preprint-fulltext

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Retrieve the full text of bioRxiv / medRxiv / arXiv preprints as clean, structured, embedding-ready data — from a CLI, a Python library, or an MCP server.

preprint-fulltext turns a DOI (or a search) into structured sections (abstract / introduction / methods / results / discussion), a single JSON/Markdown document, or a chunked JSONL/Parquet corpus ready for embeddings and RAG. openRxiv text-and-data-mining (TDM) compliance is enforced structurally, not left to the user.

"Embedding-ready" means the output is clean, section-aware, token-bounded chunks — ready to feed to your embedding model. Computing embeddings is an optional last step you own; this tool does not bundle an embedding model.

Contents

• Why · Who it's for · Full text for AI-driven science
• Features · Install · Quickstart (CLI) · Typical workflows
• Python library · MCP server (coding agents) · Data sources & routing
• Configuration · Compliance · Development · Contact · License

Why

Preprint full text is scattered across incompatible channels: Europe PMC serves JATS XML for the open-access subset, the openRxiv S3 buckets hold the authoritative .meca corpus (requester-pays), OpenAlex is a catalog with n-gram-only full-text search, and the bioRxiv/medRxiv websites render HTML. preprint-fulltext unifies them behind one canonical data model and one shared JATS parser, so you get the same structured output no matter where a document came from.

Who it's for

• ML / NLP researchers building embedding corpora or RAG systems over the preprint literature.
• Bioinformaticians and labs who need a paper's methods/results as clean text for analysis, extraction, or LLM pipelines.
• Coding agents (via the MCP server / SKILL.md) that need to pull a preprint's full text or search the literature mid-task.
• Anyone who wants one preprint's sections from a DOI without hand-parsing JATS or scraping HTML.

Full text for AI-driven science

Language models and agents reason far more reliably over a paper's methods and results than over its abstract alone — most scientific claims, protocols, quantities, and caveats live in the body. preprint-fulltext gives Claude, Codex, and other agents that body as clean, section-labeled, provenance- and license-tagged text, which is the substrate for grounded scientific reasoning and deep research:

• Literature deep-research — read across many papers' full text, not just abstracts.
• Methods / protocol extraction — pull exact procedures, parameters, and datasets.
• Claim verification — check a stated result against the actual Results section.
• Reproducibility & meta-analysis — compare methods and numbers across studies.
• RAG over your own corpus — section-aware, token-bounded chunks with citations.

Because every Section/Chunk carries its kind (methods / results / …), source, and license, an agent can cite precisely (which section of which paper/version) and stay within-license while it reasons. Full text is retrieval, not memorization: the model grounds its reasoning in the primary source instead of recalling a possibly-stale summary.

Features

• get <id> — one preprint's full text as structured JSON or Markdown. bioRxiv/ medRxiv route Europe PMC → S3 (opt-in HTML fallback); arXiv ids route to arXiv's LaTeXML full text (native HTML → ar5iv). Latest version by default; --version selects one.
• search / discover — keyword, title, abstract, or author search across Europe PMC, OpenAlex, and arXiv; topic/category/date discovery.
• ingest — resumable, incremental bulk ingestion from the openRxiv S3 buckets into a chunked corpus (JSONL or Parquet) with a sidecar manifest.
• MCP server — the same capabilities as tools for coding agents.
• Compliance built in — an export gate degrades non-redistributable works to link-back stubs; unknown licenses are treated as non-redistributable (fail-safe).
• One JATS parser shared by the Europe PMC and S3 paths; token- and section-aware chunking with deterministic, idempotent chunk ids.

Install

pip install preprint-fulltext                       # CLI + Python library + MCP server
pip install "preprint-fulltext[parquet,openalex]"   # + Parquet output, pyalex

The MCP server is built in — no extra install and no third-party MCP framework. It's a small, self-contained JSON-RPC 2.0 stdio server, so preprint-fulltext-mcp works out of the box with only the core dependencies.

Set a contact email for the Europe PMC / OpenAlex polite pools (recommended), and an OpenAlex API key if you use OpenAlex (required by OpenAlex since 2026-02-13):

export CONTACT_EMAIL="you@example.org"
export OPENALEX_API_KEY="..."            # only needed for OpenAlex discover/search

Quickstart (CLI)

# Structured full text for one preprint (Europe PMC → S3 router)
preprint-fulltext get 10.1101/2024.01.15.575000 --markdown

# Accepts a DOI, a doi.org URL, or a bioRxiv/medRxiv content URL
preprint-fulltext get https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.13.731750v1.full --html --markdown

# Versions: the DOI resolves to the latest version by default; --version selects one
preprint-fulltext get 10.64898/2026.01.29.702557 --version 1 --source html --markdown

# arXiv: id, arxiv.org URL, or 10.48550/arXiv.* DOI — routed to arXiv LaTeXML full text
preprint-fulltext get arXiv:1706.03762 --markdown
preprint-fulltext get https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.10515 --markdown

# Search: keyword, title, or author (add --source arxiv to search arXiv)
preprint-fulltext search "cortical interneurons" -n 20
preprint-fulltext search "Fezf2" --field title
preprint-fulltext search "Min Dai" --field author
preprint-fulltext search "diffusion model" --field title --source arxiv

# Discover by topic + date window (OpenAlex)
preprint-fulltext discover --query "spatial transcriptomics" --since 2025-01 -n 100

# Bulk corpus from S3 (requester-pays; needs AWS credentials)
preprint-fulltext ingest corpus.jsonl --source s3 --server biorxiv --since 2025-06

# A free, no-AWS corpus of the open-access (CC) subset via Europe PMC
preprint-fulltext ingest corpus.jsonl --source europepmc --query "long covid"

get emits a FullText document (JSON) or Markdown (--markdown). search / discover stream one SearchHit per line (JSONL). ingest writes one Chunk per line plus a <out>_manifest.jsonl audit/resume sidecar.

Typical workflows

1. Read one paper's methods/results as text.

preprint-fulltext get 10.64898/2026.01.29.702557 --markdown > paper.md
# -> # Title / ## Abstract / ## Introduction / ## Methods / ## Results / ## Discussion

2. Build an embedding-ready corpus on a topic (free, no AWS).

# CC/open-access subset via Europe PMC — one Chunk per JSONL line
preprint-fulltext ingest cortex.jsonl --source europepmc --query "cortical interneurons" -n 500
# cortex.jsonl          -> {doi, version, chunk_id, section_kind, text, token_count, license, ...}
# cortex_manifest.jsonl -> one row per preprint (doi, version, license, n_chunks, status)

3. Build the complete corpus for a month from S3 (requester-pays).

export AWS_PROFILE=...           # needs AWS credentials; ~$0.09/GB
preprint-fulltext ingest 2025-06.jsonl --source s3 --server both --since 2025-06 --format parquet
# resumable: rerun after an interruption and it skips finished preprints (no duplicates)

4. Find papers by author or title, then fetch.

preprint-fulltext search "Min Dai" --field author -n 20 > hits.jsonl
preprint-fulltext get "$(head -1 hits.jsonl | python -c 'import sys,json;print(json.load(sys.stdin)["doi"])')" --markdown

5. Give a coding agent literature access — run preprint-fulltext-mcp and point your agent at it (see skills/preprint-fulltext/SKILL.md).

Python

from preprint_fulltext.pipeline.router import Router

result = Router().get_fulltext("10.1101/2024.01.15.575000")
if result.fulltext:
    for section in result.fulltext.sections:
        print(section.kind, section.title)

from preprint_fulltext.core.chunk import chunk_fulltext
chunks = chunk_fulltext(result.fulltext)   # embedding-ready Chunk records

MCP server

Give a coding agent live preprint access. The server exposes four tools — search_preprints, get_fulltext, get_metadata, resolve — over stdio. (Bulk ingest is intentionally not a tool: it is long-running and incurs requester-pays cost.)

mcp-name: io.github.genecell/preprint-fulltext

It's a local stdio server, so it works in Claude Code / Cursor / VS Code / Windsurf / Zed / Codex / Cline — but not the claude.ai web app (there, use the Skill instead).