If you’re trying to keep up with the latest research on carbon dioxide removal (CDR), you’ve probably noticed that it shows up in all sorts of places. CDR spans numerous disciplines — from geochemistry and oceanography to engineering and economics — so findings end up scattered across various platforms. Some critical findings may not be published at all, especially as a growing share of research is done by CDR companies rather than academic labs. The result: CDR research is harder to find, share, and build on.
That’s why we’re launching CDRXIV (pronounced “see-dee-archive”), a new open access repository for preprints and data related to carbon dioxide removal. It’s a home for freely sharing and discovering new CDR research from any discipline, and from both academic and non-academic researchers.
Why another preprint platform?
As a field, CDR research is grappling with an urgent and applied question: is it possible to do gigaton-scale carbon removal by 2050 — and if so, how? That urgency underscores the value of preprints, which can accelerate conversation and iteration within an intellectual community.
We modeled CDRXIV after similar “archives” from biology and physics. Preprint servers like these let researchers share their work before it goes through the formal peer review process and is published in a journal. Instead of taking months, or sometimes years, before new results are published, preprint servers post them in a matter of hours or days. The model helps new findings reach more researchers faster, accelerating scientific scrutiny and learning. While existing preprint servers could support these goals for CDR, we saw a few reasons to build a dedicated platform.
First, most platforms target particular disciplines, but CDR is inherently interdisciplinary. The research pushing CDR forward comes from a variety of physical sciences — plus economics, sociology, political science, and ecology. Critically, these fields aren’t just progressing in parallel to each other, they need to be in active conversation. Different carbon removal approaches share many of the same problems, so advances in one area often matter for others. The lessons around comparing a CDR intervention to a baseline, for example, span policy and the physical sciences and apply to almost every CDR pathway. CDRXIV helps results like these reach researchers across disciplines faster.
Second, while most existing platforms for sharing results cater to academic research, not all CDR work is happening there. Companies and non-profits are also producing important research. For better or worse, non-academic actors often lack incentives to develop manuscripts for peer-reviewed journals. In light of this fact, CDRXIV welcomes submissions with data and an abstract in addition to traditional preprints. We hope this helps make the broader landscape of research findings more visible and accessible to the research community.
How does CDRXIV work?
CDRXIV welcomes submissions from anyone generating new research results on carbon dioxide removal.
When you create a CDRXIV account, you’ll have the option to submit an academic-style preprint, a preprint with associated data, or a data-only submission. Each submission is run through a light screening process to ensure it presents new CDR research results. Critically, this is not peer-review — just a check to make sure submissions are useful and aligned with the platform’s purpose. You’ll hear back from the content team within three days of your submission to confirm publication or to follow up on any loose ends.
Once accepted, your submission will be issued a DOI and posted publicly. The platform supports version control, so you can revise and update your submission at any time. If your work is eventually published in an academic journal, your CDRXIV submissions will remain freely available — even if the final paper ends up behind a paywall.
If you’d like more information, you can read more about CDRXIV’s scope, the screening process, and the team of volunteers helping make it all possible. You can also check out Janeway to learn more about the open source publishing platform that powers CDRXIV.
Get involved
Like any preprint server, CDRXIV will only be useful to the extent that it’s adopted by the research community. We’re excited to see how it will evolve, and we want your help shaping it.
If you’re a researcher, consider submitting your work! We soft-launched CDRXIV in December 2024, and as of today — the formal launch — there are 13 submissions on the platform on topics ranging from direct air capture costs to the statistics of enhanced weathering field sampling. You can keep up with the latest submissions by following CDRXIV on Bluesky.
One of the most effective levers for promoting open science and early dissemination of results is making preprints or data sharing a condition of funding. CDRXIV could be one place where that sharing happens. If you are a research funder or CDR buyer and you have any questions about how this has been done well in the past, feel free to reach out for a conversation.
And no matter who you are or what your role is in the CDR research community, we’d love your help spreading the word by amplifying CDRXIV on social media or telling your colleagues about this platform. If you’re interested in getting involved more directly, reach out at hello@cdrxiv.org.