bioRxiv is an open accesspreprint repository for the biological sciences co-founded by John Inglis and Richard Sever in November 2013. It is hosted by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. As preprints, papers hosted on bioRxiv are not peer-reviewed, but undergo basic screening and checked against plagiarism. Readers may offer comments on the preprint. It was inspired by and intends to complement the arXivrepository, which mostly focuses on physics and connected disciplines, launched in 1991 by Paul Ginsparg. It received support from both the CSHL and the Lourie Foundation. Additional funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative 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. Many had concerns of having their research scooped by competitors and losing their claim to discovery. However, several geneticists had submitted papers to the "quantitative biology" section of the arXiv repository and no longer had those concerns, as they could point to preprints to support their claims of discovery. As a result of bioRxiv's popularity, several 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. Over 20,000 tweets were made about bioRxiv-hosted preprints in 2015. In July 2017, the number of monthly submissions exceeded 1,000. As of December 31, 2019, over 68,000 papers have been accepted in total. A service called Rxivist combines preprints from bioRxiv with data from Twitter to rank pre-prints. MedRxiv, and its sister site, bioRxiv, have been major sources for the dissemination of research COVID-19.
Submission rate
Jocelyn Kaiser of Science said that in their 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 with a total number of 10,722 papers submitted in 2017. In the year of 2018, a total of 20,000 manuscripts were submitted, which results in a monthly average of 1600 papers. In the year 2019, over 31,000 manuscripts were submitted, which results in a monthly average of 2600 papers.
Fields
bioRxiv accepts preprints in the following disciplines
bioRxiv to Journals
The bioRxiv to Journals 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.
