Preprint sites bioRxiv and medRxiv launch new era of independence

The popular repositories, where life scientists post research before peer review, will be managed by a new organization called openRxiv

bioRxiv, a preprint repository for biology, launched in 2013.Credit: Tom Houghton for *Nature*

A new chapter has begun for two of the world’s most popular preprint platforms, bioRxiv and medRxiv, with the launch of a non-profit organization that will manage them, their co-founders announced on 11 March.

The servers allow researchers to share manuscripts for free before peer review and have become an integral part of publishing biology and medical research. Until now, they had been managed by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in New York. The new organization, named openRxiv, will have a board of directors and a scientific and medical advisory board. It is supported by a fresh US$16-million grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the projects’ main financial backer.

“It’s just exciting to see this key piece of infrastructure really get the attention that it deserves as a dedicated initiative,” says Katie Corker, executive director of ASAPbio, a scientist-driven non-profit organization, which is based in San Francisco, California. Preprints are “the backbone of the scientific publishing ecosystem, maybe especially at the current moment, when there’s a lot of worries about who has control of information.”

The launch of openRxiv “reflects a maturation of the projects”, which started as an experiment at CSHL, says Richard Sever, a co-founder of both servers and chief science and strategy officer at openRxiv. It has “become so important that they should have their own organization running them, which is focused on the long-term sustainability of the servers, as opposed to being a side project within a big research institution”, says Sever.

Thousands of submissions

Since its launch in 2013, bioRxiv, which covers biological science, including neuroscience, bioinformatics and genomics — has posted about 268,000 preprints by more than 970,000 authors. Its younger sibling medRxiv — founded in 2019 to cover medical sciences — has nearly 64,000 preprints from more than 380,000 authors. Together, the repositories draw more than 11 million monthly readers and post about 4,000 and 1,000 new submissions per month, respectively.

BioRxiv and medRxiv are financially supported by grants and donations from the CZI in Redwood City, California — which has contributed about $31.7 million since 2017 — and by some US and European academic and philanthropic institutions.