CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: preprint servers

  • bioRxiv Microbiology: 2026 Subject Growth

    bioRxiv’s microbiology collection holds more than 41,000 preprints as of July 2026, making it the platform’s third-largest subject area behind neuroscience (over 90,000) and bioinformatics (nearly 43,000). Together, these three fields account for close to two-fifths of every preprint ever posted to bioRxiv since its 2013 launch — a concentration that says as much about where biology’s fastest-moving fields are as it does about the platform itself.

    bioRxiv is a free, non-profit preprint repository for the biological sciences, now operated by openRxiv, on which authors post manuscripts before or independent of journal peer review, sorted into 27 subject-specific collections spanning everything from paleontology to synthetic biology.

    What is bioRxiv, and how are preprints organised by subject?

    bioRxiv was co-founded by John Inglis and Richard Sever in November 2013 as an open-access preprint repository hosted by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. In March 2025, bioRxiv and its clinical-sciences counterpart medRxiv transferred to openRxiv, a newly formed non-profit created specifically to steward both platforms, as reported by Science.

    Every submission is placed into one of 27 subject collections at the point of posting. There is no fee to submit to bioRxiv, and authors self-select the collection that best matches their manuscript. This subject taxonomy is what makes volume comparisons across fields possible — and what this analysis draws on directly.

    One structural exception worth noting: the Epidemiology collection is now closed to new submissions following the completion of bioRxiv’s clinical-research pilot project, meaning its growth curve has effectively flattened while other collections continue to expand.

    How does bioRxiv microbiology compare to neuroscience and other subjects by volume?

    Based on a live count of bioRxiv’s own subject-collection pages taken on 3 July 2026, neuroscience is the platform’s largest single collection at 90,290 preprints — a 19.4% share of the roughly 465,700 preprints posted across all 27 collections to date. Bioinformatics follows at 42,825 (9.2%), with microbiology close behind at 41,133 (8.8%).

    Cell biology, evolutionary biology, genomics and biophysics round out the next tier, each holding between roughly 21,000 and 26,000 preprints. At the other end of the scale, paleontology (678) and clinical trials (138) remain niche collections by comparison, while epidemiology’s 2,067 total is now largely fixed given its closure to new submissions.

    Full ranking of bioRxiv’s largest subject collections

    Rank Subject collection Cumulative preprints Share of total
    1 Neuroscience 90,290 19.4%
    2 Bioinformatics 42,825 9.2%
    3 Microbiology 41,133 8.8%
    4 Cell Biology 25,753 5.5%
    5 Evolutionary Biology 24,737 5.3%
    6 Genomics 22,868 4.9%
    7 Biophysics 21,837 4.7%
    8 Ecology 20,284 4.4%
    9 Cancer Biology 18,775 4.0%
    10 Biochemistry 18,098 3.9%

    Source: CASRAI analysis of live bioRxiv subject-collection article counts, recorded 3 July 2026. These are cumulative totals since bioRxiv’s 2013 launch, not annual submission rates, so they reflect sustained field-level adoption of preprinting rather than a single year’s activity.

    Microbiology’s position just behind bioinformatics is notable given how differently the two fields work: bioinformatics preprints are often fast, computational and low-cost to produce, while microbiology preprints typically follow wet-lab experimental cycles. That microbiology has nonetheless built a corpus within a few thousand papers of bioinformatics points to strong, sustained preprinting culture within microbiology specifically — likely reinforced by the field’s pandemic-era experience with rapid-dissemination norms.

    Why does subject-level concentration matter for research administrators?

    For institutional leaders and research-administration teams, subject-level preprint concentration is a proxy for where scholarly communication norms are shifting fastest. A field with tens of thousands of preprints has, in effect, normalised pre-peer-review dissemination as a routine step in its publication workflow — with direct implications for how institutions track outputs, credit early dissemination in tenure and promotion review, and advise researchers on preprint policy.

    • Grant and promotion committees increasingly need clear policy on whether preprints count as citable outputs, particularly in high-volume fields like neuroscience and microbiology.
    • Research offices supporting microbiology, bioinformatics or genomics groups should expect preprint-first workflows to already be the norm, not the exception, among active researchers.
    • Fields with low preprint volume (pathology, zoology, clinical trials) may need different guidance, since preprinting culture there remains comparatively immature.

    This is also a live concern for research administrators and institutional leaders tracking how open-research norms diffuse unevenly across disciplines — subject-level data of this kind gives institutions a concrete basis for that assessment, rather than relying on anecdote.

    Common questions about bioRxiv preprints

    Is bioRxiv a preprint server?

    Yes. bioRxiv is a dedicated preprint server for the biological sciences, distributing manuscripts before or alongside formal peer review. It is operated by openRxiv, a non-profit created in 2025 specifically to run bioRxiv and medRxiv, and hosts subject collections spanning microbiology, neuroscience, genomics and 24 other biology-related fields.

    Can anyone submit to bioRxiv?

    Authors can deposit a manuscript in draft or final form provided it concerns a relevant scientific field, is unpublished at the time of submission, and all co-authors have consented. Authors must first register on the platform. bioRxiv screens submissions for basic scope and ethical compliance before posting, but does not conduct peer review.

    How much does it cost to publish in bioRxiv?

    There is no fee to submit a preprint to bioRxiv. This free-to-post model is a key driver of its growth across every subject collection, including the microbiology and neuroscience volumes analysed above, since it removes the cost barrier that applies to many open-access journal publication routes.

    Does bioRxiv count as published?

    A bioRxiv preprint is not equivalent to a peer-reviewed publication. It establishes a timestamped, citable public record of the work, and many journals allow later submission of the same manuscript, but it has not undergone formal peer review at the point of posting. Institutions and funders vary in how they weight preprints in assessment.

    Implications and outlook for scholarly communication

    The concentration of preprint volume in neuroscience, bioinformatics and microbiology is likely to persist rather than reverse. These fields combine large, active researcher populations with production cycles well suited to rapid dissemination, and none shows structural barriers comparable to epidemiology’s now-closed pilot pathway.

    For research-administration teams, the practical takeaway is to treat preprint-volume data by subject as a planning input: policy on preprint citation, researcher guidance, and repository integration should be calibrated to each discipline’s actual adoption level rather than applied uniformly across an institution’s full research portfolio.

  • bioRxiv Alerts: Email, RSS or API Options

    bioRxiv alerts let researchers and developers track newly posted preprints in a chosen subject area without manually rechecking the site — the three core options are subject-category email alerts, per-category RSS/Atom feeds, and the public bioRxiv API, each suited to a different workflow. bioRxiv is the preprint server for biology operated by openRxiv, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing scientific communication, and it exposes the same underlying content through all three channels plus social feeds on Bluesky, Mastodon and X.

    This guide compares the four practical ways to follow new bioRxiv postings — email alerts, RSS/Atom feeds, the REST API, and social feeds — so you can pick the right combination for a literature-monitoring workflow, a lab dashboard, or an automated pipeline.

    What are bioRxiv’s alert options?

    bioRxiv is a preprint server for the biological sciences; a preprint is a complete scientific manuscript posted online before, or without, formal peer review. Because thousands of preprints are posted every week across dozens of subject categories, bioRxiv publishes the same feed of new content through four distinct channels rather than a single notification system.

    Each channel trades off timeliness, filtering precision and technical effort differently. Email alerts and RSS feeds are built for passive monitoring by individual researchers; the API is built for developers who need structured metadata inside another tool; social feeds suit anyone already working inside those platforms.

    How do bioRxiv email alerts work?

    Email alerts are the lowest-effort option for an individual researcher who wants a periodic digest. You sign up on the bioRxiv Alerts page, select one or more of bioRxiv’s roughly 30 subject categories — from Bioinformatics to Zoology — and bioRxiv emails you when matching preprints are posted.

    • Alerts can be scoped to a subject category, a keyword search, or a specific author.
    • You can add or remove subject-area alerts at any time from the same sign-up page, without deleting your account.
    • No bioRxiv account or login is required simply to receive category alerts — the sign-up form only asks for an email address.

    This makes email alerts the right default for anyone who wants new preprints in their inbox without building or maintaining anything.

    How do bioRxiv RSS feeds work?

    bioRxiv’s Alerts/RSS page publishes an Atom 1.0 feed for each subject category, plus a combined feed across all categories. Each feed returns only the most recent 30 posts for that category — a hard limit set by bioRxiv, not a filter you can extend — so an RSS reader that checks infrequently can silently miss older items once more than 30 new preprints accumulate.

    Feeds can be combined by chaining subject categories with a plus sign in the URL, and multi-word category names use an underscore in place of a space. For example, a feed combining Genomics and Bioinformatics takes the form:

    • http://connect.biorxiv.org/biorxiv_xml.php?subject=genomics+bioinformatics

    This lets a single feed reader subscription cover several adjacent subject areas — useful for interdisciplinary groups — without needing separate subscriptions per category.

    What can the bioRxiv API do that alerts and RSS can’t?

    The bioRxiv API is a pull-based REST interface returning structured JSON metadata — DOI, title, authors, category, posting date and abstract — for preprints on bioRxiv and medRxiv. Unlike email alerts or RSS, it has no built-in subject-category filter parameter and no push/webhook mechanism: a developer must query by date interval or DOI and filter the returned category field client-side.

    That distinction matters for anyone building automated tooling:

    • The API suits scheduled polling jobs, institutional repository harvesters, and research-tool dashboards that need structured metadata, not just a headline and link.
    • RSS and email alerts remain the simpler choice for a single researcher who only wants to read new titles as they appear.
    • Because the API is pull-based, any “alert” built on top of it requires you to run your own polling schedule and de-duplication logic.

    Detailed field definitions and endpoint syntax are published in bioRxiv’s own API documentation, which developers should consult directly before building a production integration.

    Should you follow bioRxiv on Bluesky, Mastodon or X?

    bioRxiv also mirrors new postings to social platforms, and this is where the biggest recent change sits — one that generic alert guides tend to miss. Beyond the long-standing X/Twitter account (@biorxivpreprint, over 140,000 followers, plus a dedicated account per subject category), bioRxiv now runs an equivalent set of per-category streams on Bluesky (e.g. biorxiv-bioinfo.bsky.social) and Mastodon (e.g. biorxiv_bioinfo on biologists.social).

    This matters because X restricted free API access in 2023, which reduced the reliability of X-based bots and dashboards that many labs had built to watch subject feeds. Bluesky and Mastodon’s open, API-friendly protocols make them a more dependable base for anyone building a custom preprint-monitoring bot today, rather than a nice-to-have alternative.

    Which option should you choose?

    The right channel depends on how much filtering precision you need and how much technical effort you are willing to invest.

    Channel Best for Filtering Setup effort Key limitation
    Email alerts Individual researchers wanting a digest Subject, keyword, author None (email only) No login needed, but digest cadence isn’t real time
    RSS/Atom feed Feed-reader users, interdisciplinary groups Subject category, combinable Low (add feed URL) Capped at the most recent 30 posts per category
    REST API Developers, institutional tools, dashboards None built-in; filter client-side High (build a polling job) Pull-based only, no webhook/push
    Bluesky/Mastodon/X Social monitoring, bot-building Per subject-category account Low–Medium X reach reduced since 2023 API restrictions

    For most individual researchers, subject-category email alerts remain the simplest reliable option. Developers building institutional or lab-wide monitoring tools should combine the API for structured metadata with RSS as a lightweight fallback.

    Common questions about bioRxiv alerts

    Why are my bioRxiv email alerts not working?

    Missed bioRxiv alerts are usually caused by an out-of-date subject-category selection, an alert email landing in a spam or promotions folder, or an expired confirmation link. Re-visiting the bioRxiv Alerts page and re-confirming your chosen categories resolves most cases.

    Do I need a bioRxiv account or login to set up alerts?

    No account or login is required for basic email alerts — only an email address. A bioRxiv account is only needed for actions like submitting a manuscript, posting a comment, or managing an author profile, not for receiving subject-area notifications.

    Does bioRxiv have a public API for developers?

    Yes. bioRxiv publishes a public REST API returning JSON metadata — including DOI, title, category and abstract — for content on bioRxiv and medRxiv. It is pull-based, so developers must schedule their own queries rather than receive push notifications.

    Should I track bioRxiv or arXiv for my subject area?

    Choose based on discipline, not preference: bioRxiv covers biology-specific subject categories, while arXiv covers physics, mathematics, computer science and quantitative biology. Researchers working across both fields — for example in computational biology — often need alerts from both servers rather than treating them as interchangeable.

    What this means for research-monitoring workflows

    Preprint volume keeps growing across biology subject categories, and no single channel covers every use case. A researcher who only needs a daily digest is well served by email alerts; a developer building a literature-surveillance tool for an institution needs the API’s structured metadata and should plan for its pull-based, polling architecture from the outset. Teams that previously relied solely on X-based bots should treat the 2023 API restrictions as a prompt to add Bluesky or Mastodon, or the official RSS feed, as a more durable foundation.

    Research administrators supporting open-scholarship workflows can pair these tracking methods with broader terminology in the CASRAI Dictionary when documenting how preprints fit into an institution’s research-administration processes.

  • bioRxiv or medRxiv? Choosing the Right Server for Clinical vs Basic Research

    bioRxiv or medRxiv? Choose bioRxiv for basic, non-clinical life-sciences research such as genetics, microbiology or neuroscience, and medRxiv for clinical, epidemiological or public-health research that could influence patient care. The two preprint servers do not overlap: posting the same manuscript to both is prohibited and can result in withdrawal.

    A preprint server is an open-access repository where researchers post a scientific manuscript publicly before it has completed formal peer review. bioRxiv and medRxiv are the two sibling servers operated by openRxiv for the life and health sciences respectively, and the correct choice between them depends on subject scope, not on which sounds more prestigious.

    On this page:

    What is the difference between bioRxiv and medRxiv?

    bioRxiv launched in 2013 at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) as a preprint server for basic biology; medRxiv followed in 2019 as a dedicated server for clinical and health-sciences manuscripts. In March 2025, CSHL transferred governance of both platforms to openRxiv, a newly formed independent nonprofit, marking the most significant structural change since bioRxiv’s founding.

    Neither server is a journal. medRxiv is not a journal — it is a repository, and nothing posted there has been peer reviewed or certified. Both platforms carry explicit caution notices stating that preprints should not guide clinical practice, inform health-related behaviour, or be reported as established findings.

    The practical distinction authors need is scope, not scale: bioRxiv covers fundamental biological research with new data, while medRxiv is reserved for work that could plausibly influence a clinical decision, a public-health response, or patient behaviour.

    Where should clinical trials and health research go?

    Any manuscript reporting a clinical trial, an epidemiological study, or research with direct implications for diagnosis, treatment or public-health policy belongs on medRxiv. bioRxiv’s own submission guidance is explicit that new clinical trial reports and most epidemiology submissions must now go to medRxiv rather than bioRxiv.

    medRxiv applies stricter screening than bioRxiv precisely because misinterpreted clinical claims carry public-harm risk. One detail authors frequently miss: medRxiv does not accept case reports or case series, so single-patient or small-series clinical write-ups need a different outlet even when the subject matter is unambiguously medical.

    • Randomised controlled trials and other interventional studies
    • Epidemiological and public-health surveillance research
    • Studies involving patient-level clinical or health-behaviour data
    • Infectious disease, oncology, cardiovascular medicine and psychiatry manuscripts

    Where should microbiology, neuroscience and basic biology go?

    bioRxiv is the correct venue when the research advances fundamental biological understanding without a direct clinical application. Its subject categories include microbiology, neuroscience, genetics, immunology, cell biology and bioinformatics, among others, and submissions are screened by volunteer bioRxiv Affiliates chiefly for scope, plagiarism and public-harm potential.

    A microbiology paper characterising a novel bacteriophage, or a neuroscience paper mapping neural circuitry in a model organism, sits comfortably on bioRxiv provided it does not extend into patient data or treatment recommendations. The moment a microbiology study becomes an infectious-disease outbreak analysis, or a neuroscience study becomes a neurology or psychiatry treatment study, the correct server changes to medRxiv.

    How do you decide when a study sits on the border?

    Most submission confusion happens in a handful of predictable grey zones where a basic-science category on bioRxiv has a clinical counterpart on medRxiv. openRxiv’s own subject-category lists make the pairing explicit, and mapping them side by side is the fastest way to resolve a borderline decision.

    bioRxiv category (basic science) medRxiv category (clinical counterpart) Decision rule
    Genetics / Genomics Genetic and Genomic Medicine Patient-directed diagnosis or therapy → medRxiv
    Neuroscience Neurology / Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology Patient treatment or behaviour outcomes → medRxiv
    Microbiology Infectious Diseases Outbreak, surveillance or patient-cohort data → medRxiv
    Pharmacology and Toxicology Pharmacology and Therapeutics Human dosing, trial or therapeutic outcome data → medRxiv

    As a working test: if the manuscript’s conclusion could reasonably change what a clinician does at the bedside, or what a public-health body recommends, it belongs on medRxiv regardless of how “basic” the underlying technique feels. If it reports mechanism, model-organism data or method development with no direct patient or population-health claim, bioRxiv is the right home.

    Under the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors’ recommendations, posting to a recognised preprint server does not count as prior or duplicate publication and does not preclude subsequent journal submission — but authors should still confirm the target journal’s own preprint policy before posting either version.

    Questions authors ask

    Is bioRxiv reputable?

    Yes. bioRxiv is a well-established, widely used life-sciences preprint server operated by openRxiv, screened by volunteer affiliates for plagiarism, scope and biosafety concerns. It is not peer reviewed, but it is recognised across academic biology as a legitimate venue for early-stage research dissemination.

    Is medRxiv trustworthy?

    medRxiv applies a stricter, additional screening layer beyond bioRxiv’s because of the public-harm risk in clinical and health content. Every posted manuscript carries a prominent caution notice stating it has not been certified by peer review and should not guide clinical practice, making its scope and limitations transparent to readers.

    What is the difference between bioRxiv and medRxiv?

    bioRxiv covers basic, non-clinical life sciences; medRxiv is reserved for clinical, epidemiological and health-sciences research with potential patient or public-health impact. Screening intensity, disclaimer wording and accepted article types differ accordingly, and a single manuscript cannot be posted to both servers simultaneously.

    What are the alternatives to bioRxiv?

    Depending on field, authors also use arXiv for quantitative and computational biology work, Research Square or journal-integrated “In Review” services, and discipline-specific repositories such as ChemRxiv. None of these substitute for medRxiv when a manuscript is clinically actionable.

    What this means for authors and institutions

    For individual authors, the server choice is a compliance decision, not a branding one: submitting a clinical manuscript to the wrong server risks a request to withdraw and resubmit, delaying the timestamp priority a preprint is meant to secure. Research administrators tracking institutional preprint activity — an increasingly routine part of research administration workflows — should build the bioRxiv/medRxiv scope test into pre-submission checklists rather than leaving it to individual author judgement.

    For institutions and publishers, the March 2025 move to independent openRxiv governance is worth tracking: it signals that preprint infrastructure for biology and medicine is now managed as permanent scholarly-communication infrastructure rather than a single laboratory’s side project, with implications for long-term archival stability and policy planning. Definitions of related terms, including preprint, postprint and version of record, are maintained in the CASRAI Research Administration Dictionary.

    The practical rule holds regardless of field: match the manuscript’s real-world consequence, not its disciplinary label, to the server’s scope, and treat the bioRxiv/medRxiv boundary as a public-harm question rather than a prestige one.

  • bioRxiv vs arXiv: Two Funding Models Compared

    bioRxiv vs arXiv is fundamentally a contrast in governance age and funding model: bioRxiv now operates under openRxiv, an independent nonprofit launched in March 2025 with a $16 million Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grant, while arXiv left Cornell University on 1 July 2026 to become arXiv, Inc., a member-governed Delaware nonprofit. Both are open-access preprint repositories, but the organisations behind them have chosen different paths to long-term sustainability.

    A preprint server is a repository that distributes complete but not-yet-peer-reviewed research manuscripts, allowing authors to establish priority and gather feedback before formal journal publication. The choice between bioRxiv and arXiv is usually made on subject scope — but the more consequential difference, and the subject of this analysis, is who pays for each server and who is accountable for keeping it running.

    What is the core difference between bioRxiv and arXiv?

    bioRxiv is a preprint repository for the life sciences, co-founded by John Inglis and Richard Sever in November 2013 and originally hosted at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). arXiv is the older, broader repository, launched in 1991 by physicist Paul Ginsparg to serve physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics and economics.

    The subject-matter split is well documented elsewhere. What is less widely reported is that both organisations have, within the past sixteen months, exited the institutions that originally housed them and adopted new independent governance structures — bioRxiv (with its clinical-sciences sibling medRxiv) in March 2025, and arXiv on 1 July 2026. That timing makes a direct governance comparison newly possible.

    Who funds and governs bioRxiv today?

    bioRxiv and medRxiv are now operated by openRxiv, an independent nonprofit that launched in March 2025 after both servers transferred out of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The spin-out was funded by a $16 million grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), with additional foundational support from CSHL, BMJ Group and Yale School of Medicine.

    openRxiv runs a researcher-led governance board rather than a single-institution reporting line. Its board is chaired by Scott Fraser, CZI’s vice-president of science grant programmes, and includes medRxiv co-founder Harlan Krumholz (Yale cardiologist), Princeton University president emeritus Shirley Tilghman, and CSHL president Bruce Stillman. This puts editorial and operational oversight in the hands of named scientists rather than a university administration.

    The scale bioRxiv now supports is substantial: the server has posted roughly 268,000 preprints from around 970,000 authors, adding approximately 4,000 new submissions a month, while medRxiv has posted around 64,000 preprints and adds roughly 1,000 monthly. Authors cannot post the same manuscript to both servers — submissions must be routed to bioRxiv for basic biology or medRxiv for clinical and public-health work.

    How is arXiv’s new independent nonprofit structured?

    arXiv formally left Cornell University on 1 July 2026 to become arXiv, Inc., a standalone Delaware nonprofit corporation. Under Delaware nonprofit law, arXiv, Inc. was established by two founding Members — the Simons Foundation and Cornell University — who appointed the initial Board of Directors and secured the organisation’s IRS 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.

    The Board of Directors will hold up to twelve seats, with Cornell and Simons Foundation serving as founding Members for up to five years before the seat structure opens further. arXiv, Inc. launched with three years of operating funding already secured, and Simons Foundation has committed support for at least five years.

    Unlike openRxiv’s grant-anchored model, arXiv layers a community membership programme on top of philanthropic funding: participating institutions pay up to $10,000 a year, scaled to the volume of preprints they post, in exchange for a formal voice in governance and access to usage data. Recent gift and grant activity illustrates the scale of philanthropic backing involved — arXiv received a combined $10 million from the Simons Foundation and the National Science Foundation in 2023, and a further $7 million from Schmidt Sciences and NASA in November 2025 to fund cloud migration and codebase modernisation, according to Cornell Chronicle and the arXiv blog.

    bioRxiv vs arXiv: governance and funding at a glance

    Feature bioRxiv (via openRxiv) arXiv (arXiv, Inc.)
    Founded November 2013 1991
    Field focus Life sciences (medRxiv covers clinical/health) Physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, economics
    Prior institutional host Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, until March 2025 Cornell University, until 1 July 2026
    Current governing body openRxiv (independent nonprofit, launched March 2025) arXiv, Inc. (independent Delaware nonprofit, launched 1 July 2026)
    Governance structure Researcher-led board chaired by CZI’s Scott Fraser Up to 12-member Board of Directors; Simons Foundation and Cornell as founding Members
    Anchor funder / grant $16m Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grant (2025) $10m Simons Foundation/NSF (2023); $7m Schmidt Sciences/NASA (2025)
    Funding model Philanthropic grant-backed nonprofit Community membership fees (up to $10,000/institution) plus philanthropic grants
    Scale ~268,000 preprints, ~4,000 new/month 185,692 new submissions in 2022; 5m+ monthly active users

    What sustainability lessons does this hold for research infrastructure?

    Both transitions solve the same underlying problem — a critical piece of scholarly infrastructure had outgrown dependence on a single host institution’s budget and administrative structure — but they reach different equilibria. openRxiv concentrates funding risk in a small number of major philanthropic grants and a named scientific board; arXiv, Inc. spreads risk across founding-Member philanthropy, a rotating board, and a paying community membership base that also confers governance voice.

    For research-administration audiences, the comparison matters beyond preprints. Standards bodies, taxonomies and shared research infrastructure face the identical sustainability question: who pays when the founding host can no longer carry the cost, and who is accountable once it leaves? arXiv’s membership-fee model gives institutional funders a formal stake in governance decisions, which can improve long-term buy-in but adds administrative overhead; openRxiv’s grant-concentrated model is faster to stand up but leaves the organisation more exposed to a single funder’s priorities.

    • Diversified funding (multiple grants plus membership fees) tends to reduce single-point-of-failure risk, at the cost of governance complexity.
    • A named, credentialed scientific board — as both openRxiv and arXiv, Inc. now have — signals accountability to funders and the research community alike.
    • A founding-institution “off-ramp” clause (Cornell and Simons Foundation’s five-year Member term) gives a transition period without permanent institutional lock-in.

    Neither model has a multi-year track record yet: openRxiv is little more than a year old, and arXiv, Inc. has been operating for two days at the time of writing. The next eighteen to thirty-six months, as both organisations report their first independent financial results, will be the real test of which governance structure proves more resilient.

    Common questions about bioRxiv and arXiv

    Is arXiv the same as bioRxiv?

    No. arXiv and bioRxiv are separate organisations with different founding dates, subject scopes and governance structures. arXiv (1991) covers physics, mathematics and computer science and is now run by the independent nonprofit arXiv, Inc.; bioRxiv (2013) covers life sciences and is run by the separate nonprofit openRxiv.

    Who owns bioRxiv?

    bioRxiv has no single owner; it is operated by openRxiv, an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit that launched in March 2025 after transferring from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The transition was backed by a $16 million grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and governed by a researcher-led board.

    Is bioRxiv considered a publication?

    No. bioRxiv describes itself as a repository for preprints — complete but unpublished manuscripts that have not undergone peer review. Two-thirds of bioRxiv preprints are later published in peer-reviewed journals, but the preprint itself is not treated as the final scholarly record.

    Is arXiv a respected journal?

    arXiv is not a journal at all — it is a moderated preprint repository. Submissions are checked by volunteer moderators for scope and appropriateness but are not peer-reviewed in the journal sense, even though arXiv is widely regarded as authoritative within physics, mathematics and computer science.

    Both organisations illustrate that community-run research infrastructure now increasingly separates itself from any single host institution, replacing it with dedicated nonprofit governance and diversified funding. Institutions engaged in research administration evaluating which model to support — or which to emulate for other shared infrastructure — should watch how each organisation reports its first full year of independent finances.

  • BioRxiv Submission Guidelines: A 5-Step Process for First-Time Authors

    BioRxiv submission guidelines require a single PDF (or Word file plus separate figure files), a free author-area registration, an article-category selection, and a two-step in-house-plus-Affiliate screening that typically clears in 24-48 hours. There is no submission fee, no mandatory template, and no peer review before posting. This guide walks first-time authors through each stage, the templates available, and the reasons manuscripts most often get sent back.

    bioRxiv is the life-sciences preprint server operated by the non-profit openRxiv; a preprint is a complete, citable manuscript posted before or during formal peer review, and bioRxiv assigns it a Crossref DOI (prefix 10.1101) as soon as screening is passed. Clinical trial reports and most epidemiology studies must instead go to bioRxiv’s sister server, medRxiv — submitting one of these to bioRxiv is itself a common rejection reason, covered in section four below.

    1. What are bioRxiv’s submission requirements?

    bioRxiv does not enforce a house style, but it does enforce a fixed submission format and a content-eligibility test. The manuscript must be unpublished at the time of deposit, all co-authors must have consented to posting, and the work must fall within a relevant life-sciences subject category.

    Submission route What you upload Conversion
    Single PDF Full text, figures and tables combined None needed — this is the simplest route
    Word + separate figures Word file for text/tables; figures as JPEG, TIFF, EPS or PowerPoint bioRxiv’s automated engine builds the PDF
    LaTeX Manuscript converted to PDF before upload (LaTeX source may accompany it as Supplemental Material) Author-side conversion required

    Large primary datasets belong in a community database such as GenBank or the Protein Data Bank rather than as Supplemental Material, in line with the Fort Lauderdale data-sharing guidelines that bioRxiv references directly in its submission guide.

    2. Setting up your bioRxiv author area

    Every submission starts with a free account on the bioRxiv Manuscript Processing System at submit.biorxiv.org. The bioRxiv author area is where you register, start a new submission, continue a saved draft, proof a converted manuscript, and later submit revisions.

    1. Register with an institutional or personal email address — no institutional affiliation is required to create an account.
    2. Enter the author area and select “Submit a New Manuscript.”
    3. Upload files, enter co-author details for every listed author, and add funder names and grant numbers.
    4. Select an article category: New Results, Confirmatory Results, or Contradictory Results.
    5. Choose a distribution licence — CC BY, CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-ND, CC0, or no reuse.

    Copyright remains with the author throughout. Once a version is posted, it cannot be deleted, but authors can submit a revision at any time before journal acceptance via the same author-area screen.

    3. Choosing a manuscript template

    A bioRxiv template is optional, not mandatory — the platform explicitly states it does not require a particular article format or style, and many authors simply reuse the formatting of their target journal. Two community-maintained options cover most first-time authors.

    • Word template: a community-built .docx template on GitHub styled after published bioRxiv papers, useful if you want a clean starting structure without building one from scratch.
    • bioRxiv LaTeX template: several Overleaf templates are built specifically for bioRxiv preprints and can often be re-purposed for the eventual journal submission, saving reformatting time later in the pipeline.

    Whichever route you choose, convert LaTeX output to PDF before upload — bioRxiv’s system does not compile .tex source directly.

    4. What happens after you submit (timeline and screening)

    Submitted manuscripts go through two screening stages before posting. In-house staff first check completeness and confirm the article type is eligible; volunteer Principal Investigators known as bioRxiv Affiliates then assess whether the work constitutes genuine biological research and whether it poses any public-harm or biosecurity risk.

    This combined process is the answer to a frequent search — bioRxiv submission time — and typically completes within 24-48 hours of upload. Once approved, the PDF posts immediately; conversion to full-text HTML and XML can take a further 1-2 days, so the machine-readable version usually lags the PDF by up to 48 hours.

    Stage Typical duration
    Registration and upload Immediate
    In-house completeness/eligibility check Same day to 24 hours
    Affiliate biosecurity/scope review Within 24-48 hours total
    PDF posting after approval Immediate
    Full-text HTML/XML conversion Up to 48 additional hours

    5. Common rejection reasons and how to avoid them

    bioRxiv’s own screening documentation and content-scope rules point to a consistent set of avoidable rejections for first-time authors.

    • Wrong content type: case reports, narrative reviews, editorials, letters, opinion pieces, hypotheses without new data, and laboratory protocols without accompanying results are all excluded from bioRxiv’s scope.
    • Wrong server: clinical trial results and most epidemiology studies must go to medRxiv, not bioRxiv — this single misrouting error is one of the most common first-submission mistakes.
    • Already published: a manuscript that has already been accepted by a journal cannot be deposited as a new bioRxiv submission.
    • Missing author consent: every listed co-author must have agreed to posting before submission; disputes here stall or block screening.
    • Biosecurity or dual-use concerns: Affiliates specifically screen for material that could pose a health or biosecurity risk, which can delay or prevent posting even for otherwise sound science.
    • Non-scientific or promotional content: bioRxiv is explicitly not a channel for news, product advertisements, or policy statements.

    6. Frequently asked questions

    Can anyone submit to bioRxiv?

    Yes — any author whose manuscript concerns a relevant scientific field, is unpublished, and has the consent of all co-authors can deposit it after free registration. No institutional affiliation is required, and there is no submission fee.

    When should you submit to bioRxiv?

    A manuscript can be submitted at any point before journal publication. Once a journal has formally published the paper, it can no longer be newly deposited as a bioRxiv preprint, though the platform still allows revisions of an existing preprint right up to journal acceptance.

    How long does a bioRxiv submission take?

    Screening typically completes within 24-48 hours of upload, after which the PDF posts immediately. The full-text HTML and XML version follows separately and can take up to 48 further hours to appear.

    How much does it cost to submit to bioRxiv?

    There is no charge for registration or for depositing an article. bioRxiv funds screening and hosting as a non-profit service operated by openRxiv rather than through author-facing fees.

    7. Implications for research offices and institutions

    Research-administration teams increasingly track preprints as part of grant-compliance and output reporting, not just publication records. The U.S. National Institutes of Health has, since Notice NOT-OD-17-050, explicitly permitted investigators to cite preprints — including bioRxiv postings — in grant applications and progress reports, and cOAlition S’s Plan S framework recognises preprints as a valid interim compliance route ahead of a peer-reviewed version.

    Because a bioRxiv DOI is assigned at posting and persists across revisions, institutions can use it as a stable identifier to link the preprint, the eventual journal version, and contributor metadata. Where a project already uses the CRediT contributor role taxonomy to record who did what — CASRAI originated CRediT in 2014, and the taxonomy is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 — carrying those role assignments into the preprint stage keeps authorship records consistent from first deposit through final publication.

    bioRxiv’s direct-transfer (B2J) programme, which now spans more than 190 partner journals and peer-review services, also removes a second manual re-entry step for research-office staff supporting authors through submission — files and metadata move directly from the bioRxiv author area to the receiving journal without being re-uploaded.

    Building preprinting into standard practice

    For first-time authors, the practical barrier to bioRxiv is low: no fee, no mandatory template, and a screening turnaround measured in hours rather than weeks. The remaining friction is almost entirely about content fit — choosing the right server, the right article category, and confirming every co-author has consented before upload.

    Institutions that build preprint deposit into standard research-administration workflows — alongside DOI tracking, contributor-role records, and funder-mandate checks — turn a one-off submission task into a repeatable, auditable step in the research lifecycle.

  • openRxiv Explained: Why bioRxiv and medRxiv Went Independent

    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?

    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.

  • bioRxiv vs medRxiv vs Research Square: Choosing the Right Preprint Server in 2026

    As preprinting shifts from niche practice to default first step in the publication pipeline, research offices are increasingly asked a deceptively simple question: which server should an author use? The bioRxiv vs medRxiv choice is the one that comes up most often, because the two platforms sit side by side in the life and health sciences yet operate under different screening rules and community expectations. Add Research Square’s multidisciplinary, journal-integrated model into the mix, and the decision has real consequences for timing, discoverability and compliance with funder and publisher policies.

    This is not a trivial administrative detail. With NIH data-sharing enforcement now active, UKRI’s open access policy explicitly recognising preprints as a route to compliance, and cOAlition S continuing to encourage early dissemination, research administrators are the people authors turn to when a grant deadline, a REF output query, or a journal’s dual-submission policy collides with a preprint decision. Getting the venue right the first time avoids withdrawal-and-repost headaches later.

    What Is bioRxiv? Scope and Screening for the Life Sciences

    What is bioRxiv, in practical terms? Launched in 2013 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), bioRxiv is the default preprint server for biology, covering categories from genetics and neuroscience to ecology, bioinformatics and synthetic biology. It does not carry out peer review; instead, an in-house screening team checks submissions for plagiarism, non-scientific content and material that could raise dual-use or biosecurity concerns. That screening is deliberately lightweight — most manuscripts clear it within a few days — because the platform’s purpose is speed: getting findings into circulation before, or in parallel with, journal submission.

    bioRxiv’s community norms reflect that speed-first design. Authors post early drafts, sometimes before all co-authors have signed off on final wording, and revise versions as review proceeds. Citation of bioRxiv preprints is now normalised across molecular and cell biology, and many journals in the space explicitly permit prior preprint posting, consistent with the ICMJE’s position that preprints are not considered duplicate publication.

    medRxiv’s Extra Safeguards for Clinical and Public Health Research

    medRxiv, launched in 2019 as a partnership between CSHL, Yale University and BMJ, exists precisely because health research carries a different risk profile. Findings about a treatment, a diagnostic tool or a public health intervention can influence clinical decisions or media coverage well before formal peer review has tested their validity — a risk that became impossible to ignore during the COVID-19 pandemic, when preprint clinical claims were repeatedly picked up by outlets without appropriate caveats.

    Accordingly, medRxiv’s screening is more demanding than bioRxiv’s. Submissions are checked for evidence of ethical oversight — IRB or research ethics committee approval or an explicit exemption — and clinical trials must carry a registration ID from an ICMJE-recognised registry such as ClinicalTrials.gov. Screeners also check for material that could identify individual patients or participants. This typically extends the screening window to several days and sometimes longer where in-house queries to authors are needed. Every medRxiv preprint additionally carries a standard notice warning readers not to treat it as established clinical guidance and not to report on it in the media without expert review — a norm bioRxiv does not apply as prominently. COPE’s guidance on preprints reinforces this distinction: the ethical stakes of premature clinical dissemination are materially higher than for most basic-science findings.

    Research Square: Multidisciplinary Reach and Journal-Integrated Preprinting

    Research Square, founded in 2016 and acquired by Springer Nature in 2022, takes a third approach. Rather than specialising by discipline, it accepts preprints across all fields — chemistry, engineering, social sciences, humanities-adjacent research — and its distinguishing feature is In Review, a service used by more than a thousand participating journals. Authors can opt, at the point of journal submission, to have their manuscript automatically posted as a preprint carrying a Crossref DOI and a CC-BY 4.0 licence, with the posting timeline synchronised to the journal’s peer review process. If the paper is accepted, the preprint links through to the published version; if rejected, it remains on the platform with journal branding removed.

    This integration changes the calculus for authors and administrators alike: the decision to preprint becomes a checkbox during submission rather than a separate deposit step, and the resulting record is archived in Portico for long-term preservation. The trade-off is that Research Square’s screening is a light “prescreen” rather than a discipline-specific ethics check, so it does not substitute for medRxiv’s clinical safeguards when the underlying research involves human subjects.

    bioRxiv vs medRxiv: Community Norms, Screening Time and Choosing the Right Venue

    Reduced to a single comparison, the bioRxiv vs medRxiv decision usually comes down to subject matter rather than preference. Laboratory-based biology, genomics, ecology and computational biology belong on bioRxiv, where the community expects rapid posting and light-touch screening. Anything involving patients, clinical trials, epidemiological data or public health interventions belongs on medRxiv, where the additional ethics and registry checks — and the accompanying reader caution notice — are the norm authors and readers now expect. Mixed-methods studies that straddle both (for example, a biomarker study with clinical trial data) are typically routed to medRxiv because of its subject-matter screening for human-participant research.

    Research Square becomes the right answer when the target journal offers In Review, when the field falls outside strict biology or health sciences, or when an author wants preprinting handled automatically as part of submission rather than as a separate action. None of these three platforms competes on rigour of peer review — none of them performs peer review at all — so the choice is really about matching screening depth and community expectations to the sensitivity of the findings.

    What This Means for Research Administrators

    Research offices supporting authors through this decision should keep several practicalities in mind:

    • Match the server to the risk profile, not just the discipline label — a biology-adjacent study with human data belongs on medRxiv, not bioRxiv, because of the ethics-approval and trial-registration checks.
    • Advise on funder and REF implications separately. A preprint DOI is not automatically an eligible REF output; administrators should confirm that authors also deposit the accepted manuscript once peer review concludes.
    • Check ORCID linkage at submission. All three platforms support ORCID iDs, and consistent linkage keeps the preprint, the eventual published article and institutional repository records connected via Crossref DOIs.
    • Flag journal dual-submission policies early. Most major publishers now follow ICMJE guidance that preprints are not prior publication, but a minority of venues retain restrictions, so this is worth a five-minute check before posting.
    • Treat CRediT contributor statements as part of the preprint record, not an afterthought. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014, and the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022; applying it consistently from preprint to final publication reduces later authorship disputes.

    As preprint culture becomes the expected first step rather than an optional extra, the administrative burden shifts from “should we preprint” to “which server, and what compliance checks follow from that choice.” Institutions that build simple decision guidance — discipline, human-subjects status, target journal integration — into their researcher-facing documentation will spend less time untangling withdrawal requests and mismatched registry records later. The underlying standards bodies, from ICMJE to COPE to NISO, are converging on the same principle: preprints are a legitimate part of the scholarly record, provided the screening, registration and attribution practices around them are transparent and consistently applied.