Academic Publishing and Open Access

Preprints are research manuscripts shared publicly before formal peer review, and their use accelerated sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic as scientists needed to circulate findings far faster than traditional journal timelines allowed. Scholars studying this shift examine how bypassing peer review affects the quality, credibility, and public interpretation of scientific results, as well as how platforms like bioRxiv and medRxiv have reshaped the norms of scholarly communication. A central tension in the literature concerns whether the speed gains from open, immediate dissemination outweigh the risks of amplifying unvetted findings, particularly when media coverage and policy decisions follow preprints before errors are caught. Active research is now probing how to design post-publication review systems that preserve openness while restoring the quality-filtering functions that peer review was meant to provide.

Works

218,328

Total citations

110,394

Keywords

PreprintsCOVID-19Science CommunicationPeer ReviewResearch DisseminationScientific Publishing