The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is giving an undisclosed amount to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to help grow its BioRxiv preprint platform.
"Expanded access to these drafts can dramatically accelerate the pace of discovery, and in turn, our understanding of health and disease," says Cori Bargmann, the director of science at CZI, in a Facebook post.
BioRxiv, which CSHL started in late 2013, currently houses 10,000 manuscripts from 55,000 authors from more than 90 countries, according to the lab. With this new collaboration with CZI, the lab aims to develop and expand the server.
"We are thrilled to bring expertise and vision from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to our goal of advancing the speed and efficiency of communication among scientists worldwide," BioRxiv co-founder John Inglis says in a statement. "With CZI's technical talent and their financial support, BioRxiv will be a sandbox for the exploration of new approaches to information exchange in the life sciences."
Inglis tells ScienceInsider that the CZI funds will enable CSHL better staff the preprint server project. Currently, BioRxiv is run by five people part-time in addition to their regular jobs, he says. He further tells Nature Newsthat he hopes to also use the new funding to develop a tool to turn papers submitted to BioRxiv as Word or PDF documents into more web-friendly formats.