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The pandemic is generating significant changes in scientific publishing processes and further exacerbating the gender gap.
The role that scientific research has played in policy-making during this pandemic is undeniable. Thanks to the collaborative work that researchers and health professionals have been carrying out, we have taken giant steps towards understanding the new pathogen in a matter of months. More than ever, the general public has looked to science with critical eyes to wait for answers and shape their expectations.
This need has led to a record increase in the volume of research publications during this pandemic. Dissemination of information is a crucial factor in periods of public crisis, and the scientific community has responded with unprecedented reforms in its publication processes. Studies affirm that the time between the presentation and publication of a manuscript has reduced significantly. The process that a scientific journal article had to complete – from acceptance to publication – has dropped from an average of 100 days to only six if it is related to coronavirus. An article published in Nature further reports that compared to the Ebola crisis when four articles were published per week, now an average of 367 papers are published if they relate to COVID-19.
The production of scientific articles of this dimension would not have been possible without resources to finance this extraordinary phenomenon. In an analysis for the Times Higher Education, Jack Grove estimates that the global community has raised nearly $8 trillion to research vaccines, treatments, and diagnoses. The pandemic has been a propellant not just for production but also for scientific accessibility. Numerous academic journals and repositories such as Springer Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, and the Academy of Medical Sciences have committed to making coronavirus research free and open-access. They also call for the global participation of all institutions that gather relevant information to work together for the effectiveness of the 2016 Statement on Data Sharing in Public Health Emergencies.
This proposal for open science resources certainly goes hand in hand with the spike that preprint sites have had during this period. Remember that preprints are versions of manuscripts before peer review and publication in a scientific journal. They are usually shared on websites like medRxiv or bioRxiv, which commonly accommodate the article and provide a section inviting the public for comments. They claim to be an affordable pathway for those researchers who seek to disseminate their results more efficiently and receive quicker feedback so they can subsequently adhere to the formal publication processes.
“It would be a missed opportunity if scientists did not have immediate knowledge of each other’s work and could not improve, validate, and learn more quickly.”
Indeed, this model is not new. For the last five years, the number of servers disseminating these articles has increased, albeit at a leisurely pace. However, in today’s context, where speed and free access to information resources are prioritized, the formal scientific publication process is not the most efficient option. The slim diversity of sources, review times that would exceed the most critical periods of the pandemic, and limited access have highlighted how conventional science has struggled to keep foot with the need to understand this virus.
Now, researchers in the medical area have been sharing results on preprint sites at an unprecedented rate. It is believed that this could help avoid duplication of work and provide new opportunities in research. A study reports that, of the total number of articles related to COVID-19, about 40% have been published on these servers.
The site mentioned above, medRxiv, founded by Yale researchers, owes its exponential growth mostly to the more than 3,700 COVID-19 manuscripts now found on its webpage. Experts expect it to become a leader in other medical areas once the pandemic is over.
“Thousands of scientists are working on the same problem at the same time. It would be a missed opportunity if scientists did not have immediate knowledge of each other’s work and could not improve, validate, and learn more quickly,” commented Dr. Joseph Ross, professor and co-founder of the site. However, this avalanche of information could also have serious consequences. Preprints have advantages over traditional publishing processes, but they are also “open, fast and free, creating a different set of problems,” explains an article published on Science Direct.
While the work that the researchers and other professionals have done to produce such a large number of manuscripts in so short a time is admirable, one must also consider the risks if these investigations were not being carried out under the rigors of high quality. “The immediate problem confronting the publication universe is the avalanche of articles and the need for them to be accessible,” comments the researcher, Torres-Salinas.
The paper Proliferation of Papers and Preprints During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic: Progress or Problems With Peer Review? Explains that, before the coronavirus pandemic, the preprint community was slow ascent; few scientific groups had adopted this alternative. Therefore, worries about the quality of information or the disclosure pace were not issues on the table. However, “given the avalanche of data, the concerns about medical misinformation surrounding COVID19 are valid and critical. The entire scientific community must address these problems.”
The problem with preprints
This alternative has been working well during this state of emergency. However, experts wonder if the current financing of these projects will be sustainable. The project funding invested so far will most likely result in budget cuts for university research when the pandemic is over.
Furthermore, differences in editorial standards for the preprint sites are striking. On these sites, research is published without a pre-filter. While other professionals’ feedback may be efficient, making these texts available to the open public poses potential risks. Not all of these have investigative findings, and the excess of publications makes it harder to navigate through the releva
nt information.
“We are not only fighting an epidemic; we are fighting an infodemic.”
Many of the works are preliminary reports that have not had the usual reviews. Scarce external validity, the lack of proper peer review, and dubious sources put the growing medical community at added disadvantages. For example, Nature mentions a quality review recently performed on 51 manuscripts. Most were preprints that had not been reviewed. The QR found that “the identified models were based on misinformation; all had a high risk of bias and performances probably too optimistic.”
Without formal peer review procedures, the responsibility for divulging relevant information falls upon the researchers. It is also believed that the prior publication of articles on these sites could lead to double counting in subsequent quantitative manuscripts.
Inconsistency among the various preprint sites has resulted in formal retractions from high-profile research sites. The use of unreliable literature causes these retractions. The scenario of inappropriate practices in research has reached extremes like the “paper mills” in China. These involve cases of plagiarism and falsified data and peer reviews. These organizations produce scientific articles and preprints on demand, selling them, for example, to scientists who have a requirement to publish a manuscript for their degree and do not have time to carry out formal research. Nature affirms that in February, “more than 450 articles were released with problematic images from authors affiliated with Chinese hospitals; researchers said these probably came from paper mills.”
It is feared that the publication of manuscripts on this scale will compromise the usual rigors of presenting scientific evidence and potentialize waves of misinformation. “We are not just fighting an epidemic; we are fighting an infodemic,” states Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization’s director-general.
“The aftermath of misinformation could include scientific academia’s lack of credibility.”
“We know that a tsunami of information will accompany every outbreak, but within this information, there are always misinformation and rumors, etc. We know that even in the Middle Ages, this phenomenon existed. However, the difference now is that social media amplifies this phenomenon, it travels faster and farther, like the viruses that travel with people and go faster and farther,” comments Sylvie Brand.
The problem is that these resources, being fully open to the general public, can be considered as scientific evidence when they have not yet been tested. Suppose the global community believes conclusive findings that are not supported. In that case, this can have serious consequences, mainly when people rely on investigations that have misinformation regarding treatments and the mortality rates of the virus.
Jeffrey Lazarus, an associate research professor at the Barcelona Institute of Global Health, explained to the Times Higher Education, “It can be incredibly dangerous if an unreviewed article on, say, a possible COVID-19 treatment appears in a preprint, and the treatment is tried by someone without its findings being properly reviewed. We have seen people hoard malaria medications because they believed these might have some benefits [in the treatment of COVID-19] without realizing the risk of taking these medications.”
As a result of the public reliance on still inconclusive findings, sites such as bioRxiv have already decided not to publish any more quantitative studies on potential coronavirus treatments in an attempt to stop the dangers of self-medication.
“Reviewers and editors must be vigilant to prevent such manuscripts from becoming faulty published evidence, which has the potential to influence scientific and public discourse adversely and result in confusion, bad political decisions, and public mistrust in science,” the Nature article comments.
The long-term impact of preprints
On the other hand, preprints could generate permanent changes in the culture of academic-scientific publication. Open access has narrowed the gap between the general knowledge of everyday users and research information. Significant transformations in the consumption of specialized literature will open the door to the public discussion of science.
These reforms are being replicated in the bureaucratic processes that previously swamped academic dissemination. Given the factor of missing peer reviews on the preprint servers, sites such as Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 (RR: C19) have emerged, founded just this year by MIT Press and the University of California, Berkeley. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to democratize the review system and strengthen scientific quality even in its preliminary versions.
“The pandemic has further exacerbated the existing gender gap in academia.”
The “rapid reviews” are seen as more advantageous than systematic ones, which require greater resources and more extended time. In the latter, the processes of correction and communication among colleagues are much more complex. Resources such as those offered by RR: C19 will remain in the scientific community as a much more affordable option for those authors who need more transparent reviews.
The popularity of open resources and preprint sites also present an excellent opportunity for academic communities that are often relegated. The mediatization of global information is beginning to reduce barriers to scientists from non-Western universities.
The gender gap in academia
However, this scenario is not replicated for women in science. Indeed, the pandemic has exacerbated the gender gap that has already existed in the research area. Various analyses suggest that women publish fewer manuscripts and initiate fewer research projects than their male colleagues during the pandemic.
On top of the coronavirus’s implications for projects already underway, female productivity is a challenging issue. The division of responsibilities in the children’s home and caretaking is continuously disparate, negatively impacting female representation in the sciences.
Gender disparity could also create serious problems related to objective research: in a shortage of research produced by women, many fundamental findings regarding diversity become relegated, and biases in aca
demia could become more acute.
The advantages of confinement empower those who do not take on this extra workload only to a privileged few. Olga Shurchkov, an economist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, comments to Nature that, “Unfortunately, these findings are not surprising.” If this problem is ignored, “it can potentially have serious consequences for diversity in the academic world.”
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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