Science at Speed: Publishing Amidst a Pandemic Juliana Cudini speaks with Nature Editor-in-Chief Magdalena Skipper and eLife Deputy Editors Anna Akhmanova and Detlef Weigel about the rapidly rising tide of COVID-19 publications On my first day of remote working, I set up a journal alert for research relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. As an infectious disease researcher, I had a surreal feeling that I was a living dot on a scatterplot I would later be charged with analysing, and to prepare, I wanted to keep up with important SARS-CoV-2 findings. The next morning, I woke up to 20 new publications in my inbox. By the end of the week, it was over 300. The rate at which research on the novel coronavirus is being churned out is unprecedented. The Chief Editor of Nature Medicine tweeted that submissions to the journal had increased by 150-200% since mid-March. According to a report by research technology company Digital Science, over 42,000 articles relating to the COVID-19 pandemic were released in just four months from January to April. To put that in perspective, the entire field of ‘deep learning’ in artificial intelligence, one of the fastest growing research sectors according to Digital Science, contains around 150,000 publications in total. Use of preprint servers — online repositories hosting unreviewed scientific findings and often heralded as the fastest route to disseminate results — has also skyrocketed. The website Rxivist,
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which collects statistics on the life science pre-print server bioRxiv, recorded a 10-fold increase in the monthly rate of new submissions to the server between January and May 2020, compared to the previous 9 months. It quickly became clear to publishers that access to these results is essential in shaping a pandemic response. The Wellcome Trust stated that by mid-March over 30 leading publishers had removed paywalls on any content related to COVID-19, granting access to those without subscriptions to their journals. At the time of writing in June, though the initial peak of the publication boom appears to have plateaued, the waterfall of information is far from petering out. In fact, the flood of research relating to the pandemic continues to serve as a fascinating test of strength for the levees employed by scientific publishers against rising tides of unsupported or misleading information. Journal editors subject any new finding to rigorous review by experts in the field to critically assess both the study’s design and reported conclusions. Depending on a number of factors, this process takes anywhere from weeks to
Michaelmas 2020
