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who post preprints are generally the bigger labs, the more experienced researchers, the people who have more confidence in putting their work out before it’s been formally reviewed’. And researcher behaviour is quite subject specific too, he continued, noting that eLife’s authors in more computational fields, such as neuroscience, cell biology and genetic genomics, are more comfortable with posting preprints than other disciplines. ‘eLife is beginning to publish more clinical work and that poses challenges because a lot of clinicians are less aware of preprints and there’s more explaining to do.’


Opening up science Preprints can also play an important access role. Although preprints will not satisfy many, if any, modern open access mandates, they do enable research findings to be read by anyone and preprint servers enable them to be searchable and discoverable. And they play a wider role in open science, paving the way for open review and bringing in new ideas to improve the quality of the final, published output. As Pattinson commented: ‘The goal is to


have feedback of everything we review and we should be posting that feedback publicly because it’s incredibly useful information. Authors have an obvious nervousness around posting reviews that are critical of their work but, in practice, the reviews are very constructive, not rude or aggressive, but useful feedback. We feel readers would benefit from knowing if there are any issues that need addressing on a preprint.’ He is also enthusiastic about a new


approach to open review emerging off the back of preprints, especially as a result of COVID-19. ‘We are very interested in models where groups of academics find interesting Covid papers and review them and then just go ahead and post their reviews on their own websites. It really was born out of necessity – exactly how the best things are.’


Challenges Despite the enthusiasm from many, there have also been plenty of words of criticism about preprints. In particular, the ready and rapid availability of preprints related to COVID-19 has led to some confusion and misunderstanding, and some sceptics of vaccination or of the existence of the virus itself cherry picking from scientific findings to claim authenticity to their theories. As Alejandra Arreola Triana, who teaches


science communication at Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, in Monterrey, Mexico, summed up: ‘As an author’s editor,


12 Research Information Spring 2022


I like the idea of setting precedent and perhaps getting comments or citations. But, as someone who trained in science journalism, I saw they caused some serious misunderstandings during the pandemic.’ Avissar-Whiting acknowledged these


concerns: ‘Every platform has struggled with the misinformation and disinformation problem and dealt with it differently. We made the decision to take a bit of a heavy hand.’ She explained the approach that Research Square has taken of screening manuscripts, deciding whether to publish the preprints and, if so, whether to work with the authors on producing lay explainer texts. ‘We felt we had to do something about it


and we did have the resources in-house to [do so]. I always point to the T cell paper that came out in June 2020. It was from a lab in Germany and was one of several studies talking about T cell immunity and how we have some immunity from our exposure to coronaviruses that cause the common cold. It was a very complex immunology paper, but in it the authors say something like 80 per cent of us have some remnants of this immunity from coronaviruses.


“Despite the enthusiasm from many, there have also been plenty of words of criticism about preprints’”


‘That paper, if you cherry picked it apart,


played into that [Covid hoax] narrative and so that preprint went crazy viral, but it was all within this circle of people saying it’s a hoax – an insane take given the whole world was being crushed by sickness. What we did was write a lay summary and put it on the preprint. People started screen capturing the lay summary and putting it on Twitter whenever people would take that study as evidence of Covid not existing. I don’t know how much of an impact that had on quelling the confusion around [the research], but I do know people noticed it and used it exactly the way we intended for


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