Rise of the preprint: how rapid data sharing during COVID-19 has changed science forever | Nature Medicine

"But as with many public-health officials, what Van Kerkhove did not count on was the outsized influence of preprints, which she says have been both a blessing and a curse during the pandemic. “In the beginning it was manageable because there were very few [preprints] and it was really critical pieces of information, but it did quickly become overwhelming.”...

A staggering 19,389 articles about COVID-19 were shared in the first four months of the pandemic, a third of which were preprints, unvetted and unfiltered for all to see. That number would steadily grow, as scientists raced to find drugs to treat COVID-19, develop vaccines and wrangle with viral variants. The stakes had never been higher, swift action was vital, and pre-printing results aided rapid data sharing, which expedited research. But it also exposed the inner workings of the scientific process to a new audience and laid bare the best and worst of pandemic research.

Despite the drawbacks and deadly consequences, there is little doubt that preprint publishing is here to stay. The question is how science will handle it. “We are down a pathway of open science, and that pathway is going to accelerate,” says Kyle Sheldrick, a medical doctor–cum–data sleuth at the University of New South Wales, Australia. “Our choice is not whether it occurs or not; our choice is whether it occurs responsibly.” ...

Despite dexamethasone’s massive global impact, Horby says that the speed of preprint publishing is a double-edged sword. It enables faster data sharing in a crisis and allows researchers to improve their work with feedback. But preprints also open the door to alluring results from slapdash science being able to find a public audience before critical review. “It speaks to the need for science to maintain a very high bar in terms of the quality,” Horby says....

Requesting that clinical trial investigators release raw patient data for meta-analysts to review and scrutinize — while excluding any studies that do not comply — could help change that, or at least prevent the amplification of flawed data by meta-analyses that have the power to change clinical practice and public policy. “Meta-analyses with the wrong conclusions are the single most dangerous papers that any journal can publish,” says Sheldrick...."