Efforts to share research with the public must include mechanisms to prevent harm resulting from low-quality work.
I started my career as an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the Singapore Ministry of Health. Soon I was fighting the first coronavirus epidemic, that of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). That was in 2003, a world before biomedical preprints. In the middle of the current pandemic, I am thinking about preprints and research integrity. My professional expertise has come full circle.
This Nature story makes an excellent point. Those of us who are fans of preprint servers have important obligations. We support the role of preprinting because of the democratisation of science, the speed of knowledge transfer and the immediacy of open peer review. But it only works if we can trust the honesty of the players. One idea is treating a researcher more harshly in they go the preprint route knowing their work is falsified, fabricated or plagiarised.
The case for releasing preprints is clear: results from scientific studies are made more quickly and more broadly available. Overall, greater sharing and transparency boosts trustworthiness and collaboration. But efforts to promote preprints without simultaneously implementing firm measures to ensure that the research is of high quality put the cart before the horse.