mcpbeat

Biorxiv Skill

openai/biorxiv-skill

Submit compact bioRxiv and medRxiv API requests for details, publication-linkage, and DOI lookups. Use when a user wants concise preprint metadata summaries

3k tokens
context cost
the whole folder, loaded on every use
3
files
ships runnable scripts
0
copies elsewhere
how many repositories repackaged it
4915
stars on the repo
on the repository, not the skill itself

Install

one command, takes just this skill from the repository
npx skills add https://github.com/openai/plugins --skill biorxiv-skill

What comes with it

10 843 bytes besides the instruction
agents/openai.yaml
scripts/rest_request.py

The instruction itself

6 sections, as written by the author

Operating rules

  • Use scripts/rest_request.py for all bioRxiv and medRxiv API calls.
  • Use base_url=https://api.biorxiv.org.
  • The script accepts max_items; for details and pubs pages, start around max_items=10.
  • Prefer one cursor page at a time instead of increasing page size or pasting long collections into chat.
  • Re-run requests in long conversations instead of relying on older tool output.
  • Treat displayed ... in tool previews as UI truncation, not part of the true request.

Execution behavior

  • Return concise markdown summaries from the script JSON by default.
  • Return the raw script JSON only if the user explicitly asks for machine-readable output.
  • Prefer these paths: details/<server>/<start>/<end>/<cursor>/json, details/<server>/<doi>/na/json, pubs/<server>/<start>/<end>/<cursor>, and pubs/<server>/<doi>/na/json.
  • If the user needs full page contents, set save_raw=true and report the saved file path rather than pasting large collections into chat.

Input

  • Read one JSON object from stdin.
  • Required fields: base_url, path
  • Optional fields: method, params, headers, json_body, form_body, record_path, response_format, max_items, max_depth, timeout_sec, save_raw, raw_output_path
  • Common biorxiv patterns:
  • {"base_url":"https://api.biorxiv.org","path":"details/biorxiv/2025-03-21/2025-03-28/0/json","record_path":"collection","max_items":10}
  • {"base_url":"https://api.biorxiv.org","path":"details/medrxiv/10.1101/2020.09.09.20191205/na/json","record_path":"collection","max_items":10}
  • {"base_url":"https://api.biorxiv.org","path":"pubs/medrxiv/2020-03-01/2020-03-30/0","record_path":"collection","max_items":10}

Output

  • Success returns ok, source, path, method, status_code, warnings, and either compact records or a compact summary.
  • Use raw_output_path when save_raw=true.
  • Failure returns ok=false with error.code and error.message.

Execution

echo '{"base_url":"https://api.biorxiv.org","path":"details/biorxiv/2025-03-21/2025-03-28/0/json","record_path":"collection","max_items":10}' | python scripts/rest_request.py

References

  • No additional runtime references are required; keep the import package limited to this file and scripts/rest_request.py.

How to use it

Copy the folder

Take openai/biorxiv-skill from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.

Check the name does not clash

The agent identifies a skill by the name field in its header. Two skills with the same name cannot sit side by side — one of them will be ignored.