Last August, ChemRxiv was launched with the goal to become the world’s premier preprint server focused on the chemical sciences, and what a year it has been! This spring, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), and the German Chemical Society (Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, GDCh) joined the American Chemical Society (ACS) as co-owners. This three-society group […]
Last August, ChemRxiv was launched with the goal to become the world’s premier preprint server focused on the chemical sciences, and what a year it has been! This spring, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), and the German Chemical Society (Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, GDCh) joined the American Chemical Society (ACS) as co-owners.
This three-society group provides experience and expertise in meeting authors’ needs and is well-positioned to provide strong governance for ChemRxiv in addition to promoting the chemical sciences around the globe. ChemRxiv has attracted more than 450 different submitting authors (who posted over 500 original preprints and more than 200 revisions) and readers from 40 different countries.
These preprints are being developed into full research publications and are now appearing in top journals, including ACS Central Science, Angewandte Chemie, Chemical Science, Nature, and Science, underscoring the excellent quality of the submissions to ChemRxiv. Just as impressive are the readers’ responses, with preprints read more than 500,000 times in this first year.
The strong vision to provide a premier preprint service tailored to chemists has resulted in this already robust support. ChemRxiv chose Figshare as its service provider to deliver a modern interface and ability to both host and interactively display data natively within the browser.
The authors and readers of ChemRxivhave made good use of these features by uploading crystal structures, computational files, videos, and more that can be processed and manipulated without the need for specialized software. ChemRxiv accepts all data types from authors—removing the limitations imposed by PDF and Word— providing a richer, more valuable reading experience for users. Since launch, a number of new features have been added, including a “Follow” feature, which allows readers to create notifications and RSS feeds based on precise search criteria, and an interactive citation-formatting tool. The automated scans for plagiarism, viruses
Since launch, a number of new features have been added, including a “Follow” feature, which allows readers to create notifications and RSS feeds based on precise search criteria, and an interactive citation-formatting tool. The automated scans for plagiarism, viruses, and malware, as well as improvements to the curation tools allow triage before posting to be quick, in fewer than two business days, and often in less than one day! Several new features will be available with the next release, including an interactive search widget to the “Funding” field. All of this, plus positive user feedback and the establishment of our global three-society governance, means that ChemRxiv is moving from the beta stage to a full-service resource.