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The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a cultural shift in the way that science is communicated and shared. Traditional scientific publishing is a slow process and so, needing a faster route of disseminating vital new findings, scientists turned to preprint platforms, which host non–peer reviewed articles on specialized servers. My colleagues and I reported this month that researchers shared more than 35 percent of the early COVID-19 literature as preprints. But scientists aren’t the only people who have turned to preprints; we found that members of the general public and journalists have been sharing and accessing preprints at unprecedented levels.
With this sharing and use of preprints by nonexperts, their coverage by news outlets, and the fact that they have been cited as direct influences on contentious public health interventions, it becomes crucial that we assess the quality of the preprint literature and ask: Can we ...
