Chan Zuckerberg Initiative funds medRxiv

We are thrilled and honored that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) today announced generous funding for medRxiv to support its mission of helping scientists share health-related research in real time, including critical research on COVID-19. More information is available here.

The rapid and widespread availability of new data and insights is particularly crucial during an infectious disease outbreak and public health crisis. Research papers typically take months or even years to be peer-reviewed and published in a journal. During the COVID-19 pandemic, rapidly posted, freely accessible preprints have been essential to awareness and evaluation of emerging information about the virus and its effects. In a recent survey, preprints accounted for a quarter of pandemic research outputs at the beginning of May, most in the form of papers on the not-for-profit, publisher-independent platforms medRxiv and bioRxiv, which is also supported by CZI. The pandemic-related papers on the two servers are continuously updated here (there are currently more than 5300). But since medRxiv began operations exactly one year ago, there has also been growth in papers on topics not directly related to SARS-CoV-2, in subject categories such as oncology and neurology, and CZI’s grant will help drive preprint awareness and uptake among scientists doing research across the entire spectrum of health sciences.

The grant will also support additional staff needed to help sustain and scale the growing server’s screening processes and fund the creation of machine-readable content for indexing, discovery, and text and data mining. In addition, the grant will assist with education and advocacy among authors and readers and help the medRxiv team develop better guidelines for journalists and other science communicators on how to report accurately results that have not been peer reviewed.