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Since the global pandemic of COVID-19 began, scientists and clinicians have rushed to understand and mitigate the threat, while sharing with other researchers what they know. Academic journals have already taken steps to accelerate the flow of peer-reviewed information by expediting editorial and peer review for coronavirus-related manuscripts and granting them open-access status upon publication.
“This coronavirus outbreak has led to a real surge on top of what we usually receive,” says Edward Campion, the executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), who says the journal is receiving up to 40 coronarvirus-related submissions per day. He says the journal’s expert virologists “have been willing to review papers under very short turnarounds, sometimes less than 24 hours.”
I’m getting probably ten to twenty review requests a week. Before the outbreak, I was sticking to mostly four to six coronavirus papers per month.
Coronavirus experts ...
