Submission Guide

bioRxiv is an online archive and distribution service for preprints in the life sciences. It is operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a not-for-profit research and educational institution.

An article may be deposited in bioRxiv in draft or final form, provided that it concerns a relevant scientific field, the content is unpublished at the time of submission, and all its authors have consented to its deposition. Authors wishing to deposit manuscripts must first register on the site. There is no charge for registration or article deposition.

bioRxiv is a source of technical information and should not be used to distribute other kinds of content such as news, product advertisements, or policy statements. All articles uploaded to bioRxiv undergo a basic screening process for offensive and/or non-scientific content and for material that might pose a health or biosecurity risk. Articles are not peer-reviewed before being posted online. No endorsement of their methods, assumptions, conclusions or scientific quality by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is implied by their appearance in bioRxiv.

Articles are not typeset before being posted online. The author’s manuscript is either submitted as, or automatically converted into, a PDF file.

Articles appear in bioRxiv in the order in which they were received. They are retrievable via the web interface at no charge.

Submission format

The simplest way to deposit a manuscript on bioRxiv is to upload a single PDF including the text and any figures/tables. Supplemental data should be created in a separate file or files. 

Alternatively, you may upload a Word file containing the main text (plus any tables) and separate figure files, from which a single PDF will be created. An automated PDF-conversion engine is responsible for the conversion and it can process many figure file formats, including JPEG, TIFF, EPS, PowerPoint. These formats are not compatible, however: PICT, Bitmap, Excel, PSD. For these files, you will need to convert them to PDF or an acceptable file format.

LaTeX files should be converted to PDF prior to submission; they may also be uploaded as Supplemental Material.

Supplementary Material and Data Use

Authors are free to include Supplemental Material such as additional tables and MPEG files. Large data sets, however, should instead be deposited in the appropriate community database (e.g., Protein Data Bank [PDB], GenBank). (See "Revisions" guidelines below.)

Authors should abide by all relevant community guidelines for use and acknowledgment of data resources (e.g., the Fort Lauderdale guidelines), obtaining permission where required and citing the appropriate laboratory, website, and accession numbers.

Terms of distribution

After an article is deposited in bioRxiv, it is citable and therefore cannot be removed. The copyright remains with the author, who is asked to select 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.

Article categories

Articles in bioRxiv are categorized as New Results, Confirmatory Results, or Contradictory Results. Please select the category that best describes your findings.

• New Results is most appropriate for articles that describe an advance in a field.
• Confirmatory Results should be selected if the findings largely replicate and confirm previously published work.
• Contradictory Results should be selected if the studies largely replicate experimental approaches used in previously published work but the results contradict and/or do not support it.

Citation

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

Revisions

Authors are free to submit a revised version of an article at any time (prior to acceptance for publication) by clicking on ‘submit a revision’ within the Author Area. The new version will use the same doi as the original submission, which also will remain accessible on the bioRxiv site. Supplemental data, if any, must accompany each version of a paper; authors have the option of selecting previously posted Supplemental files and/or including revised Supplemental files with each article revision.

List of Publishers' Preprint Policies

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.

DIRECT TRANSFER FROM BIORXIV TO JOURNALS OR PEER REVIEW SERVICES (B2J)

bioRxiv can save authors time in submitting papers to journals or peer review services by transmitting their manuscript files and metadata directly from bioRxiv. This means authors do not have to spend time re-loading manuscript files and re-entering author information at the journal or peer review service website. Partners currently participating in B2J are listed below (scroll to view full list).