ChemRxiv (pronounced "chem archive"—the X represents the Greek letter chi [χ]) is an open accesspreprint archive for chemistry.[1] It is operated by the American Chemical Society, Royal Society of Chemistry[2] and German Chemical Society.[3][4] The new preprint server was announced already in 2016,[5][6] but was only opened online in 2017.[7] Initially, editors of ACS journals were skeptical and only 80% of the editors allowed submissions to be uploaded to the preprint server in 2017.[8] In 2019 the Chinese Chemical Society and the Chemical Society of Japan joined as co-owners of the preprint server.[9][10]
The initial reception of ChemRxiv was one of hesitation,[6] with several major journals of the founding organizations initially unsupportive: Angewandte Chemie gave support in March 2018[11] and JACS only gave support in August 2018.[12] However, ChemRxiv received more than 1,000 submissions in the first eighteen months.,[13]
growing to 2,314 in 2019.[10] Like other preprint servers, it saw a surge in COVID-19 preprints in 2020.[14]