bioRxiv (pronounced "bio-archive") is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences.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Articles are not peer-reviewed, edited, or typeset before being posted online.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 risk or be considered dual use research of concern, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 containing plagiarized material or work not performed in accordance with the relevant ethical standards and to share information as appropriate if we have reason to believe a breach of research integrity has occurred.

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.

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.

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.

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