Where did Rxivist go?

March 1, 2023

Rxivist.org was an application that combined metadata for all preprints posted to bioRxiv and medRxiv with information about Twitter.com to showcase the most discussed preprints in biology. A lot has changed since we started the project in 2018—the biggest difference is that bioRxiv now has a straightforward API that enables programmatic access to much of the metadata previously only available from Rxivist. The other critical change is that Crossref, our source of social media data, lost access to all information from Twitter in February 2023. Retrieving data on hundreds of thousands of preprints directly from Twitter would cost thousands of dollars per month according to their old pricing, and their product plan is now too volatile to depend on specific features remaining available. These factors, combined with a lack of funding for the project, have led us to conclude that ongoing maintenance of the Rxivist website and crawlers is no longer practical.

We're very grateful to Crossref, the bioRxiv team (who, we should note, were very supportive but had no affiliation with Rxivist), and all the people we got to talk to and work with over the course of this 4.5-year effort. Information from the Rxivist project is still available in several ways:

That's all for now. Thanks for all your support.

—Rich Abdill
Blekhman Lab, University of Chicago