Recently, I’ve seen lots of posts of papers published on preprint servers. So it might be a good time to review what papers on preprint servers are (and what they aren’t!)

Preprint servers are online archives, or repositories, containing scholarly papers that are not yet peer reviewed or accepted by traditional academic journals.

Papers on preprint servers undergo basic screening, but they are not peer reviewed, edited or formatted before being posted online.

Once posted, articles are citable with their own unique DOI. Proponents of preprint servers say that posting manuscripts online before the peer-review process required by conventional journals speeds up scientific discovery.

However papers on preprint servers can also represent a risk of harm to society due to their lack of vetting, and potential for falsification, fraud, and misleading information.

Now more than ever, we need reliable and credible information. As we’ve seen with COVID19, poor science can be harmful to the public good. And peer review provides a crucial guard rail against misleading misinformation.