FAST PUBLISHING WITHOUT PEER REVIEW

2020

In the early days of the Covid-pandemic, a research group published an article in which they noted ‘uncanny similarities’ between HIV and the new coronavirus. The authors suggested that Covid might have been intentionally constructed by using genetic material of the HIV virus. This completely unfounded conspiracy theory made it into the scientific literature. Embarrassing!!

Luckily the article was quickly withdrawn and never made the news headlines, but critical researchers argued that the publisher had failed to uphold its quality standards and should never have published the article.

How did the article get published? Normally, journals use peer review to check the quality of the content before publishing, but during the pandemic, this changed. New information about the spread and symptoms of Covid was needed fast, so researchers started to publish new articles on so-called preprint servers while waiting for the peer review results.

Since the pandemic, publishing on preprint servers has become common practice. But will the advantage of rapid publication really benefit the scientific community, or will preprint servers end up in the permanent collection here are the museum?

Additional info:

National Library of Medicine - Retraction in the era of COVID-19 and its influence on evidence-based medicine: is science in jeopardy?

Stat News - Quick retraction of a faulty coronavirus paper was a good moment for science

Nature - COVID’s preprint bump set to have lasting effect on research publishing