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and World Health Organization have since condemned such reports, but these now infamous publications undoubtedly fuelled the already widely-circulating coronavirus conspiracy theories at the time. Herein lies the problem with preprints. ‘With such examples in mind, myself and Amy Brand [MIT Press director] put our heads together and asked, how can we help here?’ says Lindsay. ‘As we talked, it became clear that this was a big opportunity to have a positive effect on the public understanding and trust in science, and also offer a service to mainstream media, researchers, scholars and clinicians that needed a preprint verification that wasn’t yet happening.’ Rapid Reviews: Covid-19 (RR:C19), headed up by public health Professor
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“A ResearchGate preprint… proposed that coronavirus ‘probably originated from a laboratory’”
Stefano Bertozzi at the University of California Berkeley, quickly followed. Described as an ‘open-access overlay journal’, the publication aims to accelerate the peer review of Covid-19-related research preprints to advance findings and prevent the dissemination of false or misleading news. To speed up the process, the editorial team, including an army of graduate
students, selects potential Covid-19 preprints for review, from preprint servers such as medRxiv, bioRxiv, SSRN, with help from Covid Scholar. This text-mining tool was developed by Berkeley Lab materials scientists to help researchers wade through mountains of Covid-19 literature. The chosen preprints are then sent
to RR:C19’s pool of reviewers, who will answer key questions such as is this preprint reliable and trustworthy, should it be taken seriously, how might it be used to further our knowledge in fighting the pandemic? Lindsay says, this isn’t traditional peer
review. RR:C19 is trying to balance the need for rigour with rapid response, and as such, preprints should be published, with two finished reviews, within two weeks.
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