Pandemic publishing: Medical journals strongly speed up their publication process for COVID-19

Horbach, Serge P. J. M.

doi:10.1162/qss_a_00076

Cited by 165 publications

(149 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Such timelines for disseminating findings are clearly incompatible with the lightning-quick progression of a pandemic. An analysis of publication timelines for 14 medical journals has shown that some publishers have taken steps to accelerate their publishing processes for COVID-19 research, reducing the time for the peer-review stage (submission to acceptance) on average by 45 days, and the editing stage (acceptance to publication) by 14 days [29], yet this still falls some way short of the ~1-3 day screening time for bioRxiv and medRxiv preprints (Fig. 2B).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preprinting the COVID-19 pandemic

Fraser

Brierley

Dey

et al. 2020

Preprint

107

109

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25The world continues to face an ongoing viral pandemic that presents a serious threat to human 26 health. The virus underlying the COVID-19 disease, SARS-CoV-2, has caused over 3.2 million confirmed 27 cases and 220,000 deaths between January and April 2020. Although the last pandemic of respiratory 28 disease of viral origin swept the globe only a decade ago, the way science operates and responds to 29 current events has experienced a paradigm shift in the interim. The scientific community has 30 responded rapidly to the COVID-19 pandemic, releasing over 16,000 COVID-19 related scientific 31 articles within 4 months of the first confirmed case, of which at least 6,000 were hosted by preprint 32 servers. We focused our analysis on bioRxiv and medRxiv, two growing preprint servers for biomedical 33 research, investigating the attributes of COVID-19 preprints, their access and usage rates, 34 characteristics of their sharing on online platforms, and the relationship between preprints and their 35 published articles. Our data provides evidence for increased scientific and public engagement (COVID-36 19 preprints are accessed and distributed at least 15 times more than non-COVID-19 preprints) and 37 changes in journalistic practice with reference to preprints. We also find evidence for changes in 38 preprinting and publishing behaviour: COVID-19 preprints are shorter, with fewer panels and tables, 39 and reviewed faster. Our results highlight the unprecedented role of preprints and preprint servers in 40 the dissemination of COVID-19 science, and the likely long-term impact of the pandemic on the 41 scientific publishing landscape. 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54The first quarter of 2020 has been defined by the COVID-19 outbreak, which has escalated to 55 pandemic status, and caused over 3.2 million cases and 220,000 deaths within 4 months of the first 56 reported case [1,2]. The causative pathogen was rapidly identified as a novel virus within the family 57Coronaviridae and was named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (or 'SARS-CoV-2') [3]. 58 Although multiple coronaviruses are ubiquitous among humans and cause only mild disease, 59 epidemics of newly emerging coronaviruses were previously observed in SARS coronavirus in 2002 [4] 60 and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus in 2012 [5]. The unprecedented extent and 61 rate of spread of COVID-19 has created a critical global health emergency and academic communities 62 have raced to actively respond through research developments. 63 Research developments have traditionally been communicated via published journal articles or 64 conference presentations. Traditional scientific publishing involves the submission of manuscripts to 65 an individual journal, which then organises peer review. Authors often conduct additional experiments 66or analyses to address the reviewers' concerns in one or more revisions. Even after this lengthy 67 process is concluded, almost half of submissions are rejected and require re-submission to a different ...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preprinting the COVID-19 pandemic

Fraser

Brierley

Dey

et al. 2020

Preprint

107

109

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“…Pressure to achieve the latter may result in a compromise of the former. This phenomenon, which has become acute in the COVID-19 era, has particularly serious reputational consequences for high-ranking journals additional experiments, and to shorten the revision period, suggesting that some peer review might be rushed and that some results might be too provisional or superficial, potentially lowering academic standards rather than upholding them (Eisen et al 2020;Horbach 2020). There are also risks of badly written, superficial and inaccurate systematic reviews (Yu et al 2020).…”

Section: Risks Of Select Publishing Practices During the Pandemicmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is thus a trade-off between the likelihood of accepting an unsound manuscript and the likelihood of rejecting a good manuscript. Minimizing the likelihood of a type I error will lead to very few papers being accepted for publication but this also results in numerous good papers being rejected for publication (Heckman and Moktan 2020). In order to reduce the risk of a type I error, Oller and Shaw (2020) advocated for research related to vaccine safety and analysis to be more rigorous, unbiased and independent.…”

Section: Measures Needed To Minimize Risks Associated With Covid-19 Lmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimizing peer review to minimize the risk of retracting COVID-19-related literature

Silva¹,

Bornemann‐Cimenti

Tsigaris

2020

Med Health Care and Philos

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Retractions of COVID-19 literature in both preprints and the peer-reviewed literature serve as a reminder that there are still challenging issues underlying the integrity of the biomedical literature. The risks to academia become larger when such retractions take place in high-ranking biomedical journals. In some cases, retractions result from unreliable or nonexistent data, an issue that could easily be avoided by having open data policies, but there have also been retractions due to oversight in peer review and editorial verification. As COVID-19 continues to affect academics and societies around the world, failures in peer review might also constitute a public health risk. The effectiveness by which COVID-19 literature is corrected, including through retractions, depends on the stringency of measures in place to detect errors and to correct erroneous literature. It also relies on the stringent implementation of open data policies.

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“…It will be a few years though before being able to analyze the retraction rate of COVID-related papers 5 by means of comparing it with a control group. Yet, the time from article submission to online publication of COVID-related articles accelerated remarkably in comparison to previous publication timeframes according to independent studies published in pre-print servers and in prestigious journals as well [6][7][8][9][10] . For example, two independent studies found that the median time to final acceptance was eight times faster for COVID-related articles as opposed to papers on other issues [8][9] .…”

Section: Editorialmentioning

confidence: 99%