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Pandemic Publishing: Medical journals drastically speed up their publication process for Covid-19

View ORCID ProfileSerge P.J.M. Horbach
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.18.045963
Serge P.J.M. Horbach
1Radboud University Nijmegen, Faculty of Science, Institute for Science in Society, P.O. box 9010, 6500 GL Nijmegen, The Netherlands
2Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Faculty of Social Sciences, Leiden University, Wassenaarseweg 62A, 2333 AL Leiden, The Netherlands
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Abstract

In times of public crises, including the current Covid-19 pandemic, rapid dissemination of relevant scientific knowledge is of paramount importance. The duration of scholarly journals’ publication process is one of the main factors hindering quick delivery of new information. While proper editorial assessment and peer review obviously require some time, turnaround times for medical journals can be up to several months, which is undesirable in the era of a crisis. Following initiatives of medical journals and scholarly publishers to accelerate their publication process, this study assesses whether medical journals have indeed managed to speed up their publication process for Covid-19 related articles. It studies the duration of 14 medical journals’ publication process both during and prior to the current pandemic. Assessing a total of 669 articles, the study concludes that medical journals have indeed drastically accelerated the publication process for Covid-19 related articles since the outbreak of the pandemic. Compared to articles published in the same journals before the pandemic, turnaround times have decreased on average by 49%. The largest decrease in number of days between submission and publication of articles was due to a decrease in the number of days required for peer review. For articles not related to Covid-19, no acceleration of the publication process is found. While the acceleration of journals’ publication process is laudable from the perspective of quick information dissemination, it also raises concerns relating to the quality of the peer review process and the quality of the resulting publications.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • https://github.com/CWTSLeiden/cwts_covid

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted April 18, 2020.
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Pandemic Publishing: Medical journals drastically speed up their publication process for Covid-19
Serge P.J.M. Horbach
bioRxiv 2020.04.18.045963; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.18.045963
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Pandemic Publishing: Medical journals drastically speed up their publication process for Covid-19
Serge P.J.M. Horbach
bioRxiv 2020.04.18.045963; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.18.045963

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