EcoEvoRxiv is a free, not-for-profit preprint repository for ecology, evolutionary biology, conservation biology, and closely related fields. It grew out of the Transparency in Ecology and Evolution (TEE) movement in 2018 and launched publicly in January 2019 on the Center for Open Science's Open Science Framework. In October 2022 it re-launched on the Janeway platform, hosted by the California Digital Library's eScholarship Publishing program in Oakland, California, and it is now the official preprint server of SORTEE - the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary biology.

Day-to-day operations sit with a volunteer EcoEvoRxiv committee whose leadership is appointed through SORTEE's Board of Directors. The repository currently lists roughly 3,500 works and accepts preprints, postprints (accepted manuscripts), reports, and datasets. Submissions can be empirical, theoretical, simulation-based, reviews, or opinion pieces. Unusually for a biology preprint server, EcoEvoRxiv accepts manuscripts in ten languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Greek, Korean, and Japanese.

1. Create an account on ecoevorxiv.org - the Janeway-based submission system run through eScholarship.
2. Upload your manuscript. Include a title, all author names with institutional affiliations, and contact details for at least one author.
3. Add metadata: abstract, subject categories, keywords, and any linked data or code.
4. Choose a license. EcoEvoRxiv offers seven Creative Commons options plus the choice of applying no CC license at all. Nothing is applied by default - you decide.
5. Submit for moderation. Screening is usually complete within about 48 hours, after which the work is posted with a DOI under the 10.32942 prefix.

EcoEvoRxiv is moderated, not peer reviewed. Volunteer editorial members check that a submission is in scope for ecology, evolution, or conservation and that it is of reasonable quality with respect to structure, data presentation, and validity of conclusions. Empirical and theoretical manuscripts are typically assessed by at least one editorial member; opinion and review pieces may be seen by two or more.

The server reserves the right to reject submissions, withdraw posted works, or deactivate accounts where editors see suspicious behaviour - for example implausibly high submission volumes or undisclosed AI-generated content. Acceptance is a scope-and-quality screen, not an endorsement of the findings.

Authors keep copyright. At deposit you pick from seven Creative Commons licenses, ranging from fully open CC BY 4.0 through non-commercial and no-derivatives variants, or you can select no Creative Commons license at all, in which case standard copyright applies. If a funder or institution requires CC BY, choose it explicitly - it is not the default.

Every posted work receives a DOI, so cite it as you would any other source, flagged as a preprint. In the author-year styles common in ecology and evolution that looks like: Author, A. B., & Author, C. D. (2026). Title of the paper. EcoEvoRxiv. https://doi.org/10.32942/XXXXXX. Because works are versioned, cite the version you actually read, and if a peer-reviewed version of record now exists, cite that instead.

Posting to EcoEvoRxiv does not count as prior publication at the great majority of ecology and evolution journals, and you may post at the same time you submit to a journal. A minority of journals still restrict preprinting, so check the target journal's preprint policy before you post.

• Post before submission to establish priority and gather community feedback.
• Post at submission so the work is readable while peer review runs.
• Post the accepted manuscript as a postprint - EcoEvoRxiv explicitly welcomes postprints, which several preprint servers do not, provided the publisher's self-archiving terms allow it.

Once the paper is published, you can update the preprint's metadata to link the published DOI so readers find the version of record.

Nothing. There is no submission fee, no article processing charge, and no reader paywall. EcoEvoRxiv is supported by SORTEE and by the California Digital Library's eScholarship infrastructure rather than by author payments, which makes it one of the cheapest legitimate open-access routes in ecology and evolution.

You can revise a posted work as often as you like. The submission system offers New Version, Correction, and Metadata Correction routes; earlier versions stay accessible and the record remains citable. Full removal is discouraged, since preprints are intended as a durable part of the scholarly record, but the editorial team can withdraw a work where there is a genuine reason to do so.