medRxiv launches full-text HTML of preprints online

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory announced today that medRxiv, the health sciences preprint server it operates with Yale University and BMJ, is being augmented with the full-text HTML of manuscripts posted online. The initiative has launched with some of the earliest posted papers. Effective October 19, 2020, full-text HTML for each newly accepted paper will be added 48-72 hours after the paper first posts as a PDF file. Conversion of the server's entire back content to XML and HTML is scheduled for completion by the end of the year.

Launched in June 2019, medRxiv is owned and operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and managed in partnership with Yale and the global health knowledge provider BMJ. medRxiv currently has a total of 12,150 manuscripts, increasing by more than 1000 each month. To date more than 7500 pandemic-related preprints reporting COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 research have been posted. The full-text initiative is made possible by generous financial support for medRxiv from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The medRxiv content is converted to XML by Nova Techset, an innovative supplier of services to scholarly publishing, and it is hosted by HighWire Press, a leading independent scholarly publishing platform.

"We are delighted to provide free and unrestricted access to this valuable information in a form that’s more easily read on mobile devices," said Dr. John Inglis, co-founder of medRxiv and bioRxiv. "bioRxiv's content has been available in HTML for nearly two years, with ever-increasing usage, and we believe the community will also welcome this medRxiv initiative. We intend to make medRxiv preprints available for machine analysis and are working toward the creation of an XML repository later this year that will provide bulk access to medRxiv articles for the purposes of text and data mining (TDM)." bioRxiv's content is already available in a TDM resource.

About Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Founded in 1890, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has shaped contemporary biomedical research and education with programs in cancer, neuroscience, plant biology and quantitative biology. Home to eight Nobel Prize winners, the private, not-for-profit Laboratory employs 1,100 people including 600 scientists, students and technicians. The Meetings & Courses Program hosts more than 12,000 scientists from around the world each year on its campuses in Long Island and in Suzhou, China. The Laboratory's education arm also includes an academic publishing house, a graduate school and programs for middle and high school students and teachers.