bioRxiv expands on Mastodon and Bluesky

There are a variety of ways to get alerted to new bioRxiv/medRxiv preprints that might be of interest. Our Alerts/RSS pages have feeds for different subject categories, and you can sign up to receive personalized alerts when preprints on particular subjects or containing specific keywords are posted. Many people also rely on social media to discover new preprints. Twitter/X in particular has been a place where many readers discover and discuss preprints, so we have accounts for various subject categories.

Several new microblogging platforms have recently emerged, including Bluesky Social, Threads and Mastodon. bioRxiv and medRxiv will be represented on each of these. Mastodon is interesting because it is a decentralized, federated system that is not controlled by a single entity. There are dozens of Mastodon 'instances' run by different groups, but the important aspect is that users with accounts on one instance are able to see and respond to posts (called "toots" in the Mastodon system) by users on other instances.

There is a growing community of scientists using Mastodon, spread across numerous different instances (e.g. mtsdn.science, mas.to, mastodon.social, genomics.social, fediscience.org). bioRxiv and medRxiv are happy to announce we will be joining biologists.social, a Mastodon instance that is operated by The Company of Biologists (COB). COB is a non-profit organization run by biologists that supports research in a variety of ways and recently established a server to help support the biology community on Mastodon. We have migrated* the existing bioRxiv account from qoto.org to biologists.social and created new biologists.social accounts for each bioRxiv subject category, so you can follow all fields that you are interested in (see below). The expansion of bioRxiv and medRxiv on Mastodon is timely because full text search has recently been added as a feature of Mastodon (previously only hashtags were searchable). We anticipate the biology community there will continue to grow and look forward to seeing you and our colleagues at COB there.

Bluesky Social is another platform seeing an influx of scientists, many of whom have expressed concerns about the future of Twitter. Currently you can only join via an invitation code from an existing Bluesky user, but new codes are regularly released so it should be relatively easy to obtain one eventually. The user experience on Bluesky may feel more familiar to Twitter/X users than Mastodon. It is also easy to set up feeds, and there are a variety of Bluesky clients like SkyDeck and SkyFeed in development that may appeal to former Tweetdeck users. Like Twitter/X, Bluesky is a commercial service but it is open source and part of an initiative to develop a decentralized social network protocol, so could end up looking a bit more like Mastodon. We have created Bluesky accounts for medRxiv and each bioRxiv subject category (listed below) and encourage new users to follow these.

The social media landscape continues to evolve, and we plan to represent bioRxiv and medRxiv wherever scientists look to discover preprints and conversations about them. Follow our Mastodon and Bluesky accounts, and keep an eye out for us on Threads, Facebook, Instagram and other networks you use.

Bluesky Accounts

Mastodon Accounts

^* Although it is possible to view posts across different Mastodon instances, the existence of different moderation policies means some instances cannot be viewed by other instances. This was the case for qoto.org. If you followed bioRxiv on qoto.org, don’t worry though. You will automatically be following the migrated account on biologists.social.