Launching openRxiv Labs

Over the last thirteen years, bioRxiv and medRxiv have grown into widely used infrastructure for rapid research sharing in biology and medicine. The reliability and researcher-first values that have defined these platforms since their founding remain central to how we operate, and building on the trust, partnerships, and community relationships researchers worldwide depend on is core to our mission. At the same time, the research ecosystem is evolving rapidly — driven by changes in technology, policy, and the global landscape — and we think this is a genuinely exciting and critical moment to explore how preprinting can continue to evolve.

Today, we're thrilled to announce the launch of openRxiv Labs, a structured program for testing new and ambitious approaches to research communication. Growing directly from the strong foundation bioRxiv and medRxiv have built over the past decade, Labs is an experimental space for pushing the boundaries of research communication on top of openRxiv's corpus of preprints, figures, metadata, and other research outputs. The goal is to experiment with what improvements in preprinting might look like in practice, while retaining the stability of our core platforms.

Rather than running many small tests simultaneously, we plan to focus on a limited number of larger, bold, high-impact experiments at any given time. We will collaborate with partners who bring fresh perspectives and complementary expertise, including many of the trusted partners who have helped make bioRxiv and medRxiv what they are today. Each project will be structured with predefined hypotheses, goals, success metrics, and defined durations, and we will publish results openly on the openRxiv Labs blog, including when things don't go as planned. We think that kind of transparency is both practically valuable and consistent with how good science is done.

In 2026, we plan to run three experiments. The first, developed in partnership with Curvenote, will test a new interactive preprint reading experience and is scheduled to launch in early June. We think it points toward something genuinely different in how scientific findings can be communicated and engaged with. We're looking for the other experiments to be in the realm of search and discovery, enabling curation, trust signals, and other approaches that build on the modular elements of science. See more on our openRxiv Labs About page on what's important in these collaborations and reach out to us at hello@openrxiv.org if you're interested in learning more.

We believe the ongoing rapid changes to the research publishing ecosystem, combined with openRxiv's extensive corpus of life and biomedical research and trusted relationships with authors, readers, and institutions present a unique opportunity to catalyze the next generation of open science tools and practices. By trying new approaches with real experiments and demonstrations, we can retain the speed and trust of preprinting and broaden the ideas of what's possible in scientific communication – and the impact our research can have on science and society. We look forward to building openRxiv Labs together with the researchers, institutions, funders, and innovators who share our excitement about the future of preprinting.

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