Abstract
The world continues to face an ongoing viral pandemic that presents a serious threat to human health. The virus underlying the COVID-19 disease, SARS-CoV-2, caused over 29 million confirmed cases and 925,000 deaths since January 2020. Although the last pandemic occurred only a decade ago, the way science operates and responds to current events has experienced a paradigm shift in the interim. The scientific community responded rapidly to the COVID-19 pandemic, releasing over 16,000 COVID-19 scientific articles within 4 months of the first confirmed case, of which 6,753 were hosted by preprint servers. Focussing on bioRxiv and medRxiv, two growing preprint servers for biomedical research, we investigated the attributes of COVID-19 preprints, their access and usage rates and characteristics of sharing across online platforms. Our results highlight the unprecedented role of preprint servers in the dissemination of COVID-19 science, and the impact of the pandemic on the scientific communication landscape.
Competing Interest Statement
JP is the executive director of ASAPbio, a non-profit organization promoting the productive use of preprints in the life sciences. GD is a bioRxiv Affiliate, part of a volunteer group of scientists that screen preprints deposited on the bioRxiv server. MP is the community manager for preLights, a non-profit preprint highlighting service. GD and JAC are contributors to preLights and ASAPbio Fellows. The authors declare no other competing interests.
Footnotes
Manuscript has been revised in response to peer-review from Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 (https://rapidreviewscovid19.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/k8h2xox0/release/1) and to include additional investigations that were ongoing at the time of submission (primarily data from publishers and preprint use in policy documents). The biggest change is the removal of Figure 5 (preprint-paper changes) in order to reduce word count and focus our message. This data will form the basis of a separate publication. Other changes include text additions to the discussion and updates to author addresses / corresponding author contact information.
https://github.com/preprinting-a-pandemic/pandemic_preprints