Richard Sever of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press describes the bioRxiv preprint server at a panel presentation during the 2014 CrossRef Annual Meeting in London, UK

1. Richard Sever, PhD
Assistant Director, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
Twitter: @cshperspectives

2. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY

3. Research at Cold Spring Harbor
• 600 scientific staff
• 50 research groups
• Molecular biology and genetics
• Cancer
• Neuroscience
• Plant biology
• Genomics and bioinformatics
• Quantitative biology
• Ranked #1 in the world in molecular biology & genetics

4. Science education and communication
Conferences
• Meetings
• The Banbury Center
• Cold Spring Harbor Asia, Suzhou, China
Teaching
• Watson School of Biological Sciences
• Residential lab and lecture courses
• DNA Learning Center
Publishing
• Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

5. Books
Research journals
Review journals

6. 2013: CSHL launched a preprint server for biology

7. What scientists were saying
“It’s ridiculous I have to wait months to read a paper while it goes
through peer review…let me decide for myself whether it’s any good”
“Think how much time is wasted!”
“I am writing a grant but the paper is not going to be published
by the time I submit. The solution is a pre-print server that can be
referenced”

8. Biology appearing on the physics arXiv

9. • A not-for-profit service of CSH Laboratory
• Makes papers available before consideration by a journal
• Submission + access free
• Posting almost immediate, with screening but no peer review
• Revised versions can be posted any time

10. Features
• Posted manuscript date-stamped + given a DOI (citable)
• Indexed in Google Scholar
• Choice of article type (New, Confirmatory, or Contradictory Results)
• 25 subject categories
• Choice of license (CC BY, CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-ND, all rights reserved)
• Article metrics
• Commenting
• Links to published versions

16. Progress in a year
• ~1000 submissions (>90% approved)
• ~30% revised (many more than once)
• Papers subsequently published in >100 journals
Nature, Science, PNAS, eLife, Nature Genetics, Nature Neuroscience, Nature
Communications, Genome Research, Genetics, Evolution, Biophysical Journal, PLoS
One, PloS Genetics, Biology Open, Bioinformatics, American, Journal of Human
Genetics, Journal of Neuroscience, BMC Genomics, BMC Biology, G3, Frontiers in
Genetics, Frontiers in Neuroscience, Genome Biology, Interface, Molecular Systems
Biology, Nucleic Acids Research, PeerJ, PLoS Computational Biology, Oncogene,
Molecular Plant, Journal of Ecology, Epidemiology & Infection, Biochimie, Gigascience

17. Progress in a year
• Behavior change: more biologists posting/reading
preprints
• Policy change: more journals allowing preprint
posting
• Rule change: NIH biosketch can now cite preprints

18. • Feedback via social media
• Feedback via commenting
• Feedback via email

19. Making it easier for authors: journal integration
Formal
publication
Submission Peer review
(not to scale…)
Preprint
posted
Your
journal
here

20. Benefits
• Rapid transmission of results
• Pre-publication feedback/discussion
• Visibility, especially for early-career scientists
• Immediate availability to grant/hiring committees

21. An essential resource