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MIT Press announced today (June 29) that it will be launching a new journal called Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 with the explicit purpose of reviewing preprint articles published about the pandemic.
Servers such as bioRxiv and medRxiv offer researchers an opportunity to quickly publish results and get feedback before their reports undergo peer review.
“Preprints have been a tremendous boon for scientific communication, but they come with some dangers, as we’ve seen with some that have been based on faulty methods,” Nick Lindsay, the director of journals at the MIT Press, tells STAT. “We want to debunk research that’s poor and elevate research that’s good.”
For instance, STAT reported in February on the withdrawal of a paper published on bioRxiv that suggested SARS-CoV-2 had been engineered from HIV, while an influential preprint on the use of ivermectin for COVID-19 was removed amid a scandal involving the company ...
