Scientific & Medical Advisory Board inaugural meeting

By John Inglis, co-founder bioRxiv and medRxiv, and Chair, Scientific and Medical Advisory Board

openRxiv is a non-profit organization that empowers researchers to share their research, and the best interests of the life science and biomedical research communities are at the heart of everything we do. Our researcher-led governance model embodies this principle and an important component of it is the Scientific and Medical Advisory Board (SMAB). It consists of 15 experienced scientists, physicians, and science communicators from around the world who are strong advocates for open science and the role that preprints can play in achieving it. This board met for the first time on April 8, 2026 at two separate times convenient for this international group, and will meet once more in 2026, with more frequent meetings in the future.

The SMAB provides expert guidance to openRxiv’s management team on scientific and clinical questions, ethical issues, the evolution of the research landscape, and the changing needs of working scientists and health researchers across the globe. This board therefore comprises a range of researchers and medical professionals. The SMAB is chaired by John Inglis, co-founder of bioRxiv and medRxiv at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and Theodora Bloom, co-founder of medRxiv at BMJ. Both bring a wealth of experience in scientific communication to the SMAB. Hopi Hoekstra, Leslie Vosshall and Fiona Watt join the SMAB from the original bioRxiv Launch Advisory Board. Hopi is an evolutionary biologist and Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Leslie is a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University working on mosquito biology and Chief Scientific Officer at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Fiona is a stem cell biologist and currently Director of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). 

Needhi Bhalla and Daniel MacArthur were among the first group of bioRxiv affiliate scientists who assisted with screening submissions. Needhi is Professor of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology at UC Santa Cruz, while Daniel is Director of the Centre for Population Genomics at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Sydney. Michael Imperiale and Feilim Mac Gabhann are also bioRxiv Affiliates and have provided expert guidance on biosecurity issues. Mike is Professor Emeritus of Microbiology and Immunology at University of Michigan Medical School. Feilim works on bioengineering and computational biology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. 

Also joining the SMAB are Wolfgang Huber, Jay Shendure, Shubah Tole, and Ruiming Xu. Wolfgang is a computational biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. Jay is an HHMI Investigator and Professor of Genome Sciences at University of Washington. Shubah is a neuroscientist who studies forebrain development at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. Ruiming is Director of the National Laboratory of Protein Science and a researcher at the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

Working physicians Joseph Ross and Javier Mancilla Galindo bring essential clinical expertise and research experience to the SMAB. Joe is a co-founder of medRxiv and Professor of Medicine and Public Health at Yale School of Medicine. Javier is a medRxiv Affiliate and long-term advisor and an epidemiologist at Utrecht University.

Learn more about the Scientific Medical and Advisory Board, its purpose and scope, and how it operates.

At the first SMAB meeting, Tracy Teal, CEO, and Richard Sever, CSSO, provided a brief overview of the transition of bioRxiv and medRxiv and associated staff to the new 501(c)(3) openRxiv for long-term stewardship of the servers. They also described technical improvements in the server platforms such as the opportunity for authors to name their funder during preprint submission, and the development of key partnerships with other organizations such as Hypothesis (to build a new commenting platform), Dryad (permitting preprint authors to obtain data curation and storage services), and qed (permitting authors to obtain AI-based manuscript assessment before or after posting a preprint). Their presentation included an emerging vision of preprints as a central component in a connected ecosystem (a constellation) of research outputs that include data, code, and assessments/reviews and the aspiration that openRxiv can lead in the development of a more efficient and equitable scholarly communication system.

The SMAB strongly supported the linking of articles with data and the overarching vision of a connected ecosystem in which preprints have a central role. Members had questions about organizational sustainability and provided valuable perspectives on responsible policy considerations around AI-generated content and scientific integrity. They encouraged further efforts to improve efficiency and enhance the technical capabilities of the preprint platforms. And they urged further initiatives to increase trust in preprints. Notes from this meeting are available in the SMAB meeting notes directory and new notes will continue to be added there.

We really appreciate and value the Scientific and Medical Advisory Board members’ thoughtful and lively engagement with the issues discussed. This inaugural meeting was an excellent beginning to what promises to be a valuable working relationship.