PopSci: “Before the COVID pandemic, peer-review was the beating heart of scientific publishing. In order forstudies to enter the body of scientific knowledge, the expectation was that researchers would submit them to academic journals, which would send the papers out to other experts for edits and revisions before publishing. But it’s a process that wasn’t well-suited to the urgency of the COVID pandemic, when early research could save lives. Peer-review often takes months, and it asks for huge amounts of unpaid labor on the part of the scientists who scrutinize papers. In early 2020, growing numbers of scientists began to post research on open-access databases, called preprint servers, before those preprints had been formally reviewed. New research suggests that scientific norms are still operating on preprint servers. As physician and reporter Trisha Pasricha wrote in the Washington Post over the weekend, “when a group of authors puts any study in the public domain … they are placing their reputations on the line.” Preprints, which are often referred to as “preliminary research” in the news, had already been gaining popularity in early-adopting fields like genomics and neuroscience—but the time pressures of the pandemic gave them a new primacy. Over the first year of the pandemic, preprint servers hosted 7,000 COVID papers, while journals published about 12,500 formal papers. (There was some overlap.) Unlike many journals, preprint servers are free for anyone to access, and researchers don’t have to pay to post on. Many of those early papers do end up going through peer-review: The co-founder of two key preprint servers recently wrote on Twitter that half of all 2020 COVID-preprints have now been formally published. Regardless, preprints have become central to the science of COVID and how it’s covered in the media.  That’s been a source of controversy. To critics of preprints, they’re a repository of questionable science. “The limitation is that any idiot can publish any idiotic stuff on a platform that doesn’t have pre-publication peer review,” as one former journal editor put it to a New York Times columnist last month. But according to two new analyses shared in the (peer-reviewed) journal PLOS Biology, preprints as a whole contain much of the same information and interpretations as peer-reviewed research…”