Zuckerberg partnership builds scientific pre-publishing platform, bioRxiv

With the view to cure all diseases in our children’s lifetime, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has announced a partnership to support and further build bioRxiv, a platform for scientists to pre-publish research works.

Announcing the bioRxiv partnership, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook and co-founder of the CZI, said “I’m excited the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is partnering with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to support and build out bioRxiv to help scientists share research faster”.

bioRxiv is a preprint repository for the biological sciences launched in November 2013. It is hosted by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. As preprints, papers hosted on bioRxiv are not peer-reviewed, but undergo basic screening, and checked against plagiarism.

Scientific researches usually take years to complete; and the Facebook founder is hoping that, with bioRxiv, scientists do not just get involved in painstaking researches ending up to find out what they were seeking solution for already has solution(s).

“It’s common for scientists to be working on a problem for a long time and then when another paper finally publishes, they realize someone solved their problem or found a better approach a long time ago,” Zuckerberg said in a statement.

“It can be a huge waste of time, and if we can help eliminate it, scientific progress can move a lot faster. That’s what bioRxiv does,” he added.

Zuckerberg further stated that “If we’re going to cure all disease in our children’s lifetime, we need to speed up science” adding that “One thing that slows us down today is that it can take a year or longer to publish research in a scientific journal”.

TheNewsGuru reports that bioRxiv is a free service that lets scientists share drafts or their results, or “preprints”, before they’re published.

“It’s quickly becoming the standard database for pre-publishing biological research. We’re proud to support their work and help build out their service to accelerate science,” Zuckerberg said.

Responding to a comment on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg agrees that the principle of bioRxiv for scientific research can be applied for research in other fields of study since bioRxiv was inspired by and intends to complement the arXiv repository, launched in 1991 by Paul Ginsparg, which mostly focuses on physics and other related disciplines. Paul also serves on the bioRxiv advisory board.

“I agree. The faster we share research, the faster we learn and the more progress we make together,” he said.

Jocelyn Kaiser of Science said that in their first year, the repository had “attracted a modest but growing stream of papers”, having hosted 824 preprints.

As a result, several (but not all) biology journals have updated their policies on preprints, clarifying they do not consider preprints to be a ‘prior publication’ for purpose of the Ingelfinger rule.

In 2015, over 20,000 tweets had been made about bioRxiv-hosted preprints, a bioRxiv progress report stated.

As of February 2016, the submission rate to bioRxiv had steadily increased from 60 to 200 per month, with a total of 3100 papers received.

As of April 21, 2017, over 10,000 papers have been accepted. In March 2017, the number of monthly submissions is now over 620.

Mark Zuckerberg said he is optimistic that our children’s generation will see a world 100% free of diseases; but not sure our generation will witness that world.