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Hi @Trevornoah,
I’m a researcher and I just watched your commentary on preprint publications and scientific peer review () and I’d love to help clarify some stuff.
(1/n)
I’m a researcher and I just watched your commentary on preprint publications and scientific peer review () and I’d love to help clarify some stuff.
(1/n)
First, allow me to explain what peer review is for. It’s not, as you suggest in the video, for confirming research results. It’s a quality control measure. Basically, it’s asking other experts to take a look at a manuscript and see if it can be published. (2/n)
BUT the cool thing about preprints is that you CAN easily read them! Traditional publishing takes long and often locks publications behind a pay wall: you’d have to pay to be able to read the article. Not the researchers who performed the research. The publishers. (6/n)
So I know I’m spoiling all the fun of calling preprints “mix tapes”. But they’re really more like science SoundCloud, if you want to stick with that music metaphor. Researchers can upload their work, the community can decide if it is any good (9/n)
This means that the research might be bad — or it might be great, to find out, you really have to carefully read the preprint. (5/n)
Preprints are openly accessible for all — no paywall — and they can be a great outlet for publishing time-sensitive work fast. Which, especially during a global pandemic, can actually be really important. (7/n)
That doesn’t mean that the reviewers will run the study again and therefore confirm the results. Sometimes, reviewers will ask authors to collect more data. But rerunning an experiment (we call that replication) isn’t usually part of peer review but often takes place later. (3/n)
Next, preprints: those are indeed publications that are made available without having undergone peer review. So no experts have decided it’s worthwhile to put this work in a traditional academic journal yet. (4/n)
For instance, check out the work published on preprint servers related to covid19: https://connect.biorxiv.org/relate/content/181 Researchers can quickly share their work and other researchers can access it easily and then read it critically. (8/n)
If you wanna read more about how sharing research openly can actually be a really cool thing and is pretty important during the corona crisis, check out this opinion piece (... also a preprint 
): https://osf.io/preprints/metaarxiv/akd6c/ (10/n)
): https://osf.io/preprints/metaarxiv/akd6c/ (10/n)
Publishing work openly is part of a larger strategy we call #openscience, by the way. You should check it out! (11/11)
