Quest for Covid treatment spurs rise in preprint publishing
Pandemic underscores attractiveness of platforms that allow researchers to bypass lengthy peer review process
For centuries, peer review has been the foundation of academic publishing, helping journals determine if new research is solid enough to put in print.
But scientists scrambling to halt the Covid-19 pandemic have this year published an unprecedented amount of material straight on to free-to-read “preprint platforms”, postponing or bypassing the long and expert editing processes required by academic journals.
About half of all available research on Covid-19 published by May had not been preapproved by other academics, according to data analytics company Primer. By September, when many researchers would have had time to push work through more conventional but time-consuming publishing processes, the figure was still 17 per cent of the almost 64,000 papers mentioning Covid-19 available by then.
In comparison, only 3.6 per cent of biomedical research overall published this year went down the preprint route.
“Covid-19 has been a shift in a major way,” said Michael Johansson, director of Outbreak Science, a non-profit that argues research should be published openly to help stem viral epidemics.
“[Ebola and Zika] brought home to many people that getting science published after an epidemic is over is not useful . . . it needs to get out faster,” he pointed out.
Non-commercial preprint publication platforms such as arXiv, which is operated and funded by Cornell University, have been around since the early days of the internet as a way for researchers to obtain speedy feedback on their studies.
But some of the world’s largest academic publishers are now betting that the newfound popularity of the platforms, which charge independent researchers, institutions or conferences to host their content, will translate into new revenue streams as pressure to remove paywalls in regular academic journals grows — especially if that research is publicly funded.
Steven Inchcoombe, chief publishing officer at Springer Nature, said services such as preprint platforms would be the next avenue for growth for academic journals as so-called open access publishing gains ground. The German-owned publisher last month bought a majority stake in biology preprint platform Research Square for an undisclosed sum.
“It opens up this transition [for scientific journals] from subscription to open access,” he said, calling preprint platforms and other research services the “third phase” of academic publishing.
Shortly before the pandemic Taylor & Francis had also pushed into the sector, acquiring F1000 Research in January, also for an undisclosed sum. Stephen Carter, chief executive of the publisher’s owner Informa, told the Financial Times that “F1000 is small but in an interesting space . . . if open access continues to grow in key disciplines”.
“Reviewing and publishing work via the traditional journal system can be long and protracted, and can result in work being held behind a paywall,” Lord Carter said, but added that “speed cannot be the only objective”.
While papers posted on preprint sites become available within minutes, research papers usually go through an editing process that lasts several months. The proliferation of data and research that has not been peer-reviewed has spurred concern around the potential for misinformation and harm to the public.
“I’m not anti-preprint, in the context of the pandemic there is a need for timely access to relevant information,” said May van Schalkwyk, a specialist registrar in public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “But with the rapid release of information across platforms there is a risk of . . . misinformation or just information that has low quality.”
Gregg Gordon, who co-founded US-based SSRN 25 years ago and is the platform’s managing director, said the preprint platform has a team that checks that published papers are complete and relevant to the topic area, but added that “a lot of places will share research with literally no vetting whatsoever”.
The rush to get research out faster in a bid to halt the spread of Covid-19 has also put pressure on scientific journals’ rigorous fact-checking processes. Prestigious medical journals The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine this summer retracted papers over concerns around data in trials of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which was touted by US president Donald Trump.
Mr Inchcoombe said concerns had been raised about medical research being made available to the public without the normal checks and balances of academic publishing, but added that “Covid-19 has put a lot of pressure on people to come up with more creative solutions” to the dissemination of research.
He said Research Square uses artificial intelligence tools to screen content for red flags.
Mr Gordon noted that researchers’ interest in services that make the dissemination of work more efficient had spurred the creation of more than 20 new preprint servers in the past five years. He predicts further consolidation is on the cards.
“At some point [preprint publication] will get so diffused you don’t get a benefit and we will start seeing some consolidation,” he said. SSRN was bought by Elsevier in 2016 and Mr Gordon said the service was profitable.
Research Square, which is only two years old, is not yet turning a profit but Mr Inchcoombe said it would be “self-funding in time”.
He added that publishers’ move into preprint platforms was not “just opportunistic [due to the] impact of Covid”. Open access draft publishing will together with added services such as article recommendation become the industry’s “new area of growth”.