRxiv in submitting a joint response to a National Institutes of Health Request for Information on preprints, signalling a wider coalition forming around shared preprint-infrastructure interests, though arXiv itself remains a separate service.
Who governs openRxiv, and who pays for it?
openRxiv is governed by a six-member board of directors: Scott Fraser (University of Southern California and the CZI Imaging Institute), Edith Heard (Francis Crick Institute), Jeff Huber (Triatomic Capital), Harlan Krumholz (Yale School of Medicine; medRxiv co-founder), Bruce Stillman (CSHL), and Shirley Tilghman (Princeton University). A separate Scientific and Medical Advisory Board, chaired by John Inglis with medRxiv co-founder Theo Bloom as deputy, advises on content policy.
The funding question is where most scrutiny has landed, given CZI’s long involvement with both servers before the spin-off:
| Question | openRxiv’s public answer (governance Q&A, May 2025) |
|---|---|
| How long has CZI funded the servers? | Eight years for bioRxiv, four years for medRxiv, plus three years of dedicated seed funding for the openRxiv transition itself. |
| Does CZI have editorial or operational control? | No. openRxiv states funding agreements carry no stipulations affecting editorial or operational independence. |
| How much board influence does CZI hold? | One of six directors (Scott Fraser) has a CZI affiliation; the board is not CZI-appointed as a bloc. |
| Is openRxiv against traditional peer review? | No — openRxiv reports roughly 75% of bioRxiv and medRxiv preprints go on to formal peer-reviewed publication, with direct-submission links to 350 journals. |
openRxiv itself frames the governance model as a direct answer to funder-concentration concerns: the organisation states its mission is to be “governed by and for the research community, not a single funder, founder, or any one stakeholder.” Whether a philanthropic vehicle tied to a single tech-sector family remains structurally sufficient as the largest funder of a nonprofit intended to resist single-funder capture is a debate that predates this specific spin-off and will likely recur as openRxiv pursues its stated goal of diversifying revenue further.
What is openRxiv Labs, and what launched in June 2026?
openRxiv Labs launched on 1 June 2026 as a structured experimentation programme sitting on top of the core bioRxiv and medRxiv infrastructure. Rather than running many small tests at once, openRxiv committed to a small number of larger, hypothesis-driven pilots with predefined success metrics and durations, publishing results — including failures — openly on a dedicated Labs blog.
The first Labs pilot, built with the platform Curvenote, tests an interactive preprint-reading interface layered onto openRxiv’s existing corpus of preprints, figures, and metadata. openRxiv named a broad partner list for the programme, including CZI, CSHL, the Sergey Brin Family Foundation, Caltech, CNRS, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Imperial College London, MIT, Stanford, the University of Washington, and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam — underscoring that the funder-diversification effort begun at launch has continued into 2026 rather than stalling after the initial CZI seed grant.
Answer-first questions people are asking about openRxiv
Who is the CEO of openRxiv?
Dr Tracy Teal is openRxiv’s first Chief Executive Officer, appointed on 18 August 2025 after serving as interim COO since the March 2025 launch. She previously led The Carpentries and Dryad, two established open-research infrastructure nonprofits, giving her direct prior experience running community-governed scientific platforms.
Who owns medRxiv?
No single institution “owns” medRxiv today. It was founded in 2019 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Yale University, and BMJ, but operational and governance responsibility now sits with openRxiv, the independent nonprofit created specifically to steward it and bioRxiv without institutional or single-funder control.
Is medRxiv a credible source?
medRxiv preprints are screened but not peer-reviewed, so they should be cited with that caveat clearly stated. openRxiv reports around 75% of postings eventually complete formal peer review; until then, findings represent unverified claims from qualified researchers, useful for rapid awareness but not equivalent to a published, peer-reviewed article.
What is openRxiv, in one line?
openRxiv is the independent 501(c) nonprofit, launched 11 March 2025, that operates bioRxiv and medRxiv under a six-member board and a diversified-funding mandate, replacing their prior status as programmes hosted by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
What the openRxiv spin-off means for research-infrastructure stewardship
The openRxiv case is a useful reference point for any organisation weighing how to govern shared research infrastructure once it outgrows its founding institution. The pattern — an originating body incubates a tool, the tool becomes essential community infrastructure, and stewardship then transfers to an independent, multi-stakeholder body — is not unique to preprints.
CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014. The standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. That is the same “originator, not owner” pattern openRxiv is now navigating in public: CSHL originated bioRxiv and medRxiv, and stewardship has since passed to a body structured explicitly to prevent any one funder, founder, or institution from controlling research infrastructure the whole field depends on.
For research administrators and institutional leaders, the practical takeaway is to watch governance structure, not just funding source, when assessing an infrastructure provider’s long-term reliability. A named, multi-institutional board; published funding-independence commitments; and open reporting of pilot outcomes (as with openRxiv Labs) are the concrete signals worth checking — independent of who wrote the first cheque.