Timestamping scientific preprints

October 20, 2026

Project Timestamper is excited to announce that we have timestamped all articles from arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv on the bitcoin blockchain, ensuring that the integrity of much of humanity's scientific research is protected in the age of generative AI.

For more than a century, the system of scientific publishing has relied primarily on peer-reviewed scholarly journals for the dissemination of research papers. But in 1991, Paul Ginsparg launched a service (now located at arxiv.org) that serves as a central online repository for preprints in quantitative fields including physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering, and economics.

The arXiv now offers more than three million scholarly articles, free for download to anyone in the public. It exists as a primary hub for the world's quantitative technical research online.

Following suit, the bioRxiv was founded in 2013 by John Inglis and Richard Sever to provide a similar, moderated service for the biological sciences. And in 2019 they launched medRxiv, which hosts preprints for the health sciences. Like the arXiv, these services provide open, lightly moderated access to researchers for rapid publication of their work and free access to all members of the public. Together they host over 430,000 papers.

We're happy to share that Project Timestamper has cryptographically locked all of these millions of papers to the Bitcoin blockchain, using the OpenTimestamps service. We have effectively hardened the preprints in these databases against hacking or any form of future modification. Researchers in the future will be able to quickly and easily confirm the existence of any particular paper in its exact form as of October 2026.

This effort follows up on our previous work where we timestamped 85 million published scientific papers. By timestamping preprints as well, we are locking in a second, distinct view of the scientific record.

We believe the integrity of science and culture is fundamental to our common humanity. We hope to keep making progress in protecting the authenticity of major records of human thought.