Shepherding preprints through a pandemic | The BMJ

People tend to have opinions on preprints and whether they help or hinder progress in research. I’m an unabashed preprint advocate. Of course, some preprints are more important and interesting than others, and some prove to be plain wrong, just like journal articles. And I declare an interest: last year BMJ joined forces with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Yale University to launch a preprint server for clinical medicine, medRxiv (pronounced “med-archive”), to enable quicker exchange of research ideas. In its first six months medRxiv handled a few hundred articles. In 2020 so far it has posted 12 000, mostly on one topic: coronavirus.