Covid research matters: Is preprint publication cutting corners?
As early as March, the German public broadcaster NDR had 15 mn people subscribing to its coronavirus podcast with virologist Christian Drosten from the Berlin Charite University hospital.
migrator
Chennai
In the era of COVID-19, politicians are listening more than ever to virologists, epidemiologists and infectious disease experts to draw guidance for action from the latest findings. It seems to be a case of all eyes on science at present. Scientific research is becoming relevant to everyday life in a way that it has never seemed to be before. The public and politicians are waiting for the next discoveries, as every new scientific finding could change the lives of millions.
As a result, scientists are working under immense pressure. They are investigating the different progressions of the disease, experimenting with drugs already approved and researching vaccines. There is demand for results to be published as quickly as possible. This is where problems arise: Before now, speed was not the top priority in science. Normally, studies are subject to a relatively time-consuming scientific peer review process in which a body of experts from various disciplines examines the research results. This committee, consisting of people who are not associated with the study, is appointed by the journal to which the scientists submit their study for publication. These experts review, comment and give feedback to the study authors. The authors then make adjustments and resubmit the paper. All this takes time; if things go badly, it can even take years. That is far too long when the research concerns SARS-CoV-2 and the lung disease COVID-19 caused by the virus.
Social media for scientists
Thanks to preprint servers like bioRxiv and medRxiv, the publication of potentially groundbreaking study results has become much faster. Here, the entire peer review process is omitted. Anyone who has done a study and written a scientific paper can upload it. A few standards must be met, however. A screening procedure ensures that the paper is indeed a scientific paper and not just some pages from the telephone book. The paper is also checked for its language and excluded if it contains offensive, violent or dangerous wording. If all this is above board, the paper is uploaded.
Preprint servers are not a new phenomenon. The first such platform, arXiv, went online back in 1991. However, up to now, they have rarely played such a major role. More than 3,300 studies on the novel coronavirus have been published on bioRxiv so far. Infectiologist Oliver Cornely is sceptical about this development. He is scientific director at Center for Clinical Studies, Cologne. “I have never published anything as a preprint before and I don’t see why I should,” he says. Preprint publications have no relevance to his scientific work, he says. “I attach great importance to the peer review process. I don’t want to see it before that,” says the physician. “What’s the difference between a preprint server and a tweet?”
With this question, Cornely sums up both the advantages and disadvantages of preprint servers: Like a tweet, research results on the preprint servers are made available to a broad public, which is a curse and a blessing at the same time. Most political decisions about how to deal with SARS-CoV-2 are being based primarily on preprint studies. Cornely insists on the peer review process. But he says that when things are as urgent as they are at the moment in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, with quick action required, professional journals are prepared to accelerate the entire publication process.
“One complication that we observed in our COVID-19 patients was a fungal infection of the lungs,” said Cornely. “So we wrote a paper very quickly but with a proper peer review process, got questions back, revised the article and finally published it.” It took just four or five days, he recalls. Cornely says that many specialist journals have created such fast-lane processes for studies whose publication is particularly urgent.
— This article has been provided by Deutsche Welle (DW/dw.com)
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