CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: trends in scholarly communication

  • 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.

  • 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication: 2026

    101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication is a 2015–2016 survey and open dataset, built by Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman of Utrecht University Library, that mapped how more than 20,000 researchers, librarians, publishers and funders were adopting digital tools across six phases of the research workflow. Revisited a decade on, the underlying dataset and taxonomy still frame how institutions read today’s tool landscape — and they show preprints moving from a peripheral publication tactic to a structural stage in the scholarly communication cycle.

    101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication is best understood as both a crowdsourced database of research tools and a workflow taxonomy: it organises tool adoption into six stages — discovery, analysis, writing, publication, outreach and assessment — and remains the most cited empirical baseline for how digital tools reshaped academic practice before the current wave of open-science mandates.

    What is the 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication project?

    The project began in spring 2015 when Kramer and Bosman launched a survey asking researchers and research-support staff which tools and services they actually used, rather than which they were told to use. The survey ran from May 2015 to February 2016 and drew responses from over 20,000 participants worldwide, making it one of the largest empirical pictures of research-tool adoption ever assembled.

    Crucially, the project was never a simple popularity poll. Kramer and Bosman built a crowdsourced resource database of research tools alongside the survey, and published the anonymised dataset openly — a practice that itself demonstrated the open-science values the project was measuring. The output most people recognise is the poster mapping roughly 101 tools by year of launch and workflow stage, first presented at Force2015 and reproduced across library guides and blogs ever since.

    What did the six-phase workflow reveal about tool adoption?

    The survey’s most durable contribution is its six-phase model of the research workflow: discovery, analysis, writing, publication, outreach and assessment. Each phase captured a different cluster of emerging tools, from literature-alert services in discovery to altmetrics providers in assessment, and the analysis found a median of around 22 different tools in active use per respondent.

    That figure mattered because it quantified a problem institutions were only beginning to name: workflow fragmentation. Researchers were not choosing a single platform; they were stitching together a personal stack, often spanning free, subscription and institutionally licensed tools. The published analysis also flagged a specific risk — that publishers such as Elsevier and Springer Nature were acquiring tools across multiple phases, raising the prospect of vendor lock-in across an entire research workflow rather than a single product.

    Workflow phase 2015 survey emphasis 2026 landscape signal
    Discovery Alerts, Google Scholar, library databases AI-assisted literature search layered onto existing indexes
    Analysis Excel, SPSS, early notebooks Open notebooks and reproducible-analysis pipelines
    Writing Word processors, early collaborative editors Cloud-native collaborative authoring as default
    Publication Preprints as an emerging, minority practice Preprints as a funder-recognised compliance route
    Outreach Dropbox used more than GitHub for sharing protocols Persistent-identifier-linked outputs (DOIs, ORCID) as default
    Assessment Early altmetrics alongside citation counts Contributor-role taxonomies alongside altmetrics

    Where do preprints sit in the research cycle now?

    In the 2015 dataset, preprint servers appeared in the publication phase as one option among many, used by a minority of respondents concentrated in physics, mathematics and, increasingly, biology. A decade later, scientific preprints have moved from a niche discovery-to-publication bridge to a structural checkpoint that funders and journals actively reference.

    This shift is visible in funder policy rather than survey sentiment alone. cOAlition S’s Plan S rights-retention approach explicitly permits preprint deposit combined with a rights-retention licence as a route to immediate open-access compliance, and journals across the life sciences now routinely accept manuscripts that have already circulated on bioRxiv or medRxiv. The practical effect is that preprints no longer sit only in the “outreach” gap the original survey identified between writing and formal publication — they now function as a recognised, citable stage in their own right within the scholarly communication cycle.

    What the 2015 baseline still gets right is the underlying diagnosis: tool adoption in scholarly communication rarely moves as a single wave. Preprints diffused unevenly by discipline then, and adoption of preprint-linked policies remains uneven by discipline and funder now — the survey’s disaggregated view of workflow stages is why that unevenness is still visible rather than averaged away.

    How has the standards and identifier layer changed since 2015?

    The 2015 survey’s vendor lock-in warning has a direct institutional answer that has matured substantially since the data was collected: the persistent-identifier and standards layer. ORCID identifiers for researchers, DataCite DOIs for datasets, and the Research Organization Registry (ROR) for institutional affiliation now interoperate across discovery, publication and assessment tools in a way that was still emergent in 2015.

    Contributor attribution has followed the same trajectory. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014, the same year the 101 Innovations survey was being designed; the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, giving the “assessment” phase of the original workflow model a formal, interoperable vocabulary for who-did-what that the survey’s respondents were, at the time, largely improvising without.

    • ORCID: persistent identifiers for individual researchers, reducing name-disambiguation friction across discovery and assessment tools.
    • DataCite: DOI registration for datasets and other non-article outputs, extending citability beyond the journal article.
    • ROR: standardised institutional identifiers, used increasingly by funders and publishers for affiliation matching.
    • ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 (CRediT): a controlled taxonomy of contributor roles, now stewarded by NISO.

    Answer-first questions on the survey and its legacy

    What is the 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication survey?

    It is a 2015–2016 survey and open dataset created by Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman of Utrecht University Library, which asked over 20,000 researchers and research-support staff which digital tools they used across six phases of the research workflow, then published the anonymised results openly.

    What are the six phases of the scholarly communication cycle it identified?

    The survey defined the cycle as discovery, analysis, writing, publication, outreach and assessment. Each phase groups a distinct set of tools, from literature-alert services and reference managers through to altmetrics and peer-review platforms, giving institutions a structured way to audit workflow tool adoption.

    Why did the survey warn about vendor lock-in?

    The analysis found large commercial publishers acquiring tools spanning multiple workflow phases, meaning a researcher could end up dependent on a single company’s suite from discovery through assessment. That concentration risk is the reason interoperable, standards-based alternatives such as ORCID, DataCite and ROR have gained institutional priority since.

    Are preprints still a minority practice in scholarly communication?

    No. Preprints have shifted from a discipline-specific minority practice in 2015 to a funder-recognised compliance route under policies such as cOAlition S’s rights-retention strategy, with routine preprint-to-journal pipelines now standard in fields including biomedicine and physics.

    What this means for institutions, publishers and developers

    For research administrators and institutional leaders, the practical lesson from re-reading the 101 Innovations dataset in 2026 is that workflow fragmentation has not disappeared — it has been partially re-solved through standards rather than consolidation. Where the 2015 survey found researchers assembling a median of 22 tools with little interoperability, the current landscape increasingly links those tools through shared persistent identifiers and controlled vocabularies rather than through a single vendor suite.

    For publishers and developers building on the scholarly communication cycle, the implication is that preprint infrastructure, contributor-role metadata, and organisational identifiers are no longer optional add-ons; they are the connective tissue the original survey’s respondents were missing. The next iteration of tool-landscape research will need to measure not just which tools researchers pick, but how well those tools speak to each other across the discovery-to-assessment pipeline — a question the original taxonomy was designed to surface, and one that remains unresolved a decade on.

  • Scientific Preprints: What the 2026 Survey Shows

    Scientific preprints are now a routine part of research life, but new 2026 survey evidence shows researchers remain deeply divided on whether posting one helps or hurts a career. A scientific preprint is a complete draft of a research manuscript shared publicly before formal peer review, most commonly via a discipline-specific server such as bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv or Preprints.org. Across three separate studies published in 2025-2026, most researchers say preprints speed up dissemination and widen visibility, yet a majority still believe evaluators reward peer-reviewed journal articles over preprints when it comes to hiring, promotion and funding decisions.

    What do the 2026 preprint surveys actually show?

    The most detailed new evidence comes from a survey of nearly 1,800 biomedical researchers in the United States and Canada, fielded in early 2025 and posted to bioRxiv in March 2026 under the title “Faster science, penalties in evaluation, and concerns on quality and impact: Researchers’ use and perceptions of preprints”. Its findings, also reported by Science/AAAS, describe engagement driven mainly by speed rather than any deeper commitment to open science.

    Two smaller but complementary studies add discipline and geography to the picture: a 2026 cross-sectional survey of 103 medical faculty at Marmara University in Türkiye, published in JMIRx Med, and a 2025 nationwide survey of 170 early-career researchers in India, run by the Indian National Young Academy of Science with the International Science Council and reported by Research Matters. Together they show that global attitudes to preprints are not converging; they are fragmenting by discipline, career stage and national research-assessment culture.

    How many researchers read, cite and post preprints?

    In the US/Canada biomedical survey, two-thirds of respondents had read at least one preprint in the previous two years, roughly half had submitted one themselves, and only about one-third had cited one in their own published work. Nearly half of respondents said they worried preprints could spread shoddy research or misinformation before it has been checked.

    Survey Population and date Sample size Headline finding
    Researchers’ Use and Perceptions of Preprints (bioRxiv, 2026) US and Canadian biomedical researchers, fielded early 2025 ~1,800 Two-thirds had read a preprint in two years; most did not believe posting one improved career prospects
    Awareness, Experiences and Attitudes Toward Preprints Among Medical Academics (JMIRx Med, 2026) Medical faculty, Marmara University, Türkiye 103 Awareness was inconsistent and clinical adoption remained cautious
    INYAS/International Science Council nationwide survey (2025) Early-career researchers, India 170 52.3% cited fear of being “scooped” as the top barrier to posting a preprint

    The gap between reading, citing and posting matters. Researchers evidently trust preprints enough to consult them for current findings, but a much smaller group is willing to stake a citation, and fewer still are willing to post their own unreviewed work under their name.

    Do preprints help or hurt career advancement?

    The bioRxiv survey is unambiguous on this point: researchers on average do not believe publishing preprints enhances their career advancement. More than 60% of respondents who sit on funding, hiring or tenure committees said they give more credit to peer-reviewed papers than to preprints, and fewer than 12% said they credit both equally. Only around 16% strongly agreed that preprints reduce the weight evaluators place on articles in subscription, peer-reviewed journals.

    Yet the same respondents were not dismissive of preprints as a practice. Two-thirds of hiring-committee members said they viewed preprints favourably as evidence of productivity and momentum, even while acknowledging that a preprint carries less formal weight than a peer-reviewed publication. Researchers also credited preprints with two concrete, non-evaluative benefits: they spread findings faster than peer-reviewed journals do, and they help authors find collaborators. Credibility judgements, meanwhile, still lean heavily on author reputation rather than any formal quality signal attached to the preprint itself.

    • Career-advancement belief: low, on average, across all three 2025-2026 surveys.
    • Speed-to-dissemination benefit: consistently rated the strongest advantage.
    • Credibility heuristic: author and institutional reputation, not peer review status.
    • Formal recognition in tenure and promotion frameworks: still rare or absent.

    Why does adoption vary so much by country and discipline?

    Adoption is shaped less by technology access than by how national research-assessment systems treat unreviewed work. In India, the top-cited barrier to posting a preprint was fear of being “scooped” (52.3% of respondents in the INYAS/International Science Council survey), closely followed by a lack of institutional recognition. A genuine, if narrow, policy shift is under way there: India’s University Grants Commission guidelines now permit preprints to be considered as part of doctoral-degree assessment, a concrete recognition step most other jurisdictions have not yet matched.

    In Türkiye, the JMIRx Med survey of clinical academics found inconsistent awareness of what a preprint even is, alongside caution rooted in traditional publishing norms in medicine. That pattern echoes wider findings from Digital Science’s 2025 State of Open Data report, the longest-running annual survey of open-research behaviour, which found that two-thirds of over 43,000 researcher respondents still feel they receive insufficient credit for open practices generally — a “credit gap” that maps directly onto preprint hesitancy.

    Answer-first: common preprint questions

    What is a scientific preprint?

    A scientific preprint is a complete manuscript version shared publicly, typically via a dedicated server, before it has completed formal peer review or journal publication. It lets researchers establish priority and gather early feedback while the manuscript is still moving through review at a journal.

    Are preprints credible?

    Preprints carry no guarantee of quality because they bypass formal peer review, but many undergo basic screening by the hosting server. Survey evidence shows readers judge credibility mainly by author reputation and institutional affiliation rather than any formal quality mark on the preprint itself.

    Can preprints be cited in academic work?

    Yes. Major style guides, including APA, provide explicit reference formats for preprints, and ICMJE recommendations permit citing them provided the version is clearly identified as unreviewed. Reviewers should still prefer the peer-reviewed version once one exists.

    Do preprints help or hurt a researcher’s career?

    2026 survey data show a split effect: preprints speed up dissemination and help researchers find collaborators, but most respondents do not believe posting one improves career advancement, and over 60% of evaluators still credit peer-reviewed papers more heavily in hiring and tenure decisions.

    What this means for institutions and publishers

    The consistent finding across all three 2025-2026 surveys is a mismatch between researcher behaviour and institutional recognition. Researchers are reading, and increasingly posting, preprints for pragmatic reasons — speed, visibility, collaboration — while formal evaluation frameworks lag behind. India’s UGC decision to count preprints toward doctoral assessment is a rare example of policy catching up with practice; most institutions have not made an equivalent move.

    For research administrators and publishers, the practical implication is that preprint policy cannot be treated as a peer-review question alone. It touches authorship and contribution standards, since credit for early-shared work still needs to be attributed accurately, and it belongs firmly within research administration policy on how non-traditional outputs are counted in assessment. Clear institutional guidance — not just server-level screening — is what closes the credit gap these surveys describe.

    Where preprint culture goes next

    None of the 2025-2026 evidence suggests preprint use will slow. Reading and posting rates are already high across biomedical fields, and funders are steadily normalising rapid, open sharing of results. What has not caught up is formal recognition: until hiring, promotion and funding committees credit preprints on comparable terms to peer-reviewed work, the gap between researcher enthusiasm and institutional reward will persist. The 2026 surveys make that gap measurable for the first time at this scale — the next test is whether assessment frameworks respond.