bioRxiv (pronounced "bio-archive") is the leading preprint server for the life sciences. It was launched in November 2013 by John Inglis and Richard Sever at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, modeled on physics' arXiv, and now hosts roughly 274,000 preprints spanning every corner of biology - from neuroscience and genomics to ecology and bioinformatics. In March 2025 stewardship of bioRxiv and its health-sciences sister server medRxiv transferred to openRxiv, a new independent non-profit supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and other foundations and institutions.

A bioRxiv preprint is a complete, citable manuscript that has not yet been certified by journal peer review. Posting is free, articles appear within about 48 hours, every preprint gets a DOI, and roughly two-thirds of bioRxiv papers are later published in peer-reviewed journals. For most life scientists, bioRxiv is not an alternative to journal publication - it is the step that comes immediately before it.

1. Prepare the manuscript. A single PDF (or Word/LaTeX-derived PDF) with figures embedded or appended. Research papers only - no theses, reviews-of-record, or purely clinical work (that belongs on medRxiv).
2. Choose the subject category. One of ~27 life-sciences categories (neuroscience, microbiology, genomics, etc.), which determines where the preprint is listed and who gets alerts.
3. Pick a license. You retain copyright and choose the reuse terms (see the table below).
4. Submit via the bioRxiv submission system. All authors are notified; the submitting author confirms that co-authors approve posting.
5. Screening, then posting. In-house staff plus volunteer scientists ('affiliates') check that the submission is genuine research, appropriate in scope, and free of plagiarism or health/biosecurity risks - typically within 48 hours.
6. Revise any time. New versions are posted under the same DOI, with earlier versions permanently retained. Preprints can be withdrawn only in exceptional circumstances; a withdrawal notice replaces the text but the record remains.

bioRxiv does not perform peer review. Screening is a basic moderation check: is this a real research manuscript by real scientists, in scope for the server, without plagiarism or dangerous content? Nothing about scientific validity is certified. Readers should treat every preprint as work that has not yet been evaluated - and authors should expect journal peer review to follow. Optional community routes exist on top: readers can comment publicly on any preprint, and services such as Review Commons provide journal-independent peer review that authors can carry to participating journals.

You keep copyright and choose how others may reuse the preprint:

Note that a small number of journals prefer specific preprint licenses, so check your target journal's policy before choosing CC0 or CC BY.

Cite a preprint like an article, but identify it as a preprint and include the DOI, e.g.: Author A, Author B (2026). Title of the preprint. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2026.01.15.123456. Preprint. Most citation styles (APA, Vancouver, Nature) now have explicit preprint formats; SciSpace's citation generator handles bioRxiv automatically. Because versions share one DOI, cite the version you actually read (the page displays a version number and date).

bioRxiv's direct-transfer program (B2J) lets you submit the posted manuscript straight to well over a hundred participating journals - including titles from PLOS, eLife, EMBO Press, the Company of Biologists, and many Springer Nature and Elsevier journals - without re-uploading files. The vast majority of journals, including Nature, Science, and Cell, explicitly allow prior posting on bioRxiv; a preprint does not count as prior publication under standard Ingelfinger-policy exceptions. When the journal version appears, bioRxiv automatically links the preprint to the published article.

Posting on bioRxiv is completely free - no submission fee, no posting fee, no reader paywall. Operations are funded philanthropically through openRxiv, principally by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative alongside Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and other supporters.

All listed authors must consent to posting. Dual-use research of concern and manuscripts posing biosecurity or public-health risks are refused at screening. Plagiarism checks run on every submission. bioRxiv follows COPE-aligned practices for corrections and withdrawal notices, and preprints are permanent: treat posting as publication-grade disclosure, not a draft you can quietly delete.