Faster Scientific Publishing Can Accelerate COVID-19 Treatments
New sites like bioRxiv can help bring needed treatments to those most affected by the coronavirus pandemic.
Americans on the bottom half of the economic ladder — waiters, line cooks, Uber drivers — are the ones being most displaced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The sooner we can develop treatments and vaccines to the novel coronavirus, the sooner we can bring these Americans back to work. One big help in this regard has been new, online scientific journals that bring cutting edge research to the public at internet speed.
“As is so often the case, necessity accelerates transformative change,” writes Jeff Flier, Visiting Fellow at FREOPP and Distinguished Professor and Higginson Professor of Medicine and Neurobiology at Harvard University, in a new op-ed for Stat. COVID-19 has created the need for fast dissemination of information about the virus, its treatment, and prevention.
Over the past several years, bioscience publications have become increasingly available only online, rather than physically stored in libraries. This has changed the conventional approach to peer review, the process by which experts provide feedback on research prior to publication. One example of how the peer review process is evolving is the rise of preprint servers such as bioRxiv. These are websites that publish manuscripts online, accessible to the public, prior to peer review.
Traditional pre-publication peer review can delay publication for months and even years. In responding to COVID-19, we don’t have that kind of time. Preprints are gaining support because of their ability to quickly communicate results and receive reader feedback through online comments. Flier writes:
“It is now clear that many preprints generate rapid, extensive, and effective reviews after they are posted through readers’ comments on the site, as well as on social media platforms such as Twitter. Fears that preprints would promote many erroneous claims because they lack pre-publication peer review have not proven correct, though much more research on this topic is needed.”
Preprint servers help to get needed information into the hands of medical professionals and policymakers who rely on this research to slow the spread of the virus.
“bioRxiv published its first preprint on the novel coronavirus on January 19, 2020, and it has been on a roll ever since, with 33 papers in January, 281 in February, and more than 500 in total as I write this. bioRxiv is currently receiving 25 to 30 scientific papers a day on this topic, with the majority now going to medRxiv, the more clinically oriented site.
In a recent discussion I had with Richard Sever, cofounder of both bioRxiv and medRxiv, he told me that about 40% of COVID-19 papers are from China, but that fraction is changing as the infection extends across the world. Given the intense international interest in these papers, the editors established a modified procedure whereby all coronavirus and COVID-19 papers are examined by a group of domain experts — not to provide reviews but to assess whether the work is serious, screening out the very few that might raise questions or be dangerous if they were false.”
The rare manuscripts that don’t make the cut are sent back to the author with a request to submit elsewhere for peer review. Those that do make the cut are added to the preprint server and then typically submitted to peer-reviewed journals.
Flier says that even the most elite peer-reviewed journals in bioscience publishing are starting to change their procedures due to the urgency of COVID-19. For example:
“The New England Journal of Medicine is making all of the material it publishes on COVID-19 open access on the web (everything else is behind a subscription paywall), and putting this content in one place on NEJM’s high-traffic website. Its first original article on the novel coronavirus, now called SARS-CoV-2, was published on January 29, a paper by Chinese scientists on early transmission dynamics of the virus. From then until March 18, the journal published four original articles, six perspective opinion pieces, two editorials, and eight short correspondences. Some of these were landmark papers in the field.”
Both the increased use of preprints and the evolution of “standard” scientific journals show how bioscience publishing is adapting to our changing world.
Journals should be vigilant to ensure that all research is not only timely, but accurate, reliable, and evidence-based. Thankfully, the necessity of quick information in the time of COVID-19 is speeding up that process. And that, in turn, may bring both medical and economic relief to those who need it most.
