The peer-review system is, at present, deeply engraved in scientific minds as the golden standard for research quality. However, it has shown to be notorious for reviewer bias, lack of agreement between reviewers, harsh criticism concealed by anonymity, multiple cycles of reviews and rejections by different journals, and associated delays and expenses; additionally, the previous studies showed that its positive effect on the overall quality of the final publication is minor. Alternatively, or additionally, authors may choose to deposit their manuscripts to preprint servers, institutionally or privately supported repositories of preprints. A preprint is a complete manuscript shared publicly prior to officially undergoing the peer-review process.<br/>Over the last decade, biomedical sciences have been slowly adapting a preprint culture. The coronavirus pandemic introduced many changes to our society, and deeply affected the established in biomedical sciences publication practices. In this talk, we will present a comprehensive study of the changes in scholarly publication landscape for biomedical sciences during the COVID-19 pandemic, with special emphasis on preprints posted on bioRxiv and medRxiv servers. We will talk about various benefits that made scientific publishers and funders embrace preprints and acknowledge them as works of scholarly communication. We will present various initiatives aimed to address the concerns about the quality of un-refereed preprints. Lastly, we will discuss the overall attitude regarding the Open Access (OA) publication practices among the biomedical researchers as based on a series of interviews we conducted in Summer 2021. This talk will be of interest to editors, publishers, open science enthusiasts, and anyone interested in changes that the coronavirus crisis transpired to publication practices and a culture of preprints in life sciences.

What can we learn from the publication practices during the COVID-19 pandemic: Analysis of biomedical preprints, peer-reviewed literature, and researchers' attitude toward the open access publishing

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.