The q-bio archive is the newly created Quantitative Biology section of arXiv, an archive of electronic (p)reprints that has been serving researchers in the physics, mathematics and computer science communities for over a decade. The arXiv system is compliant with the requirements of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and contains over 200,000 articles in physics, over 20,000 in mathematics, and over 2,000 in computer science. The q-bio archive aims to serve the growing community of researchers who address quantitative questions in biology; this includes, but is not limited to, biological physics, computational biology, neural science, systems biology, bioinformatics, mathematical biology, and theoretical biology. Access is free over the Internet to all members of the scientific community. The ultimate goal of arXiv is to distribute all new research literature, to store it permanently, and to keep it freely available.

The q-bio archive is organized into different categories of biological processes and partitioned according to their scales in space and time. The categories range from molecular and sub-cellular structures to tissues and organs, from the kinetics of molecules to population and evolutionary dynamics. In addition, a separate category is devoted to method-dominated contributions, including computational algorithms, experimental methods, as well as novel approaches to analyzing experimental data.

The q-bio archive was launched in 2003 as part of the well-established series of e-print archives accessible at http://arxiv.org/. The original arXiv was created by Paul Ginsparg in 1991 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). In August 2001 the primary arXiv site moved from Los Alamos to Cornell University. The q-bio archive is overseen by an advisory committee that consists of several well-established biologists: William Loomis (University of California San Diego), Chuck Stevens (The Salk Institute), Gary Stormo (Washington University in St Louis), Diethard Tautz (University of Cologne), together with a number of volunteers who serve as 'moderators' for each category. Terry Hwa and Michael Lässig are the q-bio coordinators; and arXiv is supported by the United States National Science Foundation.

The number of biology-related submissions to arXiv rose steadily in recent years to over 40 per month in 2003. These submissions were scattered across a number of sub-archives (including physics, condensed matter, nonlinear science, mathematics, and so on). Researchers felt there was an advantage to having a centralized archive for quantitative biology and that there was need for a coherent forum devoted to quantitative issues in biology. The coordinators hope that the q-bio archive will serve as a virtual meeting point for all quantitative-minded scientists with a serious interest in biology and will help introduce quantitative scientists to the complex world of biological science. They hope that the open but focused environment provided by q-bio will facilitate the maturation and self-organization of quantitative biology into a coherent field that contributes positively to both biology and the traditional quantitative sciences.