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Davide Bonazzi / Salzmanart
By Jocelyn Kaiser
Clinical researchers can now share the initial versions of their manuscripts through a free pre-print server inspired by websites where physicists and biologists post articles before they are published in a peer-reviewed journal. Today, organizers have announced that medRxiv is accepting submissions and will start posting submissions later this month. Co-sponsored by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in New York, who created the bioRxiv pre-print server in 2013, Yale University, and the publisher The bmj, the site aims to address concerns about posting draft health science research projects involving human subjects by carefully selecting them for specific criteria and visibly tagging documents as unexamined.
Advocates of the pre-press say that they are a means to quickly communicate the results to the research community and to gather feedback before the publication of the work in a journal. Physicists have shared preprints online for decades and many biologists have joined them since the launch of bioRxiv in 2013. But clinical researchers have been reluctant to accept pre-prints, in part because of the damage that could be caused by a doctor who would change clean care based on findings that have not been verified by the reviewers.
Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale, who first announced his medRxiv project nearly two years ago, says clinical researchers already share their unexamined results in scientific meetings. At conferences, he says, "There is no possibility to present the kind of details" that appears in a document.
Nevertheless, the organizers of medRxiv will use three "safeguards," says Krumholz. First, authors will need to "declare" or certify that their pre-impressions include ethics reviews, clinical trial registration, patient consent, funding sources, and conflict of interest information. Secondly, the general legitimacy of articles will be examined by volunteer researchers, called "affiliates", and by a professional medical publisher who, at least initially, will be the only person who can post the pre-print. Finally, well-known labels describe the manuscripts as yet unpublished and invite medical reporters to keep this in mind when writing about paper.
MedRxiv organizers will not verify the information they need, for example by asking for ethical review postings, said John Inglis, co-founder of bioRxiv at CSHL. But if ethical problems arise, there will be a "withdrawal process," he says. These screening submissions will also search for sensitive items with public health implications, such as findings involving the safety of vaccines, or "dual-use" research, such as studies of possible pathogens. to be used to harm. "We certainly would not publish" an article on these topics, says Inglis.
The site is currently receiving submissions and a first round of communications is expected to begin in public on June 25. He is launching with CSHL start-up capital, but could possibly seek foundation support, says Inglis. (In 2017, bioRxiv received an undisclosed grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation which now pays two full-time staff, he notes.) But fundraising will depend on number of manuscripts attracted by medRxiv, he adds. "He can take off slowly." One obstacle is that some major medical journals, such as The New England Medical Journal and those published by the JAMA network, do not currently allow authors to submit shared articles in pre-print.
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