Why preprints are good for patients | Nature Medicine

peter.suber's bookmarks 2022-05-10

Summary:

"Rapid communication of clinical trial results has likely saved lives during the COVID-19 pandemic and should become the new norm....

But during health emergencies, there are many tensions, one of which is the mismatch between the urgent need for information and evidence and the much longer time frames of scientific peer review and publication. The COVID-19 pandemic is the first global health emergency of the new information age, with data and results widely shared via social media. This has resulted in very real difficulties in distinguishing important information from noise, and real news from fake news. How should the research and medical community best manage this new reality?...

Some may argue that the speed advantage of preprints does not outweigh the risks of poor-quality, misleading or even fraudulent research being published and acted upon. I would counter that clinicians should not rely solely on peer review to assess the validity and meaningfulness of research findings. This is because dubious, perhaps fraudulent data can still get through peer review, as was seen with early COVID papers published and then retracted from two of the most prestigious medical journals. In addition, even valid data can be misleading. There has been an avalanche of observational data that passed peer review and was then used to justify treatments, most notably with hydroxychloroquine, but the susceptibility of observational methodology to moderate biases means that such data should not be the basis of patient care.

I take two lessons from our experience running the largest COVID-19 clinical trial over the last two years. The first is that that the preprint system has come of age, demonstrating huge value in rapidly communicating important research findings. Almost daily I am alerted through social media alerts from trusted sources and colleagues of important new findings published as preprints. A degree of immediate peer review is also available by means of the preprint comments section and from colleagues via social media. The full peer-reviewed manuscripts usually appear many weeks or even months later. I cannot envisage a future without such rapid dissemination of new evidence.

 

Given this new reality, the second lesson is that we must ensure that the medical community and policy makers are sufficiently skilled in critical thinking and scientific methods that they can make sensible decisions, regardless of whether an article is peer reviewed or not."

Link:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01812-4

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.preprints oa.medicine oa.benefits oa.humanitarian oa.patients oa.speed oa.clinical_trials oa.pharma oa.quality oa.lay oa.versions oa.pharma

Date tagged:

05/10/2022, 10:19

Date published:

05/10/2022, 06:19