Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for information about the evolving virus spotlighted the role of preprint servers, which offer scientists a fastrack to share their findings.
Preprint servers house research manuscripts that are awaiting peer-review for publication in a scientific journal — a process that could take months to years.
"We don't have that kind of time when there is a deadly virus, and months of delays would cost thousands or more lives," Leana Wen, MD, emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., told The Hill.
Four more things to know about preprints, as reported by The Hill.
1. MedRxiv, a preprint server, published 217 manuscripts unrelated to COVID-19 in January 2020 after launching a few months earlier. By May 2020 alone, 1,625 COVID-19 preprint studies were published.
2. Harlan Krumholz, MD, co-founder of MedRxiv and a cardiolioloigst at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., told the news outlet that the server screens manuscripts prior to publishing them. This is to ensure they aren't anonymous or contain privacy violations. MedRxiv also weighs whether it would be harmful to release the findings ahead of peer review.
3. While there's been concern that the increased attention on preprints could lead to findings being misinterpreted or communicated, some evidence suggests COVID-focused preprints end up being published in a peer-reviewed journal at similar rates than other research. For example, at least 30 percent of pandemic-focused manuscripts posted to MedRxiv between Janurary 2020 and March 2021 have since been peer-reviewed and published in a journal. The same was true for non pandemic-related manuscripts, The Hill reports.
4. Some experts anticipate the traction preprints have gained will persist, with other areas of research seeing an uptick in the future.
"I think you can't put preprints back into the box," said Prabhjot Singh, MD, PhD, associate clinical professor of medicine at New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System. "We need to just be increasingly aware that very fresh, scientific information that's still in the process of science is going to be taken out of context or people will try to make interpretations about it. And part of what we have to do is educate the public about the strengths and limitations of the scientific process," he told The Hill.