The world’s top preprint services for the life sciences will be sustainably housed at openRxiv, a recently established independent charity. Try having a discussion with the board chairman.
Publicly accessible copies of scientific research articles published prior to formal peer review have become a key component of open science, facilitating the quick and worldwide exchange of scientific knowledge to speed up discovery. In addition to enabling prompt peer review and community input, they also make this crucial step in the scientific method publicly available.
With over 325,000 discovery reports hosted on preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv since their inception in 2013 and 2019, scientists from all around the world may now cooperate, iterate, and build upon each other’s work at a never-before-seen speed. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv were essential pieces of infrastructure for quick scientific dissemination in the life sciences. Every month, more than 11 million readers peruse articles submitted by tens of thousands of scientists from more than 140 countries, demonstrating the continued usage of these resources by researchers worldwide in all areas of the life sciences. Since 2017, CZI has backed bioRxiv and, subsequently, medRxiv.
CZI and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) announced the opening of openRxiv, a new nonprofit organization that will hold the top preprint servers for the life sciences in the world, bioRxiv and medRxiv, in order to guarantee the survival of these essential resources. Even though CZI has been supporting these servers since the beginning, this new investment will make it possible to modernize the current technology and establish the governance structure needed to maintain and expand these tools.
By facilitating the quick and open exchange of scientific findings, openRxiv is committed to promoting scientific research worldwide. Speak with Scott Fraser, vice president of scientific grant programs at CZI and head of the board of openRxiv, to find out more about this significant milestone for open science.
What is openRxiv?
Scott Fraser: BioRxiv and medRxiv, which were introduced at CSHL to confirm the function of preprint servers in the life and health sciences, now have a new organizational home in openRxiv. We can now see that it has been successful after hundreds of thousands of preprints. It makes sense to create openRxiv in order to support preprint innovation and the expansion and sustainability of medRxiv and bioRxiv.
In contrast to current publications, preprints incorporate the community into the scientific process and meet a genuine demand for speedy and open information sharing. This is evident to me and other members of openRxiv. Preprint servers have a lot to offer, and we hope to see them integrated into scientific methods.
What makes preprints so important to the scientific process?
SF: Preprints might influence the nature of the knowledge base since they make it possible for material to be exchanged considerably earlier in the scientific process. This stands in sharp contrast to the publishing ecosystem of today, where sharing occurs after ideas have solidified and frequently with significantly less community involvement. Preprint servers, in my opinion, represent a genuine comeback to scientific discourse. They allow you to present your findings in an open forum and in a way that encourages feedback from everybody. This enables us to collaborate as a community to determine what is unknown and how to get there, rather than being antagonistic.
I began my professional career in physics, and one of the things I enjoyed most about reading the classic papers was that they frequently included a discussion with the audience, concluding with what was unknown and unproven. I get nostalgic for that when I see preprints.
How do you envision the longevity of preprint servers impacting how we share scientific knowledge?
SF: Publication is presently a very slow and costly method of knowledge dissemination. In order for papers to appear in journals that do not usually receive the attention they deserve, we are investing a great deal of money and human resources in the process of reviewing and re-reviewing them. Preprint servers can maximize that time commitment, allowing us to share knowledge with the community far more effectively for the same amount of time and effort.
Additionally, there is the potential to make this exchange much more data-forward in the future. This is particularly crucial as we enter a phase where a growing number of research projects incorporate enormous datasets. Preprints have the potential to revolutionize sharing practices, but the sharing and simplified infrastructure have been lacking despite our skills and tools.
What will this change for the medRxiv and bioRxiv researchers know and love?
SF: Nothing. The servers you are familiar with will remain unchanged. For such servers, openRxiv is a new organizational home.
The openRxiv team will grow, and leadership positions will be filled. Our goal is to hire skilled individuals and form partnerships to leverage the newest technology and capabilities to provide people with access to preprints and the data that supports them. We want to lower the “activation energy” in the future so that locating the data and the software tools needed to process it does not require a lot of work. And I believe that by bringing this to the community, we will obtain the tools and solutions need to accomplish that.
One of the things the open-source software community has shown us is that by combining a multitude of diverse viewpoints and skills, we create a set of tools that are far more powerful than any one software developer could be. With the preprint servers, I believe we can accomplish the same goal and gain from all the community’s insights.
CZI has been supporting medRxiv and bioRxiv since their onset. What will CZI’s involvement look like going forward?
SF: CZI has been a core supporter of bioRxiv and medRxiv. We really believed in it and thought it was so important to have open interchange. Now, our goal is to make openRxiv part of the whole community rather than a project of CZI or CSHL.
Preprint servers have a significant and expanding role that can only be developed with input and cooperation from the entire scientific community. With the Chan Zuckerberg CELLxGENE and the CryoET Data Portal, among other research fields, we have seen early success in promoting these kinds of community-centered methods. In both instances, the research community was able to adopt and contribute to methodologies by making it possible for new models of data gathering and sharing, which resulted in faster growth than any one endeavor alone could achieve. Similar effects can be achieved by establishing preprint sharing as the standard in science.
