Feature
Peer review, preprints and a pandemic
Rebecca Pool asks: will coronavirus leave preprints and peer review inextricably entwined?
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, staff at MIT Press were noticing a problem with preprint servers. Over time, more and more preprints were being published and drifting into mainstream media, even government, in ways that weren’t always helpful and were sometimes even misleading. Then came coronavirus. As Nick
Lindsay, director of journals and open access at MIT Press, puts it: ‘These issues were exacerbated as the sheer volume of research we were seeing on bioRxiv, medRxiv and other preprint servers was immense. Literally thousands of preprints were going out there with no review, and we started to see some really troubling things take place.’ Amid the torrent of data released onto
4 Research Information February/March 2021
preprint servers, research clangers emerged and withdrawals, retractions and expressions of concern followed. For example, in late January 2020 a bioRXiv preprint from a group of researchers from the India Institute of Technology reported HIV insertions in the spike of Sars-CoV-2 that were not present in past coronaviruses. The researchers also speculated these had been placed in the virus intentionally. Then around a week later, a ResearchGate preprint from a researcher at the South China University of Technology and colleague, proposed that coronavirus ‘probably originated from a laboratory’. In each case, the papers were re-drawn
following outrage from the research community. The Chinese government
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