Feature Preprint pandemonium


“It really shows how the pandemic has brought international research groups together”


and openly with other researchers worldwide. The impact of this is very important to them,’ he says.


But demonstrations aside, traffic across


Sam Hindle, content lead at bioXriv and co-founder of PREreview, provides insight into what happened at preprint servers after the Sars-CoV-2 outbreak


Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, bioRxiv has posted between 150 and 350 Covid-19 preprints per month, during a period when total monthly submissions rose from around 3,000 to some 3,800 new papers. Meanwhile, medRxiv saw an increase from around 200 posts per month in January to around 2,000 posts in May. Around 70 per cent of all posted manuscripts from March to September related to the pandemic. We quickly became


aware that the Sars-CoV-2 outbreak would lead to challenges, so at bioRxiv we sought insight from outbreak scientists and created a group of bioRxiv ‘outbreak affiliates’ to provide


guidance on Covid-19 submissions. On medRxiv, we asked authors to reduce any causal language used in observational studies. And on each server, we became more alert to papers that could fuel conspiracy theories. Looking beyond submissions, bioRxiv and medRxiv also experienced massive increases in attention. In January bioRxiv received around six million abstract views, whereas by June views reached eight million per month. On medRxiv, abstract views increased from 700,000 in January to 11 million views in April alone. Heightened media and public attention has been challenging, as the nuanced differences between a preprint and a published article haven’t been immediately obvious to non- scientist readers. However, responsible journalism,


g


becoming more open to the idea of having an institutional repository for publications and datasets, and are aware that open data can really boost innovation.’ Mahé reckons demand has come from all


disciplines, including sociology, economics and Covid-19-related fields. He believes this also reflects Polaris OS’s current users, which include the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), the French National Institute of Health and


8 Challenges in the Scholarly Publishing Cycle 2020/2021


such as notifying readers that preprints have not been peer-reviewed and seeking insight from experts not associated with the study, can address these issues. Still, my hope is this momentum towards open and accessible research during the pandemic is maintained and extended to non-Covid-19 research. Early on in the pandemic, several biomedical journals flipped their Covid-19 articles to open access, while several medical journals modified preprint policies to support preprint posting. The further we move the needle in the right direction, the sooner we will live in a world where open, constructive scientific critique is valued, and researchers can focus on creative thinking and scientific discovery, rather than wasting energy navigating a complex publishing ecosystem.


Medical Research, Inserm, and Deutsche Bundesbank. And throughout the pandemic Mahé had


many organisations from South America contacting him, which he partly attributes to these nations’ high levels of Covid-19. He also believes a lot of this interest arises from the fact the repository platform is open source and promotes open access. ‘Researchers can be using a truly open system with data that can be shared freely


Polaris OS platforms has also been higher since the beginning of the pandemic, in all disciplines, particularly in the US and China. ‘Users mainly represent universities and research institutions, and we are trying to understand why. It’s very interesting, as these countries have very big research communities,’ says Mahé. Given the intense interest in his open


repository platform since the virus outbreak, Mahé is hopeful that the pandemic will have had a positive impact on open data. ‘A lot of researchers have now had access to free and open data that would not have been accessible without the Covid-19 crisis,’ he says. ‘I hope that collectively we become more conscious on how open data and open access publishing can help researchers and their colleagues to work more productively.’ Like Mahé, Grace Baynes, vice president of


research data and new product development, research solutions at Springer Nature, has been keenly watching the impact of Covid-19 on her organisation. As she points out, submissions across all Springer Nature journals were up 26 per cent year-on-year from January to June, with the highest growth of 51 per cent coming from medical journals. And over the same period, the organisation published a hefty 10,000 articles related to Covid-19. However, for Baynes, it is the


collaborations that have emerged in the pandemic that have been ‘really interesting’. Pointing to Scientific Data, an open-access, online-only, peer-reviewed journal for descriptions of scientific datasets, she highlights the incredible story behind the first Covid-19 article that the journal published. ‘This was describing an epidemiological


dataset about the spread of the virus, that was openly developed by researchers working around the world in real-time as the pandemic was evolving,’ she says. ‘Researchers came from China, South America, the US, UK and the rest of Europe to work on this, and it’s still being updated continuously today.


Faberr Ink/Shutterstock.com


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46