If you haven't submit to bioRxiv, well, you should

We all know that the traditional publication process delays the dissemination of new research, often by months, sometimes by years.

Preprint servers decouple dissemination of research papers from their evaluation and certification by journals, allowing researchers to share work immediately, receive feedback from a much larger audience, and provide evidence of productivity long before formal publication. The arXiv preprint server, launched in 1991 and currently hosted by Cornell University, has demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach.

bioRxiv team has published the first preprint of the resource given some details about the Archive, some statistics (number of preprints vs the number of finally published papers). 

Launched in 2013 as a non-profit community service, the bioRxiv server has brought preprint practice to the life sciences and recently posted its 64,000th manuscript.

Among others, Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge universities lead the submissions of preprints to bioRxiv.

 

Initially dominated by evolutionary biology, genetics/genomics, and computational biology, bioRxiv has been increasingly populated by papers in neuroscience, cell and developmental biology, and many other fields.

Usage

The site currently receives >4 million abstract views per month and ∼1.5 million PDF downloads per month.

bioRxiv infrastructure 

1. Manually entered article information generates the HTML metadata that is viewable when the article first appears online.
2. Submissions can be done with Microsoft Word documents and individual figure files and/or PDF files.
3. bioRxiv identifies preprint–journal article matches through a variety of scripts that search PubMed and Crossref databases for the title and author matches.
4. Additional elements viewable alongside articles include links to the final journal version of record when this appears.
5. Each version of the preprint receives a unique URL, with the DOI for the preprint defaulting to the most recent version of the paper posted.
6. Content is displayed in full-text HTML, along with a download link for the authors’ PDF file and a variety of additional information.
7. Once a formal journal version of record appears, this is prominently linked in red below the bioRxiv DOI.

bioRxiv: closing the gap between authors and readers  

The authors of the paper performed a survey on authors that have been submitting their work to bioRxiv. Some of the results are impressive... 37% of authors said they had received feedback on preprints by email and 34% through in-person conversations.  44% had received feedback via Twitter and 14% had received feedback via bioRxiv’s online commenting section. Twitter has played a very important part in spreading preprint awareness among scientists, alerting readers to individual articles, and providing a conduit for automated article feeds. Approximately,  5% of papers currently display onsite comments, while just over 1% are covered by discussions on third-party sites such as F1000Prime, PreLights, and PubPeer. 

An interesting number: Not all publications are read

Interesting the number of manuscript revised in the resource is only 25%–30%. Most papers are revised only once (if at all) but some are revised multiple times (8% have two revisions; 2% have three revisions; <1% have four or more revisions). 

At least we know this number from bioRxiv, it would be great to have this number of other journals and Editorials.. wait no, they are close, really close.