Here's a post on the value and hazards of scientific preprints during Covid, from Science Media Centre.

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/what-should-press-officers-advise-on-preprints-during-a-pandemic/

I HAVE THOUGHTS. brief thread...

During the peak of the first wave we urgently preprinted the world's largest ever study on factors associated with death from Covid-19, in over 17 million patients. This is still the world's largest ever study. 2 months later, it's soon to be published. https://twitter.com/bengoldacre/status/1258372975004389379?lang=en

It's right that we went through a laborious peer review process for the final archive version to be published in a journal; it's also right that we preprinted the paper so people could see it swiftly...

We wanted ppl to understand which diseases and demographics were most strongly associated with death from Covid-19 to inform thinking about shielding, risk management, and other research on factors associated with covid death. The analysis didn't change hugely during peer review.

Does that mean peer review is a waste of time? Absolutely not. But peer review does not divide papers into "good" and "bad": that is a simplistic world view. positive peer review is at best a risk factor for quality, it is no guarantee..

Lots of terrible papers get published after passing through peer review. As everyone will say on this topic: the Surgisphere papers were all positively peer reviewed but very flawed. (Sometimes good papers struggle or get delayed by e.g. hostile reviews from competitors)

But more than that, papers aren't "good" or "bad" by some universal kitemark standard. The self-same study can be fatally flawed for one interpretative purpose, but still be very informative on other issues. And that leads us on to the bigger point...

I've tried to help democratise access to the skills and knowledge needed to understand scientific research. I'm a massive fan of *everyone* having ready access to the scientific literature. But that doesn't mean that the scientific literature is "written for everyone". It's not.

The academic literature is a "buyer beware" market, these are technical documents for professional people to read judiciously. It's the readers job to spot the flaws, as well as reviewers and editors.

RIGHT I must get back to work (writing scientific papers). If anyone is feeling dewy eyed about peer review, please read our papers on how editors reacted when we tried to correct 58 misreported, peer reviewed, clinical trials.

https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13063-019-3173-2 https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13063-019-3172-3