Seven Years and Counting: ChemRxiv's 2024 in Review

Preprints are a core component of open science: early versions of papers are uploaded to open access repositories prior to peer review or submission to a journal. These services allow authors to share their findings rapidly and establish primacy with their research, and continually update the work with new drafts based on community feedback until they're ready to submit it to a journal. Preprints can be searched and cited by the community, accelerating the progress of science.

Reaching new records for submissions

Preprints have a decades-long history of playing a key role in research communication within many academic fields, particularly in physics, mathematics, and computer science, where uploading preprints to arXiv (pronounced 'archive') is the customary first step to disseminating research.

ChemRxiv was founded in 2017 as the preprint server for chemistry, as a joint venture between the American Chemical Society, the Chinese Chemical Society, the Chemical Society of Japan, theRoyal Society of Chemistry, and the German Chemical Society, with additional financial, technical, and advisory contributions from the Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB).

Since opening for submissions in August 2017:

• Authors have uploaded more than 25,800 preprints to ChemRxiv, with nearly 800 new uploads every month as of mid-2024;
• Over 7,700 updated versions have been added;
• Readers have viewed or downloaded content from ChemRxiv more than 51.8 million times.

Expansion of ChemRxiv Direct Journal Transfer

In common with many other preprint servers, ChemRxiv includes the ability for authors to submit a version of their preprint directly to a number of participating journals (including many under the ACS Publications umbrella) through the ChemRxiv Direct Journal Transfer program. This makes it easier for author teams to integrate preprints into their writing workflow, without having to reformat the manuscript before submission. This year, the program expanded with the addition of Synlett, published by Thieme.

Chemistry community outreach

One of the concerns relating to preprints is how they can be weaponized by those seeing to spread misinformation or poor-quality research without undergoing the formal peer review process that aims to maintain trust in the scholarly record. This was the topic of a talk given by ChemRxiv's senior product manager, Dr. Ben Mudrak, at the ACS Fall 2024 Conference in Denver, CO. You can access the slides for his talk here: Speed and trust: How can preprints safeguard against misinformation while remaining a rapid option for sharing research?

The speed of dissemination is one of the key reasons why some research funders are endorsing the use of preprints as a method of research communication, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who recently announced that all grantees must upload a version of their manuscript to a relevant preprint server to comply with the Foundation's open access policy. This was discussed in a second presentation at ACS Fall 2024; you can access the slides here: Open Science and Funder Policies.

Top preprints from 2024

Of course, no review of 2024 would be complete without mentioning some of this year's most popular preprints on ChemRxiv. The top 5 most-discussed preprints since January 2024 are:

• "The invisible footprint of climbing shoes: high exposure to rubber additives in indoor facilities" by Sherman, et al.
• "In-insect synthesis of oxygen-doped molecular nanocarbons" by Usami, et al.
• "A stable and crystalline nitrene" by Janssen, et al. (now published in Science)
• "The global threat from the irreversible accumulation of trifluoroacetic acid (TFA)" by Arp, et al.
• "Versatile deacylative cross-coupling of aromatic ketones" by Nakahara, et al. (now published in Chem)