bioRxiv (pronounced "bio-archive"
) is an
open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...
preprint
In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset versi ...
repository for the
biological sciences
Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary ...
co-founded by
John Inglis and
Richard Sever in November 2013.
It is hosted by the
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is a private, non-profit institution with research programs focusing on cancer, neuroscience, plant biology, genomics, and quantitative biology.
It is one of 68 institutions supported by the Cancer Centers ...
(CSHL).
As preprints, papers hosted on bioRxiv are not
peer-review
Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...
ed, but undergo basic screening and checked against plagiarism. However, peer reviews from other sources may be posted alongside preprints. Moreover, readers may post comments.
It has been measured that two thirds of the papers posted in bioRxiv are later published in peer-reviewed journals.
A service called Rxivist parses the metadata of preprints from bioRxiv, and combines it with data from Twitter allowing to detect trending preprints.
MedRxiv, and its sister site, bioRxiv, have been major sources for the dissemination of
COVID-19
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The disease quick ...
research.
History
BioRxiv was inspired by and intends to complement the
arXiv
arXiv (pronounced "archive"—the X represents the Greek letter chi ⟨χ⟩) is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists of ...
repository, which mostly focuses on
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
,
physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which ...
and connected disciplines, launched in 1991 by
Paul Ginsparg
Paul Henry Ginsparg (born January 1, 1955) is a physicist. He developed the arXiv.org e-print archive.
Education
He is a graduate of Syosset High School in Syosset, New York. He graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in phy ...
(who also serves on the bioRxiv advisory board). It received support from both the CSHL and the
Lourie Foundation.
Additional funding from the
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is an organization established and owned by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan with an investment of 99 percent of the couple's wealth from their Facebook shares over their lifet ...
was confirmed in April 2017.
Prior to the establishment of bioRxiv, biological scientists were divided on the issue of having a dedicated preprint
open-access repository An open repository or open-access repository is a digital platform that holds research output and provides free, immediate and permanent access to research results for anyone to use, download and distribute. To facilitate open access such repositori ...
.
[ Many had concerns of having their research scooped by competitors and losing their claim to ]discovery
Discovery may refer to:
* Discovery (observation), observing or finding something unknown
* Discovery (fiction), a character's learning something unknown
* Discovery (law), a process in courts of law relating to evidence
Discovery, The Discove ...
. However, several geneticists had submitted papers to the " quantitative biology" section of the arXiv repository (launched in 2003) and no longer had those concerns, as they could point to preprints to support their claims of discovery.
Submission rate
Jocelyn Kaiser of ''Science
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence ...
'' said that in its first year, the repository had "attracted a modest but growing stream of papers", having hosted 824 preprints.[
As of February 2016, the submission rate to bioRxiv had steadily increased from ≈60 to ≈200 per month.][ In 2017, the number of monthly submissions rose from over 800 in March to more than 1000 in July]
Fields
bioRxiv accepts preprints in the following disciplines
bioRxiv, journals, and
open peer review
Open peer review is the various possible modifications of the traditional scholarly peer review process. The three most common modifications to which the term is applied are:
# Open identities: Authors and reviewers are aware of each other's ident ...
As a result of bioRxiv's popularity, many biology journals have updated their policies on preprints,[ clarifying they do not consider preprints to be a 'prior publication' for purpose of the ]Ingelfinger rule In scientific publishing, the 1969 Ingelfinger rule originally stipulated that ''The New England Journal of Medicine'' (''NEJM'') would not publish findings that had been published elsewhere, in other media or in other journals. The rule was subseq ...
.
The bioRxiv to Journals (B2J) initiative allows authors to submit their manuscript directly to a journal's submission system through bioRxiv. As of May 2020, 177 journals participate in the initiative.[
In 2019, BioRxiv started allowing posting reviews alongside preprints, in addition to allowing comments on preprints. The reviews can come from journals or from platforms such as Review Commons.]
See also
* List of preprint repositories
This is a list of preprint repositories.
List
See also
* List of academic journals by preprint policy This is a list of Academic publishing, publishers of academic journals by their submission policies regarding the use of preprints prior t ...
* ArXiv
arXiv (pronounced "archive"—the X represents the Greek letter chi ⟨χ⟩) is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists of ...
* ChemRxiv
ChemRxiv (pronounced "chem archive"—the X represents the Greek letter chi ‡ is an open access preprint archive for chemistry. It is operated by the American Chemical Society, Royal Society of Chemistry and German Chemical Society. The new pre ...
* MedRxiv
* PeerJ Preprints
''PeerJ'' is an open access peer-reviewed scientific mega journal covering research in the biological and medical sciences. It is published by a company of the same name that was co-founded by CEO Jason Hoyt (formerly at Mendeley) and publisher ...
References
Further reading
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External links
*
{{Open access navbox
American digital libraries
Biology websites
Eprint archives
Internet properties established in 2013
Online archives of the United States
Open-access archives