# Bioicons: open science clipart for editable SVG figures > Bioicons is a free library of open source icons for scientific illustrations, built for people drawing figures in Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator rather than people shipping interfaces. Its strength is a hand-picked biology and chemistry collection; its complication is that the licence is decided per icon, so some of them still require attribution. **duerrsimon/bioicons** — A library of free open source icons for science illustrations in biology and chemistry - Repository: https://github.com/duerrsimon/bioicons - Website: https://bioicons.com - Stars: 1,776 · Forks: 105 - Language: Vue - License: MIT - Published: 2026-10-16 · Updated: 2026-10-16 · Language: en - Canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/duerrsimon-bioicons ## This is a figure library, not an interface icon set Bioicons is a free library of open source icons for scientific illustrations using vector graphics software such as Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator. The site is bioicons.com, and the topic tags on the repository are biology, chemistry, graphics, illustration and science. That framing excludes a large and obvious audience. These are not interface icons, not a 24 pixel grid, not a stroke system. A bilharzie egg or a hepatitis virus interior is a drawing with a purpose, drawn at a size where it will end up in a figure panel, and the value of the collection is that all of them are drawn in a compatible open style so they can sit side by side in one figure without looking borrowed from three different sources. The stated scope is broad within science. Bioicons is free and open and will accept any high quality science illustration as svg vector broadly fitting in the scope of the life sciences, which is a wider door than a curated set would suggest. The repository holds a Vue front end with pages, components, layouts, plugins and middleware, and the site itself was inspired by the heroicons.dev site built by zaydek under the MIT licence, which explains the visual language: a grid of icons you click to copy or download. The audience is the working illustrator. Someone with a figure to finish by Friday, in a vector editor, who needs an open alternative to the clipart that came with the software. ## Two ways to take an icon, and one of them is browser limited The website supports two modes, and the first one has a catch the README states plainly. Copy to clipboard works only in a Webkit browser such as Google Chrome, Brave or Microsoft Edge. It copies an image file and a text representation of the svg file to the clipboard. What happens next depends on the editor. In Inkscape the image will be pasted, and in future versions of Inkscape the svg will be used. In Adobe Illustrator the svg will be pasted and can be edited directly. The distinction matters more than it sounds. An image paste gives you a picture of the drawing, which you can scale and recolour but not restructure. An SVG paste gives you the actual vector objects, with their paths intact, which means you can delete the parts you do not want. The README makes the same point from the other direction: in vector graphics software you double click on the icons and edit them or delete parts that you do not want. The second mode is download on click. Clicking an icon downloads the vector in svg format, and you can use it on the web, in graphics software and in Microsoft Office products. The README also notes that vector images can be scaled infinitely, which is the reason this is a reasonable format for print figures. So the practical choice is between convenience and editability. Copy to clipboard in Illustrator gets you editable vectors in one step, but it is limited to Webkit browsers and behaves differently in Inkscape today. Download gets you the same file, everywhere, at the cost of a file on disk. ## The licence belongs to each icon, not to the site This is the part that catches contributors and users out, and the README is explicit about it. The repository itself is MIT licensed, and the site code carries that licence. The artwork does not. Each icon keeps the licence of whoever made it, and the README's guidance is that if the icon is licensed as CC BY you still need to attribute it and state the modifications you made. The credits section makes the expected practice concrete. Please always cite the individual icons and their respective license. Credit to the platform itself is appreciated but not necessary. The example citation shows the shape, naming the icon, the author, the source and the licence URL for a Servier icon under CC-BY 3.0 Unported. That is a real obligation for anyone using these icons in a published paper or a commercial figure. A figure that mixes several CC BY icons has to carry a separate credit line for each, and the ones from the Servier collection are numerous enough that the bibliography for a single figure can dwarf the figure itself. The mitigation is on the input side rather than the output side. The contribute section asks for icons preferably under CC-0 or MIT license, so the collection is moving, slowly, toward a state where the per-icon obligations are lighter. The catalogue you are using today still needs to be checked icon by icon, and the example citation is the template to copy. ## The art came from Servier and TogoTV, which is where the value is The credits name the two sources that made the collection possible, and the README explains the problem they had. Bioicons thanks the Database Center for the life sciences, and its TogoTV picture database, along with Servier, for making comprehensive open art libraries for the life sciences available. The stated reason for doing the work is blunt: their navigation is a bit clunky, and the formats are mixed images with vectors or in proprietary format, with Microsoft PowerPoint EMF named as an example. That is a precise description of a real problem in scientific illustration. The open biology and chemistry art that exists is scattered, inconsistently organised, and often distributed in formats that a vector editor cannot open properly. A single site that presents the usable subset as SVG, in one place, with the licence attached to each item, solves a problem that the availability of the art did not. The sample citation shows the shape of the collection. A bilharzie-egg icon by Servier, and a hepatitis-virus-interior icon by Servier, both under CC-BY 3.0 Unported. Both are the kind of subject that a generic clipart library does not have and that a figure about parasites or viral structure cannot be drawn without. For anything outside science, the README points elsewhere, recommending OpenClipart and Openmojii for other open clipart or emoji. The difference in approach is scope rather than format: those are general purpose libraries, while Bioicons is a curated, licensed, subject-specific set for life science figures. ## The site itself is a Nuxt application you can run locally Bioicons is primarily a website, and there is no package to install if your goal is to get icons. The icons are on bioicons.com, you click one, and you take the SVG. For anyone who wants to work on the site itself, the repository is a Nuxt application. The package.json names it bioicons.com, marks it private, and the scripts cover the standard Nuxt lifecycle: ```json "scripts": { "dev": "nuxt", "build": "nuxt build", "start": "nuxt start", "generate": "nuxt generate" } ``` Running the dev script starts the site locally, the build script produces a server build, start runs that build, and generate produces a static build, which is the mode you would want for a site like this that does not need a server at request time. The dependency list explains what the interface does. Nuxt is pinned at the 2.x line, and there is an infinite scroll module, which is how the icon catalogue is paged, plus an axios module for the data, nuxt-lazy-load for image lazy loading, a browser detect plugin, which is how the site can tell you that copy to clipboard only works in a Webkit browser, vt-notifications for the toast messages, vue-tour for a guided introduction, and Tailwind with the Tailwind CSS UI plugin and Inter for the typography. The repository has the usual supporting files, an.eslintrc.js, a.prettierrc, an.editorconfig, a CHANGELOG.md, a CITATION.cff, a CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md and a CONTRIBUTING.md. ## Contributing is an issue or a pull request, and the bar is SVG quality The contribution path is deliberately low friction, because the scarce resource is artwork rather than code. The README says that if you want to make available icons, preferably under CC-0 or MIT License, to the community via this platform, you can either open a new issue and link the icon, or create a pull request as described in CONTRIBUTING.md. Linking an issue is enough to get an icon into the collection, which removes the need to learn the site's build before you can contribute art. The quality bar is stated as high quality science illustration as svg vector. The format is not negotiable in practice, because the whole point of the collection is that the icons can be pasted into an editor and edited, and a raster or a PDF-based vector would break the copy to clipboard behaviour the site is built around. The licence preference in the same sentence is the strategic part. Accepting art under CC-0 or MIT means accepting art whose terms are easy to comply with, which lowers the friction for a researcher assembling a figure for a paper and raises the odds that they can use the collection without a permissions conversation with their institution. A closing detail worth keeping: the CHANGELOG.md, the CITATION.cff and the per-icon citation convention together mean that the provenance of any individual drawing can travel with it, which is the thing scientific publishing cares about most. ## The releases are dated by month, the code moved more recently The release naming is unusual and worth noting. There are two published releases, April24 from 2024-04-25 and Nov2024 from 2024-11-01, both named after the month they cover rather than after a version number. The package.json carries a version of 1.0.0, and it is marked private, so that number describes the site application rather than the artwork collection. The last push to the repository was on 2026-10-17, which tells you the site and the tooling are still being worked on even though the named release artefacts have not been republished since 2024. The distinction makes sense for this project. The artwork is what a user downloads, and it arrives through the site, not through a versioned release, while the releases directory history tracks occasional snapshots of the whole collection. The licence is MIT for the code, with the LICENSE file at the root of the repository, and the artwork carries per-icon terms as described earlier. For a project that exists to redistribute somebody else's creative work, that split is the correct arrangement, and the CITATION.cff file at the root is a nod to the same idea for the repository itself. What the project is not is a search engine or a replacement for a life science drawing tool. It is a curated, licensed, correctly formatted shelf, and its usefulness depends entirely on the shelf being deep and the licences being clear on each item. ## Conclusion Bioicons fits a researcher, teacher or scientific illustrator who is assembling a figure in Inkscape or Illustrator and needs a cell, a virus or a molecule drawn in a consistent open style rather than traced from a proprietary source. It does not fit a product designer looking for interface icons, and it does not fit a commercial figure that cannot carry per-icon attribution, because the site code is MIT while the artwork keeps its own terms. Before you build a figure on it, check the licence of each individual icon, keep the citation lines, and prefer the CC-0 or MIT icons when the choice is there. ## FAQ ### What is Bioicons and who is it for? Bioicons is a free library of open source icons for scientific illustrations using vector graphics software such as Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator. It covers biology and chemistry subjects and is aimed at people assembling scientific figures, not at interface designers. ### Which browsers support the copy to clipboard feature in Bioicons? Copy to clipboard works only in a Webkit browser such as Google Chrome, Brave or Microsoft Edge. It copies an image file and a text representation of the svg, and in Adobe Illustrator the svg is pasted and can be edited directly, while in Inkscape the image is pasted. ### Do I have to attribute icons downloaded from Bioicons? It depends on the icon. The README says that if an icon is licensed as CC BY you still need to attribute it and state the modifications you made, and it asks users to always cite the individual icons and their respective licence, with a worked example citation for a Servier icon under CC-BY 3.0 Unported. ### How do I contribute icons to Bioicons? You can open a new issue and link the icon, or create a pull request as described in CONTRIBUTING.md. The README asks for high quality science illustration in SVG vector, preferably licensed under CC-0 or MIT. ### Can I use Bioicons icons in Microsoft Office documents? Yes. The download on click mode gives you the vector in svg format, and the README states you can use it on the web, in graphics software and in Microsoft Office products, and that vector images can be scaled infinitely. ## Sources - [duerrsimon/bioicons on GitHub](https://github.com/duerrsimon/bioicons) - [License: MIT](https://github.com/duerrsimon/bioicons/blob/main/LICENSE) - [Project website](https://bioicons.com) - [README](https://github.com/duerrsimon/bioicons/blob/main/README.md) - [Releases](https://github.com/duerrsimon/bioicons/releases) --- Hysen Labs editorial analysis, written from the project's own repository and release notes. Cite the canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/duerrsimon-bioicons