A Pandemic Moves Peer Review to Twitter

Last June, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, Yale University and The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) started a new “preprint server” for medical research called MedRxiv. Preprint is one term of art for an academic paper that hasn’t been peer reviewed or published yet. Working paper is another. They’ve been distributed at meetings and seminars as long as anyone can remember. In 1991, physicists began sharing theirs on the internet on a server that came to be called ArXiv (pronounced “archive”).1 Mathematicians, astronomers, economists and scholars in a few other disciplines soon followed suit — some on ArXiv, some on other sites.

Medical researchers did not. For one thing, peer-reviewed biomedical journals publish research findings faster than those in some other fields (average time to publication is half what it is in business and economics), so the need for a speedy alternative was less pronounced. For another, medical research often involves questions of life or death that presumably deserve more pre-publication scrutiny than, say, a theoretical physics paper. And given that publishing in prestigious journals is key to career advancement, and prestigious medical journals have long made a big deal about having exclusives on new research results, researchers had legitimate worries that releasing results earlier could hurt them.