ScienceGeist

Their use and platforms require greater scrutiny Preprints-manuscripts that have not undergone peer review-were first embraced in physics, catalysed by the creation in the early 1990s of arXiv.org, an open online repository for scholarly papers.1 It was not until 2013 that similar initiatives were embraced by the biological and then medical sciences,2 and novel publishing platforms continue to emerge. Some commentators believe the potential for harm is outweighed by the benefits,134 but others have raised specific concerns regarding medical preprints and mitigating the risk of harm to the public.2 These discussions need to be revisited in the context of the covid-19 pandemic, which has been accompanied by an explosion of preprint publications. An analysis focusing on studies estimating the R of SARS-CoV-2 drew attention to the powerful role of preprints in shaping global discourse about covid-19 transmissibility. While showing the benefits that preprints may confer when adopting a consensus based approach-where data is extracted from multiple studies to observe trends and obtain an average with or without the exclusion of outliers-the authors also identify risks-matters of credibility and misinformation, both intentional and unintentional5-which may be increased where there are vested interests involved. Notably, two linked preprint publications examining the association between smoking and covid-19,67 which were widely disseminated before …

Preprint servers have existed for decades, but the fight against the coronavirus has seen their use soar. They're changing how science is done-but need important guardrails.

To help make the arXiv more accessible, a free, open pipeline on Kaggle to the machine-readable arXiv dataset: a repository of 1.7 million articles, with relevant features such as article titles, authors, categories, abstracts, full text PDFs, and more is made available.

Europe PMC, the literature archive of EMBL-EBI, has started indexing full-text COVID-19 preprints and the associated data.

This cross-sectional study examines the preprint publication policies of 100 clinical journals with the highest impact factor.

Scientists and journalists need to establish a service to review research that's publicized before it is peer reviewed.

There is a preprint with data on the first coronavirus vaccine candidate from the Pfizer/BioNTech effort. This article argues that it's extremely important that the human trial data is made available for the public to trust the vaccines that get approved.  

MIT Press is launching a journal that will review Covid-19 preprints, in an effort to quickly call out misinformation and highlight credible research.

Which would you trust more, a research article posted as a preprint, or one that has been published after peer review? The reality is that all science communicated via either mechanism should be read with a discerning and critical eye.

Along with healthcare providers around the world, the Wellcome Trust PhD fellow Karin Purshouse is seeing the need for fast-tracked guidance on the virus and patient treatment.

While the use of preprints has increased over the last years, preprint awareness and attitudes vary widely across research communities and among stakeholders in research communication.

Guest post by Kathryn Funk, program manager for NLM's PubMed Central. Over the last several months, we have seen an increase in demand from the research and library communities for broader discover…

The push for rapid and open publishing could take off - although financial pressures lie ahead: part 4 in a series on science after the pandemic.

How to stand out in the fast-growing throng.

Major scholarly publishers have invested substantially in preprints in recent years, integrating preprint deposit into manuscript submission workflows.

It looks as though preprints are here to stay in biomedicine - but are there too many of them?

Analysis of over 16,000 preprints released within 4 months of the first confirmed case found that COVID-19 preprints are shorter, with fewer panels and tables, and reviewed faster.

New initiative couples rapid release of new results with expert review.

Repositories are rapidly disseminating crucial pandemic science - and they're screening more closely to guard against poor-quality work.

It is testament to the machinery of science that so much has been learned about covid-19 so rapidly. Since January the number of publications has been doubling every 14 days, reaching 1,363 in the past week alone. They have covered everything from the genetics of the virus that causes the disease to computer models of its spread and the scope for vaccines and treatments. What explains the speed? Much as in other areas of life, covid-19 has burnt away encrusted traditions.

COVID-19 has reinforced the importance of preprints as an indispensable means for rapid research dissemination.

We have developed an analysis pipeline to facilitate real-time mutation tracking in SARS-CoV-2, focusing initially on the Spike (S) protein because it mediates infection of human cells and is the target of most vaccine strategies and antibody-based therapeutics.

Preprints servers have become a vital medium for the rapid sharing of scientific findings. However, this speed and openness has also contributed to the ability of low quality preprints to derail public debate and feed conspiracy theories. 

The objective of this review is to identify all preprint platforms with biomedical and medical scope and to compare and contrast the key characteristics and policies of these platforms.

Preprint servers and peer-reviewed journals are seeing surging audiences, with many new readers not well versed in the limitations of the latest research findings.

The SciELO Program has launched the SciELO Preprints server with the aim of accelerating the availability of research articles and other scientific communications before, or in parallel with, their evaluation and validation by scientific journals through the peer review process. Although open to all thematic areas, SciELO Preprints will focus on immediately serving communications related to COVID-19.

Some argue that rapid data sharing is ideally suited for infectious disease outbreaks like the one we’re experiencing now. However, the prospect of public access to unvetted work sparked worry about potential health scares and patients demanding unproven treatments. 

To speed information sharing, many scientists are posting paper drafts directly online. What are the potential downsides of that?

The public call for rapid sharing of research data relevant to the COVID-19 outbreak is driving an unprecedented surge in (unrefereed) preprints. To help pinpoint the most important research, Nature launched Outbreak Science Rapid PREreview, an open-source platform for rapid review of preprints related to emerging outbreaks.

Europe PMC has made changes to make sense of preprint versions.