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Preprint research underused in disease outbreaks
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Preprint scientific manuscripts are “a critical component of outbreak science” and should be more broadly used to give scientists and public health officials earlier access to important findings during disease outbreaks, researchers argued.
Michael A. Johansson , PhD, of the Puerto Rico-based nonprofit Outbreak Science, and colleagues conducted a literature review and found that many more preprint manuscripts were posted during the Zika virus epidemic than the Ebola virus epidemic just a couple of years earlier. But Johansson and colleagues said preprints — papers that are not reviewed before being made public — remain undervalued and largely excluded from outbreak science in favor of the important but slower process of peer review.
In addition to offering scientists and officials speedy access to new findings, they said preprints give experts an early opportunity to critique the research.
“The scientific community should not ask why preprints are posted during outbreaks,” Johansson and colleagues wrote in PLoS Medicine, “we should ask why they are not posted and make early posting the standard rather than the exception.”
Searching five public repositories — including bioRxiv and WHO’s Zika Open — Johansson and colleagues identified 174 preprint manuscripts about Zika that were posted between November 2015 and August 2017 during the epidemic in the Americas. This was a 132% increase over the 75 preprints about Ebola that were posted during a similar stretch of the West African epidemic from May 2014 to January 2016.
According to their review, the proportion of preprints that included original data also increased from 7% for Ebola to 46% for Zika, and a majority of preprints in both epidemics — 84% for Ebola and 94% for Zika — included novel analyses.
Johansson and colleagues also found that just under half (48%) of Zika preprints and 65% of Ebola preprints were eventually published in peer-review journals and indexed by PubMed, and that only 3.4% of all PubMed-indexed journal articles were posted as preprints before their publication.
“Preprints offer numerous challenges and opportunities for science in general but represent a particularly important opportunity to accelerate the dissemination of science in the midst of infectious disease outbreaks, when early actions are critical and evidence is scarce,” Johansson and colleagues concluded.
The low adoption of preprints for journal articles “reflects an intrinsic and established, yet unnecessary, prioritization of the traditional publication process over the dissemination of science,” they continued. “Further progress is essential to ensure that science can be rapidly and broadly disseminated in the context of outbreaks.” – by Gerard Gallagher
Disclosures: The authors report no relevant financial disclosures.
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