About bioRxiv

bioRxiv (pronounced "bio-archive") is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences. It is operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a not-for-profit research and educational institution. By posting preprints on bioRxiv, authors are able to make their findings immediately available to the scientific community and receive feedback on draft manuscripts before they are submitted to journals.

Articles are not peer-reviewed, edited, or typeset before being posted online. However, all articles undergo a basic screening process for offensive and/or non-scientific content and for material that might pose a health or biosecurity risk and are checked for plagiarism. No endorsement of an article’s methods, assumptions, conclusions, or scientific quality by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is implied by its appearance in bioRxiv. An article may be posted prior to, or concurrently with, submission to a journal but should not be posted if it has already been accepted for publication by a journal.

Authors are free to submit a revised version of an article at any time prior to its formal acceptance by a journal by clicking "Submit a Revision" within the Author Area. Once posted on bioRxiv, articles are citable and therefore cannot be removed.

SCOPE

bioRxiv accepts preprints of articles covering all aspects of research in the life sciences. When posting an article, the author assigns it to one of the following categories:

Articles in the physical sciences, mathematics, or social sciences should only be posted on bioRxiv if they have direct relevance to the life sciences. Articles in these areas that are not relevant to life sciences should instead be posted on servers such as arXiv, which bioRxiv is intended to complement.

ARTICLE CATEGORIES

Articles in bioRxiv are categorized as New Results, Confirmatory Results, or Contradictory Results. New Results describe an advance in a field. Confirmatory Results largely replicate and confirm previously published work, whereas Contradictory Results largely replicate experimental approaches used in previously published work but the results contradict and/or do not
support it.

COMMENTING

Readers may add public comments to articles on bioRxiv. Comments are moderated to ensure they conform to the standards of normal professional discourse. Readers are also free to contact authors directly.

TERMS OF DISTRIBUTION

Authors retain copyright and choose from several distribution/reuse options under which to make the article available (CC BY, CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-ND, CC0, or no reuse). By posting on bioRxiv, authors explicitly consent to text mining of their work (e.g., by search engines or researchers).

bioRxiv reserves the right to identify and remove any articles that contain plagiarized material or describe experimental work that is not performed in accordance with the relevant ethical standards for research using animals or human subjects.

JOURNAL PREPRINT POLICIES

Most research journals allow posting on preprint servers such as bioRxiv prior to publication. A list of journal policies can be found on Wikipedia and SHERPA/RoMEO. Authors should consult these lists and other sources of information before posting on bioRxiv.

PUBLICATION

bioRxiv will usually automatically add a link to the published version within several weeks of journal publication. On occasion a match is not made because the title or authors have changed or due to other contingencies. Please wait 2-3 weeks before contacting bioRxiv staff should the link not appear.

PRIVACY POLICY: COLLECTION AND USE OF PERSONAL DATA

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is committed to protecting the privacy of authors, preprint server Affiliates, and other users of the bioRxiv submission system and website. Click to read the full Privacy Policy.

CITATION

Preprints deposited in bioRxiv can be cited using their digital object identifier (DOI). bioRxiv DOIs assigned prior to December 11, 2019, have a simple six-digit suffix, whereas those assigned after this date will also include the date stamp for the day of submission approval (see below). Revised versions of manuscripts retain the same DOI assigned to the first version.

Example: Author AN, Author BT. 2013. My article title. bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2019.12.11.123456

If there are multiple versions of the preprint and you wish to cite a specific version, you can do so by adding the version-specific URL.

Example: doi: 10.1101/2019.12.11.123456 version 2, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2019.12.11.123456v2

Advisory Board

Affiliates

bioRxiv Affiliates are members of the scientific community who provide feedback on the service, act as advocates, and help in screening material submitted.

Frequently Asked Questions

Answers to many common questions can be found on bioRxiv's FAQ.

TEXT & DATA MINING

bioRxiv provides free and unrestricted access to all articles posted on the server. We believe this should apply not only to human readers but also to machine analysis of the content. A growing variety of resources have been created to facilitate this access.

DIRECT TRANSFER FROM BIORXIV TO JOURNALS OR PEER REVIEW SERVICES (B2J)

bioRxiv can save authors time in submitting papers to journals or peer review services by transmitting their manuscript files and metadata directly from bioRxiv. This means authors do not have to spend time re-loading manuscript files and re-entering author information at the journal or peer review service website. Partners currently participating in B2J are listed below (scroll to view full list).

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