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Animal Ethics Biosafety Human Research Ethics Research Integrity

How Science Moved Beyond Peer Review During The Pandemic – FiveThirtyEight (Maggie Koerth | July 2021)

Posted by Dr Gary Allen in Human Research Ethics, Research Integrity on July 15, 2021
Keywords: Institutional responsibilities, Journal, Peer review, Research integrity, Research results

The Linked Original Item was Posted On July 8, 2021

Criticism Word Cloud Concept in red caps with great terms such as opinion, blame, critique and more.

And what scientists learned they still needed it for.

When papers from China began flooding the websites bioRxiv and medRxiv in the first months of 2020, it was a strange and notable change. Founded as places where scientists could post drafts of research papers before those papers went through a traditional peer review, these sites had never really advertised much in China or gotten many submissions from scientists in that country before, said Richard Sever, the co-founder of bioRxiv and medRxiv. The sudden shift turned out to be a preview of the pandemic to come. “We got a wave of submissions from China and then a wave of submissions from Italy. And I remember being with a colleague, looking at submission numbers, and the chart was so eerily familiar,” Sever said. “It looks just like the progression of pandemic caseloads.”

We have written before about the reasons to be excited about preprint servers (the democratisation of science and the immediacy of the correction of science), but it isn’t without its limitations.  This great piece dives into that further.  We have included links to x related links.

“Preprint,” or “prepress,” servers have been around for decades, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, they took on a new notoriety and level of importance. Two of these sites alone, bioRxiv and medRxiv, hosted 25 percent of all COVID-19-related scientific research published during the pandemic’s first 10 months — more than 10,000 papers. In contrast, only 78 preprints were uploaded to bioRxiv during the entire 2015-16 Zika epidemic. (The medRxiv site didn’t exist yet.) COVID-19 proved to scientists that preprint servers are crucial resources in a crisis. At the same time, though, experts said the pandemic also made the shortcomings of scientific publishing clear. Preprints share a lot of the same limitations as peer-reviewed research, especially when it comes to how the media and the public use research once it’s out in the world for all to see.

Websites that post scientific research before it has been peer-reviewed and published in a scientific journal have been active since at least 1991, when the classic arXiv site, originally used mainly by physicists, went live. Even before that, scientists have shared drafts and notes among themselves through personal correspondence ever since “science” as a field became a thing. Those lines of communication exist parallel to the traditional process of peer review, which puts gatekeepers between research and publication. First, a paper has to be accepted by the editors of a scientific journal. Then, it goes to a (usually anonymous) panel of other scientists for critique. Their notes will lead to edits, which usually lead to more experiments, and then (hopefully) eventual publication.

How Science Moved Beyond Peer Review During The Pandemic
And what scientists learned they still needed it for.

Related Reading

Preprints Are Not Going to Replace Journals – Scholarly Kitchen (Haseeb Irfanullah | June 2021)

(EU) How pandemic-driven preprints are driving open scrutiny of research – Horizon (Rex Merrifield | April 2021)

Pivotal Year for Preprints – Inside Higher Ed (Lilah Burke | January 2021)

Changes in the Scientific Information Environment During the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Importance of Scientific Situational Awareness in Responding to the Infodemic – Mary Ann Liebert, Inc (John K. Iskander | December 2020)

Journalism, Preprint Servers, and the Truth: Allocating Accountability – Scholarly Kitchen (Rick Anderson | December 2020)

Disseminating Scientific Results in the Age of Rapid Communication – EOS (Shobha Kondragunta, et al | October 2020)

Coronavirus Tests Science’s Need for Speed Limits – New York Times (Wudan Yan | April 2020)

Ask The Chefs: AI and Scholarly Communications – Scholarly Kitchen (Ann Michael | April 2019)

Preprints and Citations: Should Non-Peer Reviewed Material Be Included in Article References? – Scholarly Kitchen (David Crotty | March 2018)

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