The Problem and Promise of Preprints in the Era of Coronavirus

Pre-print servers are exploding amidst a tidal wave of coronavirus papers. Not all of them are particularly good.

When we look back on 2020, what will we call it? The year of the pandemic? The year of democracy? From a medical publishing standpoint it’s clear — 2020 is the year of the preprint.

Preprints. Medical manuscripts published for all to see, prior to peer review.

The promise of preprint servers is nothing less than the democratization of medical science. Free, open publishing so researchers and readers of research can come together and make science better. But like all good ideas, it’s about the execution.

While preprint servers like Arxiv have been running for decades servicing the math and physics community, the medical research world has only more recently embraced biorxiv — often for basic science papers — and the newcomer to the scene MedRxiv — for the clinical sciences. Full disclosure — medRxiv is run out of Yale and I have nothing to do with it.

And, according to this research letter in JAMA, medRxiv is taking off in 2020 thanks, of course, to COVID-19.