Photo courtesy of Sever.
Quality is of utmost importance in the world of scientific publishing, but speed can be crucial, too. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, researchers needed to share updates quickly with other scientists. One solution is disseminating preprints of studies that have not yet been peer reviewed or published in a traditional academic journal. Richard Sever, Assistant Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in New York and Executive Editor for the Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives journals, recently visited Duke to discuss his work as the co-founder of bioRxiv and medRxiv, two of a number of servers that post preprints of scientific papers.
In traditional publishing, Sever says, “When you submit a paper to a good journal… most of the time it’s immediately rejected.” Of the papers that are considered by the journal, about half will ultimately be rejected by editors. Even for successful papers, the entire process can take months or years and often ends with the paper being placed behind a paywall.
Posting preprints on servers like bioRxiv, according to Sever, doesn’t preclude the studies from eventually being published in journals. It just “means the information is public much more quickly.”
In 2013, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory released bioRxiv. In the time since, there has been a “proliferation of discipline-specific servers” like chemRxiv, socarXiv, NutriXiv, and SportRxiv.
How do these preprint servers work? Scientists submit a study to an Rxiv server, and then after a brief screening process the paper is made visible to everyone within hours to days. A frequent concern about these servers is that they could be used to disseminate poor-quality science or false information. Since the priority is to share information rapidly, the staff and volunteers in charge of screening cannot perform extensive peer review of every submission. Instead, the screening process focuses on a few key criteria. Is the information plagiarized? Is it actual research? Is it science or non-science? And most importantly, could it be dangerous?
In 2019, Sever and his colleagues at Cold Spring Harbor collaborated with Yale and the BMJ Group to launch medRxiv, a server that focuses on health research. Since the consequences of posting misleading clinical information could be more severe, it uses enhanced screening for the papers that are submitted.
Papers can also be revised after being uploaded to a server like bioRxiv. A scientific journal, on the other hand, may occasionally publish a correction for a published article but not a completely new version.
What are the benefits of preprint servers? Releasing preprints allows scientists to transmit study results more quickly. It can also increase visibility, especially for scientists early in their careers who don’t have extensive publishing records. Grant or hiring committees can look at preprints months before a paper would be published in a journal. This emphasis on speed also accelerates communication and discovery, and the lack of paywalls could make science more accessible. Additionally, preprint servers can give researchers an opportunity to get broader feedback on their work before they submit to journals.
So why submit to scientific journals at all? Traditional publishing is slower, but it aims to assess scientific rigor and quality and, critically, the importance of the work. “The currency of academic career progression,” Sever says, “is journal articles.” Another attendee of Sever’s lecture brought up the value of curation, using the example of movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Sever believes that the sort of curation performed by journals is different. Movie reviewers give their opinions later in the process; they don’t stop production of a movie halfway through, saying “I want a happy ending.” Sever believes preprint servers allow science to be shared more widely without putting the final decision in the hands of editors.
What are the concerns regarding preprint servers? One concern scientists may have is being “scooped,” or sharing information only for another researcher to claim it as their own. Sever does not find the scooping argument to be very persuasive. “How can you be scooped if you’re using an anti-scooping device?” He believes that Rxiv servers, since they allow rapid dissemination of results, actually provide a safeguard against people passing ideas off as their own because the preprint author is in control of the timing. Another concern occasionally expressed is that having a paper on an Rxiv server may make it harder to get it accepted by a journal. Sever is unconvinced, pointing out that most papers are rejected by journals anyway.
A more pressing concern may be the potential for preprint servers to disseminate bad science, though Sever notes that there are “a lot of not-very-good papers in traditional publishing” as well. Besides, academics’ careers depend on producing high-quality work, which should be an incentive not to share bad work, whether on preprint servers or in scientific journals.
Nonetheless, people do sometimes submit pseudoscience to preprint servers. “We have been sent HIV denialism, we have been sent anti-vaxx things,” Sever says. Some people, unfortunately, are motivated to share false information disguised as legitimate science. That is why bioRxiv screens submissions—less for accuracy and more for outright misinformation.
A more recent concern is the potential for AI-generated “papers.” But like journal articles, all papers posted on bioRxiv are kept there permanently, so even a fake paper that makes it through the screening process could be caught later. Anyone doing this risks future exposure. A more insidious form of this problem, Sever says, is “citation spam,” where someone generates papers under another person’s name but cites themselves in the references to improve their own citation record.
“Like anything,” Sever says, “we’ll have to accept that there’s some garbage in there, there’s some noise.” The vessel, he says, is no guarantee of accuracy, and “at some point you have to trust people.”
Sever believes preprint servers play an important role by “decoupling dissemination from certification.” He hopes they can open the door to “stimulating evolution of publishing.”
Post by Sophie Cox, Class of 2025