Introducing openRxiv: A Q&A With Board Chair Scott Fraser

Preprints — publicly shared versions of scientific research papers released before formal peer review — have risen to prominence as a cornerstone of open science, enabling the rapid and global sharing of scientific knowledge to hasten discovery. They not only facilitate immediate peer review and community feedback but also bring this integral part of the scientific process into the public domain.

Since their launches in 2013 and 2019, preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv have hosted more than 325,000 reports of discoveries, enabling scientists worldwide to collaborate, iterate, and build upon each other’s work at an unprecedented pace. In the life sciences, the preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv became critical infrastructure for rapid scientific dissemination during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers worldwide continue to use them across all fields of the life sciences: each month, over 11 million readers explore manuscripts submitted by tens of thousands of scientists from more than 140 countries. CZI has supported bioRxiv and, later, medRxiv since 2017.

To ensure the longevity of these integral resources, CZI and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) announced the ​​launch of openRxiv, a new nonprofit entity to house the world’s leading preprint servers for the life sciences — bioRxiv and medRxiv. While CZI has supported these servers since their onset, this new investment will enable the governance structure and modernization of the existing technology required to sustain and grow these tools.

openRxiv is dedicated to advancing global scientific research by supporting open and rapid sharing of scientific results. Learn more about this important milestone for open science in an interview with Scott Fraser, vice president of science grant programs at CZI and chairman of the board of openRxiv.

What is openRxiv?

Scott Fraser: openRxiv is the new organizational home of bioRxiv and medRxiv, which launched at CSHL to validate the role for preprint servers in the life and health sciences. Now — hundreds of thousands of preprints later — we see that it’s been successful. Creating openRxiv is a natural transition for ensuring the growth and sustainability of medRxiv and bioRxiv and innovation in preprints.

It is clear to me and those who are a part of openRxiv that preprints address a real need to share knowledge rapidly and openly, bringing the community into the scientific process in a way current journals don’t. There’s a real advantage to preprint servers and we want to see them become a part of the way we do science.

What makes preprints so important to the scientific process?

SF: Because preprints enable information to be shared much earlier in the scientific process, they can play a role in shaping what the knowledge base is. This is in stark contrast to the current ecosystem of publication, where the sharing happens once the ideas have been firmly formed, often with much less community input. I see preprint servers as a real return to dialogue in science. They enable you to put your findings in a manner that invites comments back from anyone — and in an open forum. Rather than being adversarial, this allows us to work as a community toward figuring out what isn’t yet known and how to get there.

I started my scientific career in physics, and one of the things I loved when reading the classical papers is that those papers often were part of a dialogue with the readership, and they would end with what wasn’t known and what is yet to be established. Preprints make me nostalgic for that.

How do you envision the longevity of preprint servers impacting how we share scientific knowledge?

SF: Publication has become a very expensive and very slow approach to share knowledge. We are spending enormous amounts of resources — both financially and in terms of people’s time — reviewing and re-reviewing papers, for them to appear in journals that don’t always get the attention they deserve. Preprint servers can optimize that time investment so that for the same amount of time and effort, we can much more efficiently share knowledge with the community.

In the future, there is also the opportunity to make this sharing happen in a much more data-forward manner. This is especially important when we’re moving into a phase where large datasets are increasingly part of many research projects. We have the capabilities and tools, but the sharing and streamlined infrastructure have been lacking — preprints can help transform sharing practices.

What will this change for the medRxiv and bioRxiv researchers know and love?

SF: Nothing. The servers you know and love will still be the same. openRxiv is a new organizational home for those servers.

We will be expanding the openRxiv team and hiring leadership roles. We aim to bring onboard talent and establish collaborations to take advantage of the latest technologies and abilities to serve the preprints and the data behind the preprints up to the users. In the future, we hope to reduce the “activation energy,” so it doesn’t take a huge amount of effort to find the data and the software tools used to process that data. And I think by bringing this into the community, we’ll get the solutions and the tools we need to do that.

That’s one of the lessons the open-source software community has taught us: by bringing together this wealth of different points of view and talents, we end up with a set of tools that far outdoes what any one author of software could do. I think we can do the same thing with the preprint servers and benefit from all the insights in the broader community.

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.

The preprint servers play such an important and growing role, which will be best fostered through input and collaboration with the whole science community. We’ve had early successes catalyzing these types of community-centered approaches across research areas, including with Chan Zuckerberg CELLxGENE and the CryoET Data Portal. In both cases, by enabling new models of data collection and sharing, the research community was able to adopt and contribute to methods, leading to growth faster than would be possible with any singular effort on its own. We can drive similar impacts when it comes to sharing preprints and making that the norm in science.

Learn more about openRxiv.

For more information about openRxiv, visit the organization’s website.