How to bring pre-impressions to a busy field of medicine

The founders of the popular bioRxiv biology preprint server have launched a repository on which medical scientists can share their findings before peer review.

The success of BioRxiv has prompted some clinical researchers to push for such a site, as the biology repository only accepts pre-impressions in certain areas of medical science. However, some researchers are concerned that the publication of unscanned clinical research presents a risk if patients or physicians act on the basis of inaccurate information.

The organizations at the origin of the new server, named medRxiv, have been working on the project since 2017 and claim to have put in place protective mechanisms to address these issues.

They will ask the authors to provide details of ethical approvals for their studies and patient consent, and to disclose all sources of funding. The pre-impressions will be screened by an external clinical scientist and an experienced clinical editor, supported by developing organizations – the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, the BMJ publisher in London and Yale University in New York. Haven, Connecticut.

If there is concern about screening, the document will be forwarded to a clinical publisher and a final decision could be made by medRxiv's six-person management team, says John Inglis, executive director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press and co-founder. from medRxiv. bioRxiv, launched in 2013.

And the medRxiv team said it would not publish research, which would pose a risk to the public – for example, new information about the side effects of a drug that could encourage patients to stop taking medications that save lives without medical advice. The website and individual background documents will also clearly indicate that the work is not peer-reviewed and should not be used to guide treatment or be reported to the press as a medical advance. The medRxiv site will be online on June 25, but accepts manuscripts.

Quick exchange

Proponents of preprints claim that posting manuscripts online before the lengthy peer review process required by conventional journals accelerates scientific discoveries. Researchers may receive comments or report negative results, which journals may be reluctant to publish. Physicists and mathematicians pioneered online pre-printing almost 30 years ago. In recent years there has been a proliferation of servers for specific disciplines and geographic regions.

But medical science is inherently different from other disciplines, which generally do not tend to dissociate themselves from publication, said David Maslove, a clinical researcher at the Kingston General Health Institute in Canada. "Medical studies may be of more interest to the public and people may be more motivated to research and act on new information about the treatment of certain diseases," he said. Maslove is encouraged by the medRxiv checks, but claims that it is simply a "peer review by another name".

Marc Lipsitch, epidemiologist at Harvard University in Boston (Cambridge, Mbadachusetts), states that the experience is worth it: during outbreaks of diseases such as Ebola or Zika, for example , the rapid and free exchange of information is important for scientists and clinicians alike.